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Thursday, November 6, 2025

JC's Basketball Practice Rules - What About Ours?

We're teaching life. Coaches teach the ABC's - approaches, beliefs, and choices. 

Don't create a "life list" (birding) of useful practical applications. Stick to five, the five fingers that make a fist, establish guidelines for each practice. 

1. Be efficient. Start on time, get into and out of drills and practice segments quickly, and end on time. Think like a Swiss engineer. 

2. Stress fundamentals. Figure out how much time to devote to fundamentals (a minimum of fifty percent). Vary drills to keep players engaged and learning. Dean Smith said, "I don't coach effort." We'll never have Michael Jordan, so we must. 

3. Condition within drills. Full court, full press scrimmaging, transition drills, "Argentina Passing," and others keep players running and practicing with a ball. 3 x 3 x 3 shooting gets both high volumes of shots and running. 

4. Make it competitive. Build competition into as many drills as possible. Coach Knight taught that the best activities included offense, defense, decision-making and competition. If I had it to do over, I'd have more scrimmaging, building constraints into it. For example, require scoring inside the paint for part or scoring off perimeter shots, or a paint touch and a ball reversal during a possession. 

5. Defeat pressure defense. Pressure defense forces tempo, challenges teams to pass and cut, and prioritizes avoidance of turnovers. 

My favorite drills is "advantage-disadvantage" 5 versus 7 with constraints of no dribbling. You learn to cut and pass or fail. 

Four-on-four halfcourt without dribbling teaches similar principles. 

Lagniappe. Everybody plays hard in the postseason. You have to get there first.  

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