Here is a short commentary between Jim Bado and one of the girls on his youth team. It discusses the importance of having everybody handle the ball on your youth teams…
Before Saturday’s game started, Michele plopped beside me on the bench.
“Coach,” she said, “do I have to play guard today?”
“Yeah,” I replied, “everyone plays guard on our team.”
“But I don’t want to. I’m not any good at dribbling. Can’t I just play forward? I’m better at that.”
“You’re playing guard. You get better at dribbling by doing it.”
“But I always lose the ball or they take it from me — I don’t want to do that in the game today.”
“Michele,” I said. “Remember when you started with our team two seasons ago?”
“Yeah.”
“You’d never played basketball before and didn’t know how to shoot a lay-up, did you?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t know how to pass or play defense either, right?”
“Yes.”
“And now, because you’ve done those things in games, you can do all of them, right?”
“No,” she said, before catching herself, “I mean yeah, yeah, I can.”
“Well, it’s the same way with dribbling. That’s why I want you to bring the ball up in games, so you’ll get better at it. And I know you can do it.”
She thought about that for a second and said. “Ok, but can I just do it once or twice today?”
It took everything I had not to crack up. Seeing her, and all the girls improve, is why you coach youth sports.
You can find more articles from Jim Bado that are usually non-basketball related at the LOSER Report.
Thank god for coaches like him. I was tall for my age early on and was deemed a post player, I was good at it, but my 8th grade coach said that I could never dribble the ball, never practiced it. When I got to high school still a post player, but when I got to college I was too short, but couldn’t dribble that well to be a wing. End of career, wish I had a coach that made me practice ball handling all the time.