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PostPosted: 28 Oct 2014, 10:31 

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I'm coaching m2m to 2nd graders any tips of advice would be great. I want to start a shell drill with them but worry it will confuse them. At this time I just getting them use to staying with there man.


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PostPosted: 28 Oct 2014, 17:48 

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Establish First that the man with the ball is the most important thing.

Only the person with the ball can score. Whoever your man is, you are also responsible for the ball.

Then put the ball in the hands of one of the offensive players in the shell.

Ask the players to count: Who is one pass away? Who is more than one pass away.

Then introduce them to the line up the center of the court. That is called the help-line. What is it called? The help-line. If your man is more than one pass away, you should be on the help-line. One hand should be pointed to the man with the ball and one hand pointed to your man. (Use a pistols analogy here, it works great!)

Then show them where they should be, according to your philosophy. Where are you if your man is one pass away. How about two passes away?

I always like to tell them, the further the ball is away from your man, the farther you can be away from your man.

Then proceed with the shell drill. Go Slow. They only throw a pass on your command. You make sure they are talking:
"Ball"
"Help"
"Deny"

Go slow. Remember, they are kids. It will take them a while to pick it up. As you feel they master it, then you can pick up the pace and add more wrinkles.

Just some thoughts.

Brian Sass


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PostPosted: 28 Oct 2014, 19:12 

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I think you're on the right track with staying with their man concept. Basic drills that deal with their foot movement is always good. Teaching them to stay low with a good defensive posture. A few simple off ball and on ball rules.

1) Here's a quick drill to show them why staying low when defending is a good thing. Line up two kids who are relatively the same speed to have a foot race from half court to the FT line or whatever distance you choose. Have them both ready to race with one foot behind and do it. Now take the faster kid and tell them to stand straight up with both feet about a foot apart. Have the other player get low and ready. Race again. Unless the guy standing up is amazingly fast, your low guy will win.

2) Mirror drill on half court line. Partner up, one player on offense can move back and forth on the line between two cones (5-7 feet apart), the other player is on defense and has to play with hands behind his back. The D player has to "mirror" the offensive players moves and keep up with him.

3) Make them play D while holding a towel around their necks to get them used to moving with their feet.

4) Pistols drill, although 2nd graders might not be ready for help side just yet. One finger pointed at guy will ball, one pointed at their man. Learning to see ball and their man without turning their head. Good concept and the pistols is a good keyword.

Have to go but will post more once I look through my younger drills.

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PostPosted: 28 Oct 2014, 19:14 

Posts: 157
LOL....in second grade I wouldn't expect anything to look "good", heck, I'd just be happy to get through a game at that age group without anyone falling over each other. :P


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PostPosted: 29 Oct 2014, 05:12 
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I'm not sure my comments will help you because I go about things a little different. But I thought I'd share my experience with this in case it helps.

In 2nd grade, we only play 3on3 so the players get more touches on the ball and develop better ball skill. We generally play full court but also do the half court game too. I set up my own league and we either scrimmaged ourselves or invited coaches to play us 3on3.

In 3rd grade at the end of the season we started playing 5on5. The only reason we did that is because I was having trouble getting other coaches to play us 3on3 and I felt we needed some games just for fun. You can read about that here if you want.
http://jeffhaefner.com/coach/coaching-youth-basketball-what-we-did-with-our-3rd-grade-team-and-ideas-that-might-help-you/

So my first advice is that if possible, try to minimize 5on5 and plan small sided games like 3on3. As the other coaches suggested, getting 2nd graders to play decent man to man defense is challenging. And you probably shouldn't get too hung up on it.

To start out, we play 1on1. This is both to develop offensive skills and defensive skills. Not to mention the agility and foot coordination that comes with the defense. We played a lot of full court 1on1 but also used lots of other variations. Here's one example:
http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/drills/1on1-grid-drill.html

We repeatedly demonstrated to players how we wanted the to move their feet to stay between the offensive player and the basket. Sometimes they get confused and take the wrong angle, etc. But the end of the season all our players were pretty good at 1on1 defense.

Then when we played 3on3, I just explained our defensive goal.... keep the offensive players as far from the basket as possible. Showed them the area we wanted to keep them out of. Showed them how to help and reviewed on ball defense. I think we did a little 4 on 4 shel but not very much. It's very slow going at this age.

So basically we emphasized:
- on ball defense
- keep the ball out of the lane
- see your player and the ball (point your pistols to both players -- this helps a lot)
- help each other

Again, I don't know if this helps. But that's what we did. If you read the link above, we had really good defense by the end of 3rd grade season. Not many points were scored against us. I think 6 was the most if I remember correctly.

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PostPosted: 29 Oct 2014, 05:13 
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Here's another post that I think will help you with defense:
http://jeffhaefner.com/coach/youth-defense-how-to-make-sure-young-players-know-who-they-are-guarding/

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PostPosted: 29 Oct 2014, 17:44 

Posts: 900
The more I think about it, 2nd grade is a tough age to expect more than one or two concepts on defense. I really like that article Jeff posted about knowing who to guard.

One thing I did at that age is used a peanut butter on bread analogy. I actually brought some bread and put peanut butter on it during a practice, turned it upside down, shook it, and the peanut butter stayed on. From then on, "peanut butter" was our keyword on defense. They had to stick on their player like peanut butter. Had a few take that a bit too literally, but we worked through it.

I also told the players that if the person they were guarding went to get a drink, you're going to get a drink. Obviously I was joking (and had a player who took me seriously once), but the over exaggeration seemed to get the point across.

Another analogy we used was calling the basket a castle and they were defending the castle. They couldn't let their player get to the castle which meant they had to stay between their player and the castle. Seemed to work and we used "castle" as a keyword when kids weren't between their player and the basket.

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PostPosted: 30 Oct 2014, 05:45 
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I like the castle idea!

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Jeff Haefner
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