In hopes of giving you some ideas and possibly helping your team in some way, I’m sharing what we did with our sophomore (10th grade) boys basketball team this year. This includes our offense, defense, drills, plays, and so on. Brief Overview and Results For the 2015/16 season I coached the Marion sophomore boys basketball team. […]
New Article: Stupid Simple Entry that Always Works – How to Initiate Your Offense
I wrote a new article called A Stupid Simple Entry that Always Works – How to Initiate Your Offense. We recently started using this entry with our high school sophomore boys and our 3rd grade girls. It works at all levels, it’s simple, and I really like the aggressive “attack” mentality that goes along with it. […]
8 Components of Good Motion Offense
I want to share something that I “rediscovered” this season. After every game or scrimmage, ask yourself the following 8 questions about your half court offense… Do we have good spacing? Do we have good ball movement/reversals? Do we have good player movement (cuts, screens, fades, etc)? Are we getting the ball inside (via dribble […]
My Favorite Passing Drills – How to Cut Down on “Bad Passes” and Turnovers
With an inexperienced group of players this year…. bad passes and turnovers have been a problem for us. This caused me to take a long hard look at our passing drills and refine how we do things. As a result, I feel like we have made tremendous progress. Here are some of my favorite passing […]
Message to Your Players – Being Selfless and Helping Others
What’s more important than teaching life lessons and helping others? I think basketball is a great tool to teach those lessons and set a good example for players. With that in mind, I’m sharing an email I just sent to the players on our sophomore team. I have found this is a great way […]
Keeping ALL Your Players Busy in Practice and How to Handle Large Groups
This season we often find ourselves in the gym with one or two coaches and over 30 kids. This can be a real challenge and requires some creativity to stay productive. I think it’s important to keep as many of your players busy (and improving) as possible. How much can a player improve when they […]
Cutting Down Turnovers, Improving Defense, and Objectively Analyzing Your Game Results
We lost our first game of the season. It was against my old team that I coached the last couple years. So it was bitter sweet. I was happy to see the players I worked with last year play really well. But at the same time I wanted to win the game with my new […]
Day 3 – Practice Plan and Drills
NOTE: This practice plan is based on specific strategy we have developed for this team and this season. Your strategy and philosophy might be different based on age level, skill level, number of players in the gym, number of baskets available, etc. But hopefully the practice plans and drills give you some ideas. I highly […]
Day 2 – Practice Plan & Drills (Sophomores 2013/14)
Here’s our practice plan from Day 2 (10th grade boys)…. Intro Explain you have to learn 3 pivots and 3 counters on your own. Hand out pivots doc to those that need it. Review core values. Read and hand out “hard working” doc. On Ball Defense Defense lines – Stance, mirror, push step, dig, contest […]
Day 2 – Developing a “Hard Working” Team
After our first practice, it’s clear that players don’t understand what “hard working” means. I think many of them are trying. But they don’t know what it takes yet. To me, “hard working” is a skill and a value that you must teach, develop, and continually refine… So here’s what I did on our second […]