UM Centralized Training

MASUM 0708 - Report

First off, I apologize for the lack of updates on UM for the last 2 months. I have been tied up with work (travelling to Middle East, clearing work so I can go on leave for MASUM), tied up with UM basketball (centralized training, MASUM Itself) and now clearing all the backlog accumulated over the 2 weeks I was on leave during MASUM.

During MASUM I had sent daily sms updates to as many Ex-UM players as I could. My sms list was 40 persons long! If I have missed any Ex-UM player from my sms list please forgive me ... It was unintentional ... And please add a comment to this blog entry that you were left out and I will add you to my sms list.

What follows now is the 1st installment of the long overdue MASUM 0708 report.

Over the course of the next 2 weeks I hope to be able to post in stages, my report on MASUM 0708, starting with :

CENTRALIZED TRAINING

For the first time, I am no longer in legal practice (where I had 60 days annual leave). Iam now an in-house legal adviser with WCT Berhad and couldn't take leave for centralized training (having to reserve my leave for MASUM itself). I am therefore extremely thankful and grateful and UM is extremely fortunate that Coach Tan Chun Pin was able to assist by conducting the morning practice sessions and I conducted (often together with Coach Pin) the night sessions.

Coach Pin has already been assisting me for more than 2 years now and is fully capable of running practices.

This year we were also fortunate that none of the players had industrial training during that time.

We managed to achieve many of our goals for centralized training including setting our goal (Champs), rediscovering our defensive identity / intensity, finding our offensive identity, peaking our fitness, settling our game rotation.

We had 3 friendly matches (lost the 1st one badly) but saw our performance improve from game to game.

There were some things which we didn't manage to cover or cover as much as the coaching staff had hoped to - these included having both 1st and 2nd units (totally) familiar with each others "special sets" (we had a few sets there were exclusive to each unit - i.e. run by one unit, but not the other) and practicing different players in each unit. We had settled in to which 5 players were in each unit but didn't have time to practice different combinations of players in each unit (and this would later come back and "bite" us!).

Overall, we were extremely happy with the rediscovery of our high intensity, defensive identity, both units settling into their own "comfort zones" in terms of offensive style and pace (1st unit - steady and deliberate; 2nd unit super-fast and a bit helter-skelter) and the team settling into a comfortable rotation basis (players knew when who/which unit would be going in/coming out).

Next post on MASUM 0708 update : Game #1 vs UiAM