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

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.

What to Look For When Selecting Your Team

There are generally 2 ways of selecting your youth basketball team.

1) You have tryouts and choose a set number of players from those either invited to the tryouts or from an open tryout. This is mainly the select/travel teams choose their players.

2) You have an open evaluation where you normally have coaches ranking players based upon such skills as dribbling and shooting, and in some cases how they perform in a scrimmage. This method is primarily used for selecting players in a draft for house or rec leagues.

Regardless, what type of tryout you are holding, there skills you are looking for are basically the same.

When I drafted my team recently for a house league, the keys I looked for were:

1) Dribbling capabilities

This probably the most important attribute to have at the youth (13 and under) level. It allows you select who will be your guards. For me, the guards aren't necessarily the shortest players.

To me, this is more significant than shooting. If I have a player who can dribble well, especially if they a good defender, then layups or 10 foot shots will comprise most of their scoring.

Watch any youth game, most of the points are scored from a short distance.

2) Height

You can't teach height. Tall players are at a premium, and tall players who can dribble is even better.

Just remember, you can always teach an athletic tall player how to dribble.

3) How well they played during the scrimmage

Here you can review lots of skills at once. You can see whether the player can dribble against pressure defense, if they can pass, shoot, and most importantly, play defense.

Thankfully, the scrimmages are usually 3 x 3 where you can get a better feel for the basic skills, and they should play man-to-man defense.


4) Energy/Attitude

Does the player seem to enjoy playing? Are they coachable? Do they keep playing when things don't go their way or do they sulk?

These tips hopefully give you some idea of what you to look for when selecting your team. The next article which ties into this one will discuss the purpose of coaching.

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.

Coaching Surprises, What I Learned From My U-11 Team

Last year I was coached a U-11 girls basketball team for rec league. Our games were once a week and we had one practice a week for 90 minutes.

There were 8 players on my team with 4 of them playing organized basketball for the first time. Thus, you understand how much fundamentals were a large part of practice sessions. I actually held back on what I taught them beyond the basics of dribbling, passing, defense, and shooting layups.

What I held back on was defense. Figuring it was easier to teach zone for our limited practice time, we actually became a very passive team. The reasoning being it was easier for them play an area rather than playing a man or girl even though were doing slide and other man-to-man drills.

After 4 weeks of getting blown out in a few games, and watching the girls stand around as if they were spectators, it became evident something had to change. Luckily, the girls were like a sponge when we started implementing man-to-man defense.

Wow! What a revelation! The girls, especially the new players, understood sticking your man and guarded them with fervor. We actually started winning games, which wasn't the main focus, but they added another aspect to their game that will carry them a long way in the future.

Guess what?

No matter the level of play or the limited practice time, my teams will never ( I know never say never) play zone again.

So what I really learned is that our youth can learn whatever thrown at them as long as they understand and see themselves getting better. All of our m2m drills were competitive and rewards were given to the winners of the drills.

What we actually did was make it fun! Remember, when you coach teams under 13 years of age, learning must be fun for them.

Yes, this article is primarily advertisement for m2m defense. They can learn zone in high school, but their m2m skills will allow them to play any type of defense.

Why Coach Youth Basketball

If some of you are like me, you probably got started or will start to coach because you wanted to coach your child's team. A good enough reason.

Fair enough and very logical.

Then the practices begin and you realize you have to command the attention of not just one individual player, but many others as well. Upwards to 12 kids on a team. I know rec teams usually have smaller roster, probably around 6-8 on a team, but you get the idea.

To answer the question, why coach youth basketball? It boils down to a few reasons.

1) There is a need for youth coaches across the country. Every year, some leagues have to beg, plead, bribe, etc. to find adults to coach teams. Every time you assist in coaching, you are helping the community. In reality, it's an awesome way to give back to your community.

By the way, we had teenagers in one of the leagues coaching 2 teams. In some school districts, community service is a requirement for graduation. What a fun way to enjoy fulfilling a graduation requirement.

2) Because it's a fun sport to teach. Here's where you may think it's too complicated and over encompassing; however, nothing can be further from the truth. If you keep it simple and to the basics of defense, passing, shooting layups, and dribbling (not necessarily in that order), you can easily field a team.

My experience is coach equals teacher. Every level of basketball from the youth leagues, high school, college, NBA, Olympics, the coach is imparting his knowledge to his players to achieve a desired result. The results or ends differ upon the level and expectations of the coach.

Thus, the number one reason kids play this sport at is to have fun. If you make it fun, they will learn and get better, and they will want to continue playing! Wins and losses won't matter because who will remember this 10 years later?

3) An opportunity to be closer to your child. Most youth coaches are coaching teams because they have a child who is player. We all work long hours and would love to spend more time with our children. This a great opportunity to do so while also helping other kids learn in the process.

For intent and purposes, we will mainly discuss youth basketball coaching from ages 7 to 13.

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Hope all you get something out of the information provided and have an enjoyable experience.