Hi BB community,

As a 20yo player turned coach, I've found that the biggest problem I have to overcome is limited practice time. I coach 12-13 year old girls in Australia and we have two 90 minute trainings and one game per week, which runs for virtually 9 months of the year.

I've read your tips regarding practicing fundamentals during the pre-game warmup and using "stations" to maximize efficiency and believe that these have/will be effective.

In Australia the larger basketball community has (in my opinion) fallen into a habit of running things the 'traditional way'. While these methods are effective I'm looking to expand my coaching knowledge and gain an edge on the competition.

Literally ANY tips you have regarding optimizing and maximizing practice time would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

Kind regards,

Coach Tom

Cool to see a post from Australia, need to get there one of these days.

The best tip I can give you is incorporate multipurpose drills that cover several skills at once. Here's a good example from Jeff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1U5oSMQ6S4 The more multipurpose drills you can do, the more you'll maximize your time during practice and cover more skill sets.

Take a piece of your offense and turn it into a skill drill. When we practice lay ups, shooting, cutting, screening, etc... it is always done in context of our offense some how. That way we work on two or more things at once. Here's just one example. When we practice lay ups, we also practice our fill and backcut. Then we practice our fake and face cut. We're not out there just running lay up lines.

If you have an assistant, practice defense and offense the same time. Assistant watches the offense in the half court, while you watch defense in the half court.

Have an assistant watch rebounding and boxing out in all your drills. Now almost every single drill is a rebounding drill, and you don't have to practice rebounding separately.

Warm up running a pice of your offense. 5 on 0 pass and screen (perimeter passes only). While at it, make sure every player faces in triple threat.

Lots of ways to multitask when you stop to think about it.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the prompt replies.

Coach Rob - the problem Ive found with multipurpose drills is ensuring that the fundamentals are adhered to for the different parts of the drill. For younger players I try to focus on as fewer concepts as possible in each drill to ensure they are developing good habits without being overwhelmed by directions from us coaches, but this means that parts of multipurpose drills are done to a standard less than I'm satisfied with. I'm certainly not criticizing your advice (I often use multipurpose drills), but do you have any further comments for my query?

Jeff - I've been watching a lot of videos and reading articles from Rick Torbett, and he consistently mentions the same thing as you have: I feel pretty stupid for differentiating between our team offense and player development for as long as I have.

Anything to add regarding maximizing practice time? We go through our dynamic stretching program (to prevent ACL injuries) prior to the training start time so our 90 minutes is all basketball, but I could always use some gimmicks to get teenage girls off their effing iphones and practicing more outside our organized sessions with and/or without coaches being present.

Apologies if I'm coming across as nitpicking. I really do appreciate the advice.

Cheers,

Coach Tom

Coach Tom -

Be as organized as you possibly can... for one, we never took a water break... they were allowed to get water when they weren't in part of the drill or offense etc. Solved a back up and bull session at the water fountain.... 2 3-5 minute breaks, 6 minutes saved... run from one station or drill to another.

Conditioning... do your conditioning with your drills and offense/defense... that was another thing we did to conserve time - multi purpose drills is another good way like Jeff and Rob said - Practice your press offense vs your defense.

Trying to get girls to play outside of practice is tough... but you might try and "buy" them into doing it. Practice shooting and or free throws outside of practice... have them take down their stats - winner gets whatever you can afford???
Small prize weekly... monthly get be a little bigger and something like a shirt for the season? I coached boys so I didn't have to do this, they would do some work on their own.

The rest of the things I mentioned are things we did and we had 4 days a week of practice / 2 hours a day.