I am on the verge of becoming the coach for a 4th grade girls travel team this season. The only thing that would stop this from happening is if the travel director feels it would be better the combine the 4th and 5th grades into one team.

In your opinion, what is an acceptable roster size to maintain a team for just 4th grade? I have spent the last 7-8 months getting the word out to girls to tryout for the team so that we have enough players. Right now, the number of quality girls for the 4th grade team is at 7 or 8. To me, that is an acceptable number.

Last season, I was approached by a coach who told me they wanted to combine these two grades this seson because they didn't think they had enough talented players in the older grade to have their own team. My daughter's grade, however, definitely has the 7-8 girls to make up a decent squad on their own. I am fearing that the older grade might try to pull some shenanigans and poach some of our girls. A couple of them played up a grade last year for one tournament and we were less than please with how things were run.

Forgetting about the politics and other factors in this situation, having 7-8 available for a youth game is just about perfect. Everyone will get to play and get meaningful minutes. If you have 10 players on the team, there will be a couple players on the team that won't get a lot of minutes and frankly won't benefit.

Often coaches will kid themselves and think that giving a player 2-3 minutes before half time and then 5 minutes if they are up at the end is doing them some good. That's just not enough playing time for the player to develop or get anything out of it. That's why I say 7-9 is just about right.

The problem with an 8 player roster is what if two players are sick and one gets in foul trouble? Not the end of the world but does make it hard to compete. Also, you can't do 4on4 shell unless you use an assistant if a player misses practice.

There are so many solutions to these problems -- combining practices, moving players around, etc. I have too many girls out for one of my teams but I just come up with creative ways to solve the problem and get everyone good opportunities. Every situation is unique.

Almost forgot, 3on3 and 4on4 is great for their development because they get more touches on the ball. You can arrange for other teams to play you 3on3 or 4on4. Just another option to consider. That's what we do at the 3rd and 4th grade level.
Hope this helps.

I agree, 7 or 8 players is good for the games as long as no one gets hurt or sick. I think that my # would be 8 for scrimmage purposes but there is always a way to work around that.

I hate the thought of politics at this age... these are young kids learning to play and should be having fun. If I were you and with you thinking that another coach is going to grab a player or two.... I would have a meeting with the parents and lock them into YOUR team somehow.

Let them know what your goals are ( hopefully to teach them the fundamentals of the game, how to get along and work towards a common goal, and more importantly, have some fun. Getting them ready to play at the next level is also a goal )

Winning is NOT important at this age.... learning fundamentals is. Success is a by product of being fundamentaly sound.. JMO

I think 8 is a good number for a competitive team. Upside is more playing time for everyone and easier to deal with subs. Downside has already been mentioned, if someone gets injured or is sick, you're stuck with less players.

I've been there on the 10 player deal and it makes things extremely rough when it comes to subs. Having 10 players is great for practice purposes. Some of the teams in our area limit the playing members to 8, but add two more non playing members for practices. The two non playing members pay a lot less and get the benefit of improving their game.

Last year, I kept my 8th grade competitive team to 8 players. In our league, once you declare your roster, you're done. Three weeks into our preseason one of my guys broke his leg, so he's out for the season. We ended up playing close to 50 games between two leagues and tourneys, a third of those games were played with 5-6 players, due to sickness, injuries or fouls. Tons of playing time though and they learned how to manage their fouls.

Well, we got our own team for just our grade. I have not seen the roster yet, but I am anticipating it being at 8 girls. I was at the tryouts, but I helped run drills for the 6th grade girls. We had one girl decide to play winter travel volleyball instead of tryout for basketball so we were very concerned about numbers. If she would have come out for the team, we probably would have had the 8 strong players that we talked about last winter. Instead, we've got 7 of them and probably one more that I've never seen play.

For a group of 4th grade girls, I think we have a lot of height, athleticism and aggressiveness. There is one girl who has 4 or 5 older brothers and is the most aggressive little girl I've ever seen. I think we'll have decent speed and at least a couple girls who can handle the ball pretty well right now. So with practice and development we should be ok.

