Saturday, September 14, 2024

Basketball - Practice Planning

Have specific goals when planning practice. Have a variety of practice strategies to teach individual, team, and game management skills. 

Watching great practices (e.g. Geno Auriemma at UCONN, Brad Stevens at Celtics) provided unique opportunities. 

A few points that resonated:

  • Superior organization
  • High tempo (efficiency) 
  • Competition (Geno tracked everything)
  • Teaching (Stevens/assistants were running through Raptor core plays and how he thought they could be best defended)
  • Competitive character - watching young Stewie, Tatum showed "professionalism" in action


When possible, use activities that combine offense, defense, competition, decision making and pressure. My favorite in that regard is advantage-disadvantage full court play, 5 versus 7. Adding constraints such as no dribbling helps. 

In the developmental setting, we emphasized shooting, offensive development. Few players can earn big minutes on defense alone. We spent about 35-40% on shooting/individual offense, about 10% on handling and defeating pressure, 15% on three-on-three with a coach supervising each end, 15% on scrimmaging via offense-defense-offense segments with ATOs, BOBs, SLOBs which often define outcomes close and late. 

We only had three hours a week for middle school practice. It's not enough to introduce a lot of things I would have wanted to do, but we played man defense so we didn't invest time in a lot of exotic defenses. 

I tell players the "right way" to do it is how your current coach wants it done. 

In the "Alone" series on the History Channel, competitor Wyatt says, "I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. But I can change tomorrow and the next day and the next day." 

Lagniappe. From Coach Berge. Do the work. 

Lagniappe 2. Desperation to win. 
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