Hello all. I love this forum!

I'll be having my first practice for our rec league team tomorrow. I am coaching 3rd - 6th grade girls. We'll have about 6 or 7 one hour practices before our first game in mid October. Below is a list of drills/games I plan to use to some degree during these practices. Which ones would I get the most benefit out of for these first 2 or 3 practices? Realistically, I imagine I'll only get to use 8-10 of them during a one hour session. For a little more info on what I'm dealing with, I'll have 8 girls. 3 of them have never played, the other five have played anywhere from 3 to 7 years. With this being known, what defense and what type of offense do you usually run for this type of league? I usually use 2-3 exclusively, but I would like to get away from that and just do M2M. For this age group, I also struggle with what to do on offense. Thanks in advance!

BALL HANDLING
Kneeling Dribbles (Right and Left)...fingertips
Regular Dribbling (stay low and knees bent)
Red Light / Green Light (with and without ball)
Snake Dribbling
Stare Dribbling
King of the Ring
Dribble Tag
Keep it bouncing
Dribble Relays

PASSING DRILLS
Stationary passing
Shuffle passing
Two ball passing
Passing line relay (intro to pivot)
5-skill drill (intro to jump stop)
Monkey (s) in the middle
Circle Passing (2 balls)
SHOOTING
Line shooting
Layup basics
Long layups (add passer at top of key)
Pressure layups
Knockout
Anything goes (3 players at a time)
5-spot shooting (half moon)

OFFENSE/DEFENSE
WAR
Ball Scramble
3v3 no dribble keep away
Freeze Drill
3v3 (start with sideline or baseline inbounds pass)
Pivot 21 (chair with ball at elbow, and coach ball)
Scramble drill (boxing out/rebounding)
Defensive slide relays
Speed square game (defensive slides around paint)
2v2 Box out

Since we're talking rec league here, couple of questions out of the gate:

1) Does your league they allow 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th graders to play against each other? Pretty big gap in physicality and experience.

2) What are your coaching philosophies and goals for this season?

Your list of drills looks great, make sure to keep them fun.

With regards to which drills will have the most impact, I'm more in the camp of drills that are more game-like. Nothing against drills that emphasize a specific skill, but if I can have a drill that incorporates skills and actual situations they will encounter in games, that's even better. Especially when you only have one hour practices.

I'm a big fan of 2v2 and 3v3. More ball touches = more fun for the kids. More opportunities to learn a wider range of skills.

I'm M2M defense all the way at this level. Various reasons, but that's why my #2 question is up there ^

Regarding the offense, you'll have to keep it fairly simple since you have 3 who've never played. I like some type of basic motion offense of pass and cut or pass and set a screen to start.

The tricky part with one hour practices is having time to work on a few inbounds plays and your offensive scheme. It's easy to find yourself 45 minutes into practice and you haven't worked on anything technical about your offense or defense. When A happens, do B type of a thing.

A lot of this will boil down to your coaching philosophy and what you want to see accomplished this season. Personally, I think having a coaching statement of philosophy and a few goals written down helps a ton in situations like this. Communicating those to the parents up front can help you avoid a few headaches down the road.

#1. Yes. I have coached in this league for 2 years now, and my teams have been 3rd-6th girls both years. This year their were only 4 6th graders and about 10 5th graders to sign up, so that is their justification for combining. I have lobbied both years to remove this, but they are just not interested in breaking it up into 3/4 and 5/6.

#2. I also coached middle school competitive league in the area, and have noticed that most girls don't have the fundamentals skills needed to succeed. Namely, dribbling, shooting form and general quickness/aggressiveness. I want to be able to aid in changing that.

I coached the same age group of girls a couple years ago. Well, it was 4-6 grade, but my daughter and 4 of her classmates were ready to play a bit more competitively, so they played as 3rd graders in the 4-6 grade league.

Over the years, I've gone through plenty of trials and tribulations coaching youth basketball. Your list of drills is great, but I agree with Coach Rob. You've got to incorporate some game like situations for them to truly test these skills. Otherwise practice becomes stagnant when you're just doing drill after drill and skill after skill.

My thoughts:

Keep things fast paced. Even your stationary ballhandling, make them push themselves to bounce the ball faster, it will increase the number of reps they are getting, so you can spend less actual time on it and not lose a thing.

I wouldn't fall into trying to run an exact offense with this age. Teach them different options of how to get open (v-cut, L-cut), show them when/how to backcut, maybe even when/how to screen for a teammate. And then just work on keeping them spread out. Spacing, movement and good passing will take you very far at the youth level.

The best thing I started doing with my teams in the past couple seasons was to run the Shell Drill. I now teach it as a progression. First we start out as 3on3 or 4on4 positioned around the perimeter. The first level is to pass to another spot and hold the ball so the defense can move and be in correct position. Once I'm comfortable that the D understands their positioning, we'll speed it up a bit and then add another level. The offense is now passing and cutting and filling open perimeter spots. At this point, we are not allowed to dribble. So this should be just like your no dribble keep away you listed in your drills. We're working on team defense and team offense all in one drill. The kids are figuring out on their own how to get open. Once they become comfortable with this, we add in dribbling, but usually limit it to 4 dribbles at a time. So now we're completely live, playing basketball. It will look ugly at times, but then again, that's probably 95% of youth basketball these days! The difference is your players are understanding how to play together, no matter how ugly it looks to you. Over the season you can start showing them how to look for backcuts in the Shell Drill, how to do screen away action, etc.

Shell Drill, combined with high volume 1v1 reps and maybe a fullcourt transition drill and your team should be good to go. These drills get everybody involved and I feel that they are a great way of getting a lower-tier player to buy in and work hard to improve.

I have more and could probably go on for hours about this stuff, but I'll give it a rest for now.

In regards to #2 above........girls basketball is a completely different game than boys basketball. Some people take a long time to realize this. I had a 4th grade girls travel team last year and I'm with them again as 5th graders. In the weeks leading up to our regular season, my wife would occasionally say how sloppy we looked when we scrimmaged ourselves. One weekend after our practice, we stayed around to watch a high school scrimmage. My wife watched about 30 minutes of the freshman girls play, turned to me and said "so is this what ALL girls basketball looks like!?" or something to that effect. Fast forward to the end of the year and we had an 18-13 record, one tournament championship and three runner-ups. And we never finished worse than third place in a tournament.

Get the girls working on their ballhandling, passing and layups. I've found that in most walks of life, especially sports, that confidence breeds aggression.