Controlled Chaos?

Fast breaks and steals. I understand they are part of basketball, however, it drives me nuts when the game turns into kids chasing each other up and down the court. It's chaos at best. I'd estimate 10% of the time someone actually converts a steal or fast break into points and the other 90% is made up of out of control dribbling, wild passes and a frantic pace.

I feel like we need to teach our kids to slow down when they get a turnover (or defensive rebound) and not immediately think they have to rush down the court. It just seems to feed into that frenzy. I'm cool if they have a clear path or mismatch to try and push it down court, but even then I see teams turn the ball back over because they're out of control.

Thoughts?

(5th/6th grade boys b-ball rec league)

I'm afraid its the nature of the beast with that age group. This is something you need to instill in them... that the ball is important, take care of it... and PLAY UNDER CONTROL.
Take some time in practice to run situations ... a situation where you want them to take the last shot after a rebound... say 30 seconds to a minute on the scoreboard?
Your kids are just learning what they can and cannot do on the floor. Get them to work on those skills in practice, remember, what you allow them to do in practice they WILL do in a game.
AND, don't worry, we all hate turnovers... so, unless you want a walk it up the floor type of team... you are going to have a lot of turnovers until they become more proficient at the faster paced game.
Good luck coach.

Ken

Ken - funny you mentioned "that the ball is important, take care of it". Last night in practice I asked the kids what they'd do if they found a $50 bill laying on the ground. Would you just run into a crowd and throw it up in the air? Emphasized that when we had a scrimmage, it seemed to work. Might bring a $50 bill to our game Friday as a visual aid. ;)

-rob

I like your style Rob! LOL Why don't you pick out a number of turnovers that you can live with and give them gatorade or something like that IF they stay under that number? Bribery always works :-)

My last year of coaching 8th graders I made a deal with them... each one would pay a $1 if we lost a game and when we won... I would put up $5.
They balked a little bit.... I told them we were already 8-2..... it was a Catholic school and we didn't have our own gym so we played a lot that year when they took one day of practice a week away. We ended up 36-14, do the math. We had a nice dinner party at the end of the season.