SMARTDRAW IN SPORTS:

Courting Victory with NBA Play Diagrams

Out of Bounds
As Advance Scout for the Toronto Raptors, Micah Nori scopes out the plays of future NBA opponents. He attends their games and takes note of their most effective and popular plays. Nori then draws diagrams of these plays to share with Raptor coaches and players.

"Diagrams help us walk the players through the action of new plays," said Nori. "They help us understand what's happening on the court in ways that a video cannot."

Nori was using a program called Coaches Tools to diagram the plays, but he needed something better.

"The program was a little out-dated, and the data would not export into WORD^® or any other format," he said. "It just was not user-friendly."

Nori heard about Microsoft Visio^®, but it was too expensive and not compatible for those who do not already have Visio^®. Next, he discovered SmartDraw, and decided to give it a try.

The Set Up
Nori liked SmartDraw from the get-go.

"It was so easy to use, and I love how everything lines itself up automatically," he said.

Nori started building a library full of symbols representing different plays on the court.

"I created symbols for dribbling, passing, and other movements," said Nori. "I then put them all into a library for player movements."

Nori found he could simply drag and drop the symbols to create diagrams of plays from competing teams. These included sub-libraries for out-of-bounds, half-court offenses, and zone offenses.

"Pretty soon, I had a folder for each team with all their play sets," he said.

SmartDraw also made it easy for him to modify existing diagrams to represent new plays.

"I like how I never have to start from scratch, or redraw entire diagrams," said Nori. "I can just use old ones that I have drawn and change around some of the symbols."

Game On!
Nori now uses SmartDraw every day. He prints out his play diagrams and inserts them into a playbook for each team.

"The diagrams I make in SmartDraw are clean and polished," he said. "Everyone loves them-the coaches, the players, everyone."

The final score?

"SmartDraw is great," said Nori. "It's user-friendly, it gets the job done, it's compatible with Microsoft Office^®, and it's less expensive than Visio^®."