Friday, March 22, 2024

Basketball: Ten Ideas Worth Stealing for More Effective Practice

I love practice. After players, practice is our most precious resource. 

Coaches earn recognition because of our teams, our players, and our lessons. One of my idols is Bowdoin rhetoric professor Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. During the Civil War, without military training, he became legendary winning a battle at Gettysburg, earning the Congressional Medal of Honor. His secret? "I can learn." 

Make practice work, effective, fun. Here are ten guaranteed methods.

1. Expand from Brian McCormick's "no lines, no laps, and no lectures." Practice time is precious. Get everyone involved early. Set up a group at each end, inside the arc, playing "dribble tag." Someone is "IT" and needs to tag someone. Add constraints like non-dominant hand dribbling or every third between the legs. This is an excellent warm up activity.

2. Condition within drills, such as Kentucky Layups. Go for your personal best. 

3. Make activities competitive. Shooting practice is always competitive. Pressure is a privilege. 

4. Alternate highest intensity activities with lower intensity ones, e.g. such as free throw shooting. 

5. Every activity should impact winning. Revise or eliminate segments that don't promote winning. 

6. Apply the structure of Performance Expert Dr. Fergus Connolly - skill, strategy, physicality, psychology. Take complacency out of your dictionary.

7. Include 'special situations' practice that works offense, defense, and understanding situation, time, and score. We played three possession games including offense-defense-offense beginning with an ATO, BOB, SLOB, or free throw. 

8. Maximize touches with small-sided games. Clip-and-save these from Coach Fernandez. 

9. "Spacing is offense and offense is spacing." - Chuck Daly   When practicing "team offense," work core principles and monitor spacing, player movement, ball movement, and finishing. 

10.Build in "gotta have it" sections, scrimmaging with purpose. For example, "close and late." 

  • Tie score. One timeout. Six seconds left with the ball. Fullcourt to navigate. Teach them to advance the ball in the least possible time to get the ball to halfcourt to use the timeout. 
  • Down one. Three seconds left. BOB or SLOB. What's your best action? Practice it. 
  • Up three, ten seconds left, without the ball. Are you fouling? 
Bonus. What helped us go 21-4 and win the top division sectional championship in 1973? Advantage-disadvantage. Full court press break, five-versus-seven, no dribbling allowed. Cut and pass and cut.

Lagniappe. An excellent shooter is less so when you pass to her ankles.  

Lagniappe 2. Timing is everything.  

Lagniappe 3. Know thyself.  

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