While the varsity team stands at the pinnacle of your basketball program, it is hardly the most important aspect. Those players will be leaving you soon, and a competent program cannot focus solely on the varsity level. It must be built on a solid foundation that places importance on skill development from bottom to top.
Someone significant needs to get involved in your youth program. It doesn’t always have to be the head coach, but I think that sends an initial message to everyone involved that this will be taken seriously. I know varsity coaches who have spent Friday night coaching the varsity game, sat up all night watching film, and then coached their eighth grade teams the next morning.
I also know coaches who do this for a year or so and get burned out. I completely understand that. It is also why you have to surround yourself with good parents and community members who want to be part of something bigger than themselves. If you find people that have these qualities, you can get them to teach what you need.
Find someone to be the head skills guy in your program. Maybe that’s you to start, but mold someone into that position. Great prospects are former players who already know your expectations, drills, and the skills you want to teach.
Efficient Development: Choosing What to Emphasize
Especially at the younger levels, I have come to believe that developing skills is much more about doing efficient drills and repetitions than trying to be extremely detailed. I recently read a great quote in coach Randy Brown’s newsletter the other day: “If you try to emphasize everything you won’t teach anything.” This is so true.
One of the worst mistakes you can make during a practice is wasting time running a drill for the sake of a drill. You achieve what you emphasize. You can’t achieve until you first decide what you want to emphasize.
- Decide on the skills you want emphasized.
- Design or borrow three or four drills that will develop each of these skills.
- Go to your youth team’s practice or hold skills clinics to show the players and coaches the drills you want them to do.
- Make them do these drills in practice with their teams. It’s about winning at the varsity level, not the sixth grade “National Exposure Invitational Select Championship Title”. You must lead with a vision and create something to buy into.
Here are four skills I would emphasize. Is this list absolute? Absolutely not. You have to decide what is right for you and your program, but this is a good start.
- Shooting form
- Dribbling
- Passing
- Footwork
If you noticed, I put footwork last—for now. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t work on it, but I wouldn’t place it as a point of emphasis when kids are in third to fifth grade. Yes, you do need to teach kids how to pivot off both feet under pressure. The older they get, the more I think you should emphasize it.
Achieve What You Emphasize
This goes back to “emphasizing everything and not teaching anything.” In dribbling and passing work, you can emphasize repetition and intensity without much worry on technique at this point. For younger players, it’s important to focus on skills and fundamentals that they can easily grasp and build upon as they progress.
A big advantage of this is that you can create competitions and fun games to work on ball-handling and competitