I'm entering my 9th year of coaching and 2nd year of coaching competitive boys basketball. We are an 8th grade team that will be playing in the most competitive division this year. Our team will play in several leagues and tournaments throughout the 2012-2013 season.

I have the ability to practice two times per week for 90 minutes. Every now and then, I throw in a third practice if everyone's schedule permits. Gym time is limited and expensive in my city, plus we try not to burn everyone out by focusing on basketball 24/7. I have committed parents and kids, however, homework and other activities also enter into the equation as we travel down this path.

I feel that my practices are organized, they move quickly, and we practice hard for 90 minutes. I try and use drills that relate to game-like situations in some fashion. Although, I find myself running drills for the sake of running drills sometimes. I'm trying to find the balance between practicing skills and concepts. By skills, I mean dribbling, passing, and shooting drills. By concepts, I mean how to run different offenses and defenses, breaking presses, pressing, in bounds plays, if your man is there then you need to be here, those kinds of things. I find that when we get in games, it shows that we haven't practiced the offense enough or the press break, etc., however, the kids seem to get bored when I start reviewing concepts. They're well behaved and listen, but I can tell the "concept window" is only open for a little while before I lose them.

So, two things:

1) How much time would you allocate towards concepts in a practice vs skills?

2) When teaching concepts, is there a way to keep it interesting and still get enough repetition to help insure execution come game time?

Thanks!

Rob -

There are certain things that need to be repeated every practice... keep the time frame short.. 5-6 minutes.. keep them moving and try to make things competitive.

One thing that I learned early as a varsity coach was to make sure that we could run our press offense in our sleep. We lost our first game in a holiday tournery because we couldn't. I told the kids that was on me, but it won't happen again. We worked on our press offense 10 minutes every day, one day vs m2m one day vs zones.

I don't see where two 90 minute practices per week will burn anybody out, once they get into high school they will be practicing 4-5 times a week for 2 hours... while playing 1-2 games per week. Kids have to learn how to balance their time between, academics, home and sports. This makes them more responsible.

Make sure that every drill you run releates to what you do in games. Shooting drills should include reading the defense while utilizing screens, proper footwork, catch and release/shooting the ball. Defensive drills, 1 on 1, 2 on 2 and 3 on 3,,,, meaning defense on the ball, one pass away and most importantly 2 passes away (SHELL DRILL) helps a lot too.

Break down your practice into segments where they have work hard for a few drills and then a drill that they really enjoy doing while teaching your concepts.

Only you know how much your team needs to work on fundamentals.... IF they aren't fundamentally sound, they will not be successful. Success comes from being well prepared and fundamentally sound.

You can break down your practice plans by spending 20 minutes on offense, 20 minutes on defense, (this includes some break down drills)
15 minutes of shooting - 10 minutes for your press offense vs your press. That leaves you 25 minutes for inbounds plays, sideline, inbound under and any other specialty you might want to cover. You can take some of this time and include it into your offense and defense so you can run those plays vs a D.Maybe 5 minutes each after they understand how to run them..... leaving you with 15 minutes. End every practice with a fun thing, so when they leave and go home they will talk about having fun at practice, Trust me, they will talk about you at home and how practice went. The thing we did was run "situations" - the kids loved them.... had a lot of fun, they were very competitive and its a great learning tool.

If you had more time to work with I might suggest having more than one drill to teach a skill/concept, that way they wont get bored, but 180 minutes isn't a lot of time to work with. Good luck

I hope this helps.

Just a couple additional thoughts that may or may not help.

Maybe try lesson lecturing/talking and use different "teaching" tactics? For example, in our practices the explanations are very simple and minimal. Our offense can be explained in a couple minutes. So can the defense. Once they have the big picture, then it's all learn through reps, trial and error, quick corrections, and self discovery.

Asking questions can help too. Why did this guy get wide open? Why did we turn the ball over? Why did you take that contested outside shot? Why didn't get score that time? Why didn't we get an easy look on that possession? Why did you screen thin air?

Show it real quick. Have them do it a few times. Then ask questions and/or show them a better way to do it real quick Short concise teaching. Do it again.

Those are just thoughts and ideas to come to mind.

We don't spend much time on concepts and the "lecturing/talking" is very minimal. If it doesn't have to do with "player development" we don't spend time on it. So it's all skill development, athletic development, teaching them how to be better players, developing confidence, aggression, mentality, etc. We also rely on stats quite a bit for motivation and make sure players understand what they mean.

All we do are skills, athletic development, motion (which is also skill development), man defense (which is athletic development and sometimes our motion too), press breaker (which is just spacing and extension of motion), and a few situations. We do spend a little time on simple inbounds plays (the only plays we spend time on) because they pay such big dividends and there are so many dead balls in youth and high school games.

Thanks for the replies! Great suggestions and reminders, exactly what I needed.

I need to think through the "concepts" and make sure when I'm teaching those that the player development aspect is also being covered. Like the concise part on talking also, good reminder. Definitely need to segment my practices more to make sure I'm covering everything needed. Another good reminder is engaging the kids which I try and do by asking questions and having them basically teach back what we just covered.

Again, great suggestions, thanks!