What is your opnion and experience on giving your players handouts at practice? How important is it and what kind of information have you handed out? What are the most important type of handouts? Or do you just send things to players on the internet? Have you given your players homework?

I'm preparing an information pack for my players for the upcoming season with a season plan of what we're doing on offense and defense, drills we'll be using, info on our offense and defense, some web-sites they should see (with videos and articles), maybe some team rules for practices and games. Hope I don't give them too much. Should I share my practice plans with the players (online maybe) or at least a sample or template? I will most likely make a Facebook-page for the team to post information, articles and videos.

With high school teams, I always give a handout that include core values, team rules, contact info, and maybe a little info about offense and plays.
http://jeffhaefner.com/coach/excited-had-our-first-mandatory-meeting-with-the-players-off-to-good-start/

I also send emails about core values lessons (sometimes youtube links), good examples of offense, etc.
http://jeffhaefner.com/coach/message-to-your-players-being-selfless-and-helping-others/

Anything you can do to teach and reach your goals as a coach I think is a good thing. Everyone digests info and learns differently (reading, hearing, doing, seeing, etc). So having numerous ways to kids to learn and get info is good.

Do you have a sample of team rules I could see?

Yep. They are in the first link to the blog post. I'll paste there here for ya...

Our team rules are:

- Don’t do anything detrimental to the team.

- Follow the “team core values” on and off the court.

That’s it. We don’t need any other rules because that covers everything I can imagine.

I do verbally give them a few examples of violations and what I might do for punishment. For example, if you are late to practice or miss without notifying me, that affects our practice and is detrimental to the team. Your punishment might be laps, everyone does sprints, or all your teammates do sprints while you sit in a chair drinking gatorade. Each situation is unique and handled how I see fit.