Helping Kids To Focus

I had written you earlier about being happy that someone finally came out with this attitude about sports. For the first 4 weeks of practice, we worked many of your fun drills. My team is doing great. We are winning handedly. I taught the kids the outlet pass and they caught on to that quickly and it is very effective. Funny thing....the minute I tried to throw in a couple of simple plays, they started misbehaving and lost focus. I am going to take your advise and I did like a lot of the suggestions in the forum on the offense. It is very true that kids don\'t do well with any stress. What do you suggest to do with kids that continually do there own thing and don't focus on the how the skill is supposed to be done? I have trouble wanting to help these kids....I have tried to give a lot of positive reinforcement, but they don't even respond to that. Help.....Kelly

Kelly,

Have you tried the tactics in here?
http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/m ... ayers.html

If none of those work we can try to give you more ideas. I just didn't want to repeat what was already in there and wasn't sure if you have seen that report. Also, how old are the players?

Jeff

googer,
I wrote about this in another post on defense but I just started coaching 7 and 8 year olds and was looking for something that was easy to remember to help kids focus on what we were doing. We have a Team FOCUS which is "Get Better Every Day" or G.B.E.D. (which I had put on rubber bracelets that I handed out at the first practice). I try to stress that each player needs to work at getting better each day both on and off of the court (I believe that bball and fball teach life lessons better than any other sports). so they need to be a better passer or defender or a better brother or son or better student... My hope is that the kids will continue to work on little things as we progress throughout the year and will not loose focus. First time I have tried something like this but thought it might help you.
Good Luck

hi kelly...i know what you're going through. i've felt the same thing - there are some kids who have such a hard time focusing - they're either wired that way, or perhaps they just don't want to be out there (their parents made them sign-up, they're really insecure, etc). i look at that as simply my responsibility - i don't have to be responsible for the player liking the game of basketball (that's just not within my power to do), but i am responsible for making sure he is engaged and participating for the hour or so that he's out there. to do that, i try a few things:

- humor: keeping things light, throwing in some funny comments, and laughing at myself have all been good ways to get even the surliest kids to engage.

- us against them: whether it's "us" against the other team, or the players against the coaches, that group mentality helps bring all the players together, and for many of them, it's their first time being part of a group.

- find out what interests them: i have one kid on my team who was really insecure - he wasn't as good as the other players, so he decided that he'd get attention by clowning around. through casual converation with him, i found out he was really into science, so i asked him to watch some basketball on TV and tell me if some players don't adhere to the law of gravity. it was great - he did his task (it appealed to him), and he got to demonstrate that he's an expert. that alone caused him to pay attention and be eager to be part of what we were doing.

- patience: i spent about 1/3 of each practice biting my tongue, but i just have to remember that these are kids, this is supposed to be fun, and every player on the court has a story about who they are that i'll never fully understand.

hope that helps...

--Pat