I found this site last year and just wanted to say thanks to all involved. Really learned a lot. I coached a 3rd/4th grade girls CYC basketball team with 6 of the 9 girls never having played before. Ended up with a 5-15 record but that really didn't matter much to me. What mattered was seeing the improvement in skills in every girls using a lot of drills from this website.
I started them off in a standard 1-3-1 offense but when the girls weren't moving without the ball very well I switched to a 5 out motion offense. That seemed to suit them and we played much, much better. Its still a jumbled mess at times but when it clicks for them, it's pretty neat to watch. I think our biggest accomplishment was that out of the 9 girls, all 9 of them scored at least 1 basket during the season. Watching a lot of youth basketball games this season, I can say not a lot of teams can say that. We had our last game yesterday and played a team that beat us 24-4 the previous meeting at the beginning of the year. We lost 6-4 as they scored the winning bucket with a minute left. It showed me and the other parents how far the girls had come.
Thanks again for all of the information available.

You're welcome, Coach!

If you stick to fundamentals and teaching kids how to play, I'm sure you'll start to beat some of those teams.

Frank -

Great feedback. Sounds like you've been doing the right thing and it paid off. I'm betting the parents that signed up for basketball also enjoyed the season. Love it when I hear about teams where every kid scored a basket. I bet it was an awesome feeling to see the improvement by the end of the season.

Congrats on sticking to your game plan.

We ended up 4-6 in our league and in 3rd place so I was quite happy with that. We very easily could have been 7-3. The other 10 games were from 3 different tournaments throughout the year(the school pays for 3 tournament/year which turned out great for us) and we played a lot of better teams than us. I just wanted to get the girls more games in, especially since the school paid!

Just remember to keep the fun in the game. Its not all about winning at this age. Leave that stress to the paid pros!!!