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Monday, January 20, 2025

Basketball - What Our Team Practiced Each Practice

Middle school basketball was designed as a vehicle to teach and to prepare players for high school basketball and beyond. That meant "routine" for activities that we considered most efficient and important. Find something you can adopt or adapt. 

Nothing came down to us on "stone tablets." We conditioned within drills, worked to practice at high tempo, and avoided "laps, lines, and lectures."

These included fundamental and team play development. Here are some that occurred each practice: 

1) Initial two laps for muscle warmup. 

2) Warmup dribbling (around the arc) 

  • Out right handed, back left handed
  • Steady, hesitation, crossovers, combination (hesi-crossover)
  • Occasional substitution, dribble tag inside the arc (both ends) 
3) Warm up shooting (Villanova get 50 with partner)

4) Additional shooting 
  • 30 buckets (3 minutes, groups of 3 shooters, 3 rebounders) every make must realign to a new perimeter spot
  • 3 by 3 by 3 full court shooting 


  • UCONN 4 minute shooting (3 balls, 2 lines elbow jumpers, track makes at each end)
  • Spurs Shooting - 4 groups of 3 - passer, rebounder, shooter - shooter must make five then everyone rotates. Groups compete to finish first. 
5) Managing pressure (advantage-disadvantage) - 5 versus 7 full court press break. Option is using constraints of NO DRIBBLING. Practice is hard so 5 versus 5 in games with dribbling becomes easier. 

6) Small-sided games (3-on-3, both ends, inside the split) One coach at each end to supervise. Start from different 'sets' (e.g. spread, high ball screen, "triangle"). This worked on half-court execution for both offense and defense. 

7) "Specials" - special situations, end of practice...three possession games, (O-D-O) offense-defense-offense. Each 'game' starts with either a BOB, SLOB, free throw, or ATO). This simulated "close and late" game situations, especially actions after timeouts late. 

Some skill development activities, for example, pick-and-roll offense and defense, box drills with defense, wing series offense, and others didn't get used each practice. We only had two 90 minute sessions available a week. One coach told me they got eight hours of practice time a week. 

Lagniappe. Good design close and late. 

Lagniappe 2. Bad ball pressure almost always translates into problems.  

Lagniappe 3. Balanced scoring is hard to defend.  

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