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.

Youth Basketball Practice, 3 Keys to Having a Great Practice

For all coaches, especially new or inexperienced coaches, how you manage your practices will determine how much your players will pay attention, learn and implement your ideas. Youth coaches have one added issue confronting them. You will often have a player who has never played organized basketball, thus creating the need to keep things basic.

Here are 3 keys to having a great practice.

1 ) Time Management.

All coaches feel as if they don't have enough practice time. If you have a 90 minute practice, all must have an accounting of all 90 minutes. Each drill should have a set time limit as well how much time for breaks. Make sure you leave enough time at the end for scrimmages.

2) Make It Fun

Most kids at the youth level play because it's fun. It's another game to them. Others who are more serious still need coaching that holds their attention. What better way to do this than making it fun?

This begins with you. If you speak in monotones without any excitement, your team will respond accordingly. I don't mean yelling at the top of your lungs as if you are hosting one of those infomercials, but you have to be a bit animated.

What also has helped me in the past is to make each drill competitive. Divided them into 2 teams, and have each team cheer for their teammate as a criteria for extra points. The losing team runs an extra drill like suicides while the winning team watches and also cheer them the other team running the drills.

The above is a great team building exercise.

3) Keep It Simple

We all have visions of diagraming plays various defenses. Sometimes, we are our worst enemy. For time management purposes as well as keeping practice fun, we must keep it simple.
Teaching the fundamentals of dribbling, passing, defense, and shooting will take up most of your time and must be kept to as simple as possible. If your team can perform the aforementioned basics, you will have prepared them for higher level play, such as high school.

Follow these 3 keys and your practices will be a blast.