This is my first official week of basketball practices — this week I have practices with 4th grade boys, 6th grade girls, and high school varsity boys… That’s a wide range of ages! Yet I teach them all our transition offense the exact same way. I start teaching our 4th graders the same way I […]
How to Be a Better Teammate – Use Steve Nash Example to Improve Your Teams Chemistry and Bring Positive Energy
Here’s an email I sent to our 6th grade girls team. The players have really taken to it and our practices have improved — better chemistry, relationships, and a positive energy. Feel free to copy and tweak this email for your own team… Subject: For Tigers Players. Steve Nash high fives. Please pass on. For Tigers […]
Dynamic Warm Up For Basketball – Strength, Athleticism, and Injury Prevention
Here’s what we use for a dynamic warm up before basketball practice. I’m not a doctor or a certified trainer. I’m just a coach that has borrowed ideas from other experts and put together a plan that I like and that makes sense to me. So keep that in mind as you read. I’m just […]
15 Basketball Tryout Drills for Efficiently Evaluating Players
When conducting tryouts, you want drills that allow you to efficiently evaluate players. The key word here is “efficiently”. You only have so much time in tryouts to evaluate players. So you want to make good use of your time! Tryout drills should be fairly simple yet similar to what you normally do in practice. If […]
11 Practice Requirements for Youth Basketball Coaches
For our 6th grade (to be) girls basketball team, we had a lot of players wanting to join so we decided to create two teams. Both teams will run the same offense, defense, etc… but we’ll practice separate. Since I don’t have enough time to coach both teams I have recruited a couple coaches […]
What We Did With Our 5th Grade Girls Team – Offense, Defense, Drills and Plays
Here’s what we did with our 5th grade girls’ team this year. It’s surprisingly similar to how we coached our 10th grade boys team and our 3rd grade boys team this year. Basketball is basketball. No matter the gender or age level… you shoot, dribble, pass and pivot. I keep things pretty simple and focus on player development. So I […]
What We Did With Our 3rd Grade Boys Team – Offense, Defense, Drills, Plays
Here’s what we did with our 3rd grade boys’ team this year. You might be surprised that it’s very similar to how we coached our 10th grade team. Overview and Results For the sake of transparency, I’ll start by admitting our 3rd grade team is stacked. Due to some luck and unique circumstances, we have a […]
What We Did With Our Sophomore Boys Basketball Team – Offense, Defense, Drills, Plays
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. […]
Why Coaching from Stands Causes Confusion – And How to Stop Parents From Doing It
If you have parents that shout instructions to their kids from the stands, you probably already know that can be problematic. Nothing worse than a kid continually looking at their parents for approval during a game (instead of the coach) and often times the parent yelling instructions that contradict what you want. Not to mention it […]
How We Came Up With Our Team Core Values This Season
We tried something different this year. We let the players come up with the core values and character values that we want to emphasis this year. Here’s how we came up with them… First we had a meeting to brainstorm ideas. BTW, this was our 10th grade boys team. Players came up with ideas and […]