I love your website! I have a read a few of your articles about youth basketball skill development and there is little mention of rebounding/boxing out. How come?
Thanks! Todd

PS I am coaching a 5th grade girls travel team this yr.

I found a few from a real quick search in the "Site Search" box over to the left. Sometimes you have to dig a bit to find articles and posts on a topic. Here's a quick list, but you could probably find more than I did. Are you looking for something specific?

https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/fundamentals/rebounding.html

https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/pr/rebounding.html

https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/drills/reactionrebounding.html

https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/stats/rebounding-stats.html

https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/drills/closeoutbox.html

From a winning and effort development standpoint, rebounding is really important at a youth level. I too coach 5th graders.

We do mention rebounding on the site but not a lot for a couple reasons...

It's not that difficult to teach. I could take an 18 year old kid and teach him how to box out and rebound in one week. However it would take many years to teach this 18 year how how to dribble, shoot, make lay ups, decision making, etc. So from a long term development standpoint, we don't talk about rebounding very much.

With all that said, we do emphasize rebounding with our youth teams (including my 5th grade team) and even my high school team. However we do very few rebounding drills, if any. Instead the emphasis is during scrimmages, games, skill development drills like shooting, the stats I give to players after every game, and so on. I guess you could say that almost everyone one of our drills are rebounding drills, even though we don't specifically do any rebounding drills.

Also, since pretty much all youth team and even high school teams shoot between 10-50%, there are LOTS of chances for rebounds. So they are clearly important and can have a big effect on the outcome of the game.

Another reason we emphasize rebounding is because it fits into our effort and hustle emphasis. So I think it's good for developing the effort and hustle aspects with young kids.

Hopefully that makes sense. Not saying you shouldn't do any rebounding drills. You should. Just saying there are probably more important things from a developmental standpoint and also other ways to develop rebounding.

BTW, our team last year as 4th graders was always the smallest... it wasn't even close. But I think we won the rebounding in almost every game. We haven't spent any time on boxing out yet. Just taught them where they ball will go and to go get it!!