I love practice; I used to love the smell of iodine and Tuf-skin, squeaky sneakers, and suicides. Grow up "playing" basketball not working it. Making an experience miserable doesn't inspire children to love the game.
Richard Branson closes his MasterClass with a chapter "Never Forget the Fun."
I get it, you have to win. And winning is fun. But if you're coaching twelve year-olds what experience do they remember, do they carry forward in life?
Here are five activities that had purpose and that players loved.
1. Dribble tag.
Six players with basketballs inside the arc. Designate one as it. Same rules as tag, or add constraints like "dribble with the nondominant hand" or make every third dribble must be a crossover.
2. Capture the flag.
Teach movement, escapability. Everyone gets a 'pinnie' that they tuck inside their pants. The idea is to "stay alive" inside the arc without having your pinnie pulled.
3. Quarterback layups.
We only played this drill indoors. As kids get older and more powerful (8th grade girls), I excluded contact so nobody got killed. This drill trains players to explode to the basket and finish in one dribble.
4. Frito Lay/ Free to Layup.
Self-flip to elbow, catch and pivot. Score on one dribble layup. Rebound and dribble hard to elbow for a jumper. One point for each basket, game to 21. Switch sides after first round.
5. "Specials" a.k.a. O-D-O, offense-defense-offense.
Initiate the three possession game (tie score) with an ATO, SLOB, BOB, or free throw. We invested fifteen minutes daily in this form of scrimmaging which practiced 'special situations' and scoring/defending "close and late" in games. We usually had three groups of four depending on player availability.
One game that we won, we went 3 for 3 in ATOs and won by three. An official came up to me after the game and said that our kids did a great job executing. He didn't mention how much we got beaten with the dribble where we got help and no rotation...as coaches we see the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Teach movement, competition, and decision-making while making practice fun.
Lagniappe. Play with emotion; don't be emotional.
Lagniappe 2. Simplify like legendary Cal rugby Coach Jack Clark. An excerpt:Getting angry at yourself after making mistakes in games isn’t going to help you play any better, so you might as well stay calm and continue to do the best that you can. Leave your mistakes in the past. Learn from them, move on, and focus on what’s next!
— Sports Psychology (@SportPsychTips) September 3, 2022
3. SHARE A VOCABULARY.
Jack Clark: There’s a coach on campus here who just asked me to look at his team’s values. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, because this was a really well-paid coach who’s in a high-profile sport. But this team actually wrote the word “California” in a circle, all the way around. Below the C they put everything you could possibly imagine: commitment, courage. Sometimes there were like 70 words for each letter — you can’t believe in all that stuff. He was like, “Did I miss anything?” “No, of course you didn’t miss anything. You’ve got everything — but putting ‘I’ for ‘intelligence’…listen, at some point those aren’t values. Those aren’t things that you’ll fight for.”
Jack Clark: We buy into six or seven things that are interconnected, that boxcar together to create a system. Now, might there be the odd freshman that would miss a couple? Maybe. But they would get the major definitions right because they’ve heard it and they’ve heard it from the other guys on the team. We talk about this. We spend a lot of time in meetings, too, remember. A lot of sports teams probably don’t spend enough time in meetings.
