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

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.

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.

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.