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Coaching Youth Basketball – What We Did With Our 3rd Grade Team and Ideas that Might Help You

March 7, 2014 by Jeff Haefner 46 Comments

I wanted to share the results from our 3rd grade basketball season and some ideas that might help you and your team. I hope in some way this gives you ideas and helps you with your youth teams and making a positive impact on them. Our First 5 on 5 Tournament Experience I’ll start with […]

Filed Under: 3rd Grade Basketball, Strategy

NEW Link – The Pink Elephant Concept Will Help You Improve Players Performance

February 23, 2014 by Jeff Haefner Leave a Comment

Here’s a great article that someone shared on our forum.  It’s about getting your players to respond to you and perform better.  It’s really easy to fall in the “pink elephant” trap and frankly I think most coaches make this mistake.  I know I do. This article makes some excellent points that I am going to […]

Filed Under: Practice Strategy

Message to Your Players – Being Selfless and Helping Others

December 21, 2013 by Jeff Haefner 1 Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: 10th Grade (Sophomore) Basketball, Positive Impact

Decision-Training Style of Coaching. Is This a Better Method?

December 20, 2013 by Jeff Haefner Leave a Comment

Brian McCormick makes good points about asking questions and using decision based teaching.  I’m trying to do a better job on this area.  It takes practice.  I guess us coaches still have to practice too! Use a decision-training style of coaching, meaning that I ask a lot of questions to help the players learn. Coaches […]

Filed Under: Strategy

Keeping ALL Your Players Busy in Practice and How to Handle Large Groups

December 19, 2013 by Jeff Haefner Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: 10th Grade (Sophomore) Basketball, Drills, Practice Strategy

Cutting Down Turnovers, Improving Defense, and Objectively Analyzing Your Game Results

December 6, 2013 by Jeff Haefner 18 Comments

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 […]

Filed Under: 10th Grade (Sophomore) Basketball, Drills, Practice Strategy, Stats

Sweet Basketball Coaching App – One of My Favorites to Improve Shooting

November 25, 2013 by Jeff Haefner Leave a Comment

Coaches Eye is a pretty sweet app that I use to analyze players shots.  It’s great because I can record their shot with my ipad or iphone, and then a few seconds later show them in slow motion what they are doing. Almost every single time… the player looks at the slow motion video with […]

Filed Under: Coaching, Tools

10 Ways to Keep Injured Players Busy and Productive During Practice

November 22, 2013 by Jeff Haefner Leave a Comment

As coaches, we all at some point have players attending practice but can’t participate in regular drills because they’re injured. Of course, it depends on nature of the injury, but you should almost always be able to come up with ways for players to work on their game and improve their skills during practice. The […]

Filed Under: Practice Strategy

Day 2 – Developing a “Hard Working” Team

November 20, 2013 by Jeff Haefner Leave a Comment

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 […]

Filed Under: 10th Grade (Sophomore) Basketball, Motivation

“Where Do Rebounds Go?” This is a must read for ALL coaches.

November 17, 2013 by Jeff Haefner Leave a Comment

Here’s an awesome article called “Where Do Rebounds Go?“.  This is a must read for ALL coaches. http://courtvisionanalytics.com/where-do-rebounds-go/ It’s really interesting because a Geographic Analyst (no idea what that means but it must mean he’s smart) plotted and analyzed the rebounding locations for over 26,000 missed shots. His analysis and diagrams of the results are […]

Filed Under: Strategy

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About Me

I’m a basketball coach, skill development trainer, and Co-Owner of Breakthrough Basketball. I currently live in Marion, Iowa with my wife, two kids, and our golden retriever (Izzy).

Right now I am coaching two teams. I will be coaching... Read More...

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Most Popular Articles

  • 15 Basketball Tryout Drills for Efficiently Evaluating Players
  • Dynamic Warm Up For Basketball – Strength, Athleticism, and Injury Prevention
  • What We Did With Our 4th Grade Youth Basketball Team – Offense, Defense, Skills and More…
  • Trying New Drills – No Dribble is Still One of the Best
  • Coaching Youth Basketball – What We Did With Our 3rd Grade Team and Ideas that Might Help You
  • What We Did With Our 5th Grade Girls Team – Offense, Defense, Drills and Plays

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