I'm planning to use a 5-out motion offense with just a few principles: Pass and cut, pass and screen away, dribble drive, ball screen. We'll gradually get to all of the layers. Going by what I've seen in the past, zone defense and full court defense are only allowed in the second half of games as long as the score is still within a certain amount of points. So we'll have to work on some press breaking and zone offense at some point. I think the 5-out can be adpated to work against a zone. And I've also considered using a 3 out 2 in motion at times. I like that look against a zone defense.

Defensively we're going to be a m2m team, but we'll touch on some 23 or 32 zone. Maybe put our aggressive girls up top and then line the back row with a couple of our trees.

We will get 2 weeks of practice before our first game. It should amount to somewhere between 6-9 hours of practice. Time to get to work.

Sounds like you'll have some good players to work with on this team. I like the 5 out motion offense, it allows for multiple ball touches and players aren't "stuck" at one position. Keep us posted on the season.

We ran the 5 out open post offesne.. called Double Up..... forces every player to be able to handle the ball, read defenses, pass well and be able to get open by making good cuts.

Good luck, I hope this works out for you and the kids.

We had our first two practices this week. Young girls and a lot of fundamental work to do, but after about 4 hours of practice you can see the rust starting to come off. 7 of the 8 girls are extremely hard workers and then there's 1 with a lazy attitude. I'm going to have to work on finding the right approach with her. She's a very talented girl with good size, but her will be what keeps her off the court. She's also new in town, so she may have a bit of that outsider feeling going on. When we do partner work, I make sure the girls take a different partner each practice, so hopefully over time she'll be more comfortable.

We spent about 20 minutes in a 5 out shell on day one, walking, jogging, then near ful speed working on the first layer of pass and cut, with players replacing to the open spot. They seemed to have a decent understanding of it. Last night we worked on some breakout drills of passing and cutting, worked on a 4 on 4 defensive shell, pointing pistols, jumping to the ball, etc. Then played 4 on 4 for the last 10 minutes or so. From an outsiders perspective it probably looked like a mess LOL. But for the most part they maintained decent spacing, they worked hard at moving to get open and we even had a few nice pass and cuts. We just need to work on watching the cutter so we get that high percentage shot. Afterwards I asked the girls if they could talk about what they learned from the scrimmage, what worked, what didn't work and they had very good responses.

I'm also thinking of teaching them how to use a dribble handoff to the wings if they are struggling with the entry pass. We'll also work on backcuts next week. Our first game is Nov 17 and then the following week we've been invited to play in a pre-season tournament nearby. We're guranteed at least 3 games there and there are only 4 teams in our division in the tournament, so I think we all automatically advance to tournament play after pool play. It will be great experience for the girls, win or lose.

I used the rule that if you dribble at the wing, they have the option to back-cut or take a dribble hand-off. We taught the wing to use the back-cut if they were more out on the perimeter. We also taught that a pass fake was an automatic back-cut, which worked well if the wing popped out a bit first to get their defender to bite.

Sounds like you've started with some good fundamentals in your practice. Good luck and keep us updated!

Practice tonight and hopefully Saturday. Then our first game is Sunday afternoon.

Last practice we worked on the wing players using v-cuts to get open to initiate offense and then we also showed them the dribble hand off. At the end of practice we played some 4 on 4 for about 10 minutes and after a few possessions they started using the hand offs when they couldn't get open and we had some really nice drives to the hoop from that.

Fundamentals are getting better and I think a good number of the girls have a decent understanding of the basic concepts of basketball. When I was walking them through the dribble handoff, the girl playing dummy D on the dribbler said "but then won't I just switch and guard her when she gets the handoff?" To me, that's pretty good IQ for a 4th grader.

Our games consist of 4 qtrs, 9 min each. Only m2m D allowed in the first half and any type of defense in the second half. So we're sure to see some zones and ful court pressure. I saw a few games in a 4th grade tournament last year and the full court stuff was just m2m full court. I'm thinking I'll get the ball in the hands of my best dribbler, have the second best be our inbounder and trailer. Then clear everybody else out and get the ball up the court.

As for a zone offense. I anticipate seeing a lot of 2-3 zones. I think I might spend a little bit of time showing the girls a 3 out 2 in look with the 2 in moving post and elbow on ballside. And we'll just talk about finding the openings and being patient.

Thoughts?