How David Herbert is preparing the Gems for the FIBA U19 Women's World Cup

The veteran coach shares his planning process for Australia's tilt at a world junior title

Credit: FIBA

This week, the biggest event in women’s junior representative basketball tips off in Madrid. Australian Gems coach David Herbert will again lead the team, having guided them to a silver medal in Hungary, 2021 and been an assistant coach for their silver in Thailand, 2019.

Herbert also coaches the Basketball Australia Centre of Excellence team that competes as a wildcard in NBL1 and features a host of Gems players, including Jessica Petrie, Rubi Gray, Jayda Clark and Saffron Shiels.  

Before the main event starts, the team will play several warm-up games, including a four-team mini-tournament with USA, Canada and Spain. Herbert tells The Pick and Roll he doesn’t have “huge expectations” for the pre-cup games, preferring to use them as trials. “We’ll be experimenting with lineups and trying to finalise a style of play before our first (tournament) game against Spain. It’s an interesting situation because we play them twice before we meet them in the tournament – do you go out and play as hard as you can? Or do you hide things?”

“We’re developing processes on how we defend both on-ball and off-ball screens, but that may vary from how we hit the ground running in our first game.”