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.