My Favorite Basketball Drill

Of all the dribbling drills I advocate, this one is far and beyond the best.

You can immediately see the dribbling strengths and weakness of each player.

Basically it’s a dribble suicide.

The following information was written by Ed Riley and posted by Steve Jordan on his website:

http://www.akcoach.com/index.htm

This is what Coach Riley writes:

There are several different types of suicides. This is a simple one.

A. player runs from baseline to closest free throw line and back

B. then player runs from baseline to half court and back

c. then player runs from baseline to furthest free throw line and back

d. then player runs from baseline to opposite baseline and back

Try running this yourself at full speed, and you’ll understand why it’s called a SUICIDE. Now the drill is to see who is fast, who is able to start and stop, and who has endurance. Have them all run a suicide, but they must slap the floor when they reach a free throw line, half court line, or a baseline. At the end, rate your players.

This is how the traditional suicide is run, but look what happens if you add dribbling.

Have them compete in groups, so you can pay more attention to each player. They do a suicide while dribbling a basketball. They still have to slap the floor at the given intervals. This will start to let you see who your ball handlers are.

A very simple drill where you can the dribbling skill level of your players.

Do this and you will have saved yourself a lot of time.

Enjoy and feel free to share and post comments

Drills You Can Practice On Your Own

First day of "The Edge".. What the beginner's can do right in their own basement, backyard, sidewalk, roof (just kidding)

3 Simple Youth Basketball Offenses to Help Your Team Score More Points

Usually, I don’t write much about offenses at this level because it’s difficult enough trying to learn the fundamentals. Learning plays just takes away from the development of the player’s ability to master the basics.

With that said, my premise is before you teach offense, your players must learn how to play defense. Thus, your first basic offense is a solid defense. Play solid man-2-man defense and you will be able to steal the ball for easy layups. Maybe, I shouldn’t say easy, but it is a better shot than most shots in a set offense. Also, don’t forget rebounding as the final piece in the defensive puzzle.

What if you can’t fast break? How happens when your team has to slow down the ball?

If you are forced to run a set offense because of timeouts, turnovers, or other stoppages or slowdowns, here’s what you can do.

Each of these are very simple and require no extraordinary amount of time to learn; therefore, I don’t refer to them as plays.

Here’s what I mean:

1) Teach your players to pass and move/cut. The ultimate youth basketball give and go offense. The point guard is the player to start the offense, you can have almost any set up you wish, but I prefer to spread the floor and have the point pass to the wings and cut to the basket while facing the person to whom he/she passes.

The wing player passes the ball (if no open shot is available) to the next open player and performs the same cut towards the basket. If the wing player on the opposite site has not received the ball, they stay where there are until the ball is passed to them. Also, this creates floor balance against a fast break.

This keeps the players from staring at one player and being a spectator on the offensive end.

This offense will be covered in detail in an upcoming article written by Ed Riley.

2) Screen and roll aka pick and roll.

This takes a bit of practice, but will free up a player more open shots. Defenses at the youth level aren’t equipped to handle this just yet, primarily because they lack communication.

3) Spread offense.

This keeps the point guard from over dribbling and gets everyone involved. Works best against a zone defense where the ball is passed around the perimeter and moved til the player has and open drive to the lane for a layup.

I tried this offense a couple years ago when coaching a U-9 team. We were up by 20 points in the 4th quarter and didn’t want to run up the score. So we went to basically a “four corners” offense. Those of you who are old enough should remember the old University of North Carolina’s offense run by Phil Ford.

What I found is by passing the ball around the perimeter, the zone defense they were playing, couldn’t shift fast enough to keep up with the ball, and lanes were wide open. Actually, this is how a couple of players who hadn’t scored all year garnered their first points of the season.

Side note: What to see a confidence builder? Wait til you have a player to finally score their first points of the season. You will notice the increased enthusiasm and confidence.

This offense works well against teams who allows a defensive player to freelance or spy while the rest play zone. Eventually, the player gets tired of chasing the ball and result is open lanes.

Usually, teams allow their best offensive player to roam because most of their points scored are layups from steals.

My experience is these are the 3 simple offenses you can run without sacrificing time for fundamental drills.

Each of these will be covered in detail in subsequent articles.

Enjoy and share with a fellow coach.

Youth Basketball Coaches! Do This and Watch Your Team Improve

Over the past few years, I have learned to become more of an observer of players and the skills they have or in some cases, don’t have.

Mastering these skills is a matter of how you plan to coach your team.

Are you teaching and coaching or just coaching? The difference is teaching is a matter of imparting the necessary fundamentals such as dribbling, passing, defense, and shooting layups. It usually involves repetitive, but fun drills.

While coaching is how you manage your team during game time situations. Too much of this in practice, and end up not teaching the basics.

I know it’s a simplistic definition, but hopefully you get the gist of it all.

No matter how may manuals, audios, videos, you review, your best learning as a coach will come from your own experiences. In other words, you learn by doing and this goes for your players as well.

When teaching a drill, explain the purpose, then demonstrate. Youth players can implement the drill quicker when they have an understanding of it’s meaning.

Make every drill competitive. Divide them into 2 equal teams and make drills such as suicides and layups a relay race. The losing team could do an extra suicide or the winning team could get a prize, such as lollipops. Having drills that are competitive makes the practice livelier and creates team building, What happens is the players end up cheering and encouraging their teammates and also cheering for the other team’s player who hasn’t caught up to speed.

Tip: Because I am usually crunched for time, I implement drills that cover multiple fundamentals.

Let the players choose their own drill. I can see some of you questioning my sanity, but remember the players will choose a drill that you have already used in previous practices. All they are doing is choosing the one that is most fun to them.

My team always chooses the Ring of Fire drill. Don’t know why and it’s one that requires more concentration than the others. They seem to love it and it works on their passing, pivoting, hand to eye coordination, speed, etc.

These are some quick steps you can take to improve your team’s play.

Purpose of Youth Basketball Coaching

This is where the fun begins!



You have chosen your team and it's practice time.



At the youth level, you have to be careful not to get too involved with wins and losses. Ten (10)years from now the kids won't care or remember how many games they won or lost.



They will remember whether or not it was an enjoyable experience.

They play because it's fun. If it wasn't fun, they would just quit.

You can have a team that will win consistently, but are you developing players individually?



My belief is at this stage (U-13), the coach is a teacher who needs to stick to the basics and develop the individual player. This doesn't mean they don't play to win, you teach them winning basketball by teaching them the basic fundamentals.



For example: You have the tallest player in the league, and he/she is great at grabbing rebounds and scoring off those rebounds.

The player is a center on your team, and you play the 2-1-2 zone.

During your practices, all the player does is hang out under the boards and grab rebounds. Your team wins lots of games.

But what have you fundamentally taught the player?

What happens when 2 years later the player is no longer the tallest player in the league or your team? Can he/she dribble to create their own shot? Is the player able to play man-2-man defense out on the wing?

My true basics are dribbling, defense (foot movement), passing, proper layup form, and shooting form. Then everything else falls as a sub drill of the above basics.

This especially holds true if you are coaching in a rec league. The time you have with your players is very limited, and the basics are necessary if you want you players to move up to more competitive leagues, such as select/travel, AAU, and high school.

We all like to win, but there is limit to what effect you have on a player to just play to win. Teach a player for a lifetime with the basics, and you will help create a winning player.