Coach Frank Allocco’s ultra-modern assist: drilling ACT actors in basketball basics

It becomes an uncommon matchup at the basketball court of the University of San Francisco’s War Memorial Gym. Team contributors weren’t gamers, however actors. The opponent wasn’t any other group but future audiences’ incredulity. The event changed into a practice session for American Conservatory Theater’s “The Great Leap,” an exhibition basketball recreation among a San Francisco squad and a Beijing crew. Could the solid research sufficient of the game’s movements and physicality to appearance passably like severe gamers and coaches? And all within the period of a rehearsal length in preference to an entire life’s really worth of exercise?

Winning wasn’t on anyone’s thoughts in the course of this Feb. 12 exercise for “The Great Leap,” which is about partly at the very basketball court wherein cast individuals rehearsed. Thankfully, solid members BD Wong, Arye Gross, Tim Liu, and Ruibo Qian had Frank Allocco handy. Now USF’s senior accomplice athletics director of outside relations, Allocco is among California’s maximum outstanding high faculty basketball coaches. He led one-of-a-kind groups to nation championships — Northgate (Walnut Creek) and De La Salle (Concord) high faculties — and his .868 prevailing percent is the second-highest in country history. Even so, the actors, some of whom have been novices, brought a focal point and dedication to the court docket that earned them overjoyed praise from Allocco: “You’re so coachable!”

Allocco’s crash route to protecting a loss of basketball enjoy: dribble below your waist. Use your fingertips rather than your palm: “If you play basketball,” Allocco said, preserving up the heel of his hand, “you ought to by no means get dirty right here.” Instead of shifting in a instant line from one point to every other, zigzag. “The complete key to basketball is shifting people far away from in which you’re going,” Allocco stated.