I get asked fairly often to post more defensive videos and so rather than having to retype out parts of my response through tweets, DMs or Instagram private messages and going through my YouTube channel to find some recommendations, I thought I would just write it all out here.

So first of all, I want to say that I disagree with the notion that videos featuring goals being scored are for offensive players and videos where the defense plays well and doesn’t get beat or causes a turnover are for defensive players.

Every video or clip of a lacrosse game has players playing offense or defense and players on both sides of the ball learn from. Neither offense nor defense exists in a vacuum. Both sides are reading and reacting to what the other side is doing. You can’t have a complete understanding of what the defense is doing if you don’t understand what the offense is doing. You have to look at what the defense is looking at to know why they’re doing what they do.

Particularly for defenders, it’s critically important to have some idea of what the offense is trying to do if you’re going to be successful at stopping it. It’s much easier to defend something that you know is coming than something that catches you by surprise.

A key part of defensive IQ is being able to identify and prioritize stopping the biggest potential scoring threats. Watching only successful defense can make that difficult because you can’t see all the things the defenders are stopping the offense from doing.

If you think about your favorite college and pro defenders that you’re watching videos of to try and imitate, what kind of game film do you think they’re studying? Aside from film of themselves, it’s probably mostly film of opposing offenses that they’re going to be facing.

The thing about offensive or defensive schemes is that your team is only going to run a couple of different ones and you’re going to spend time going over them and working on them during practice. On the other hand, the number of potential different schemes that you could go up against in a game is practically limitless. So I would argue that for players, it’s more important to study the other side of the ball when you watch film because it will allow you to become familiar with all of the different things an opponent might try to do during a game that you won’t get a chance to go up against in practice.

All of that being said, it’s good to watch and study successful defense as well. In part because they’re not as popular, my “defensive” videos can be harder to find. I often get asked by people to make a certain type of video featuring a defender and nearly every time I am able to respond with a couple of suggestions of videos I have made that they’ve never seen.

With that in mind, here is a guide to a bunch of my videos that feature mostly successful defense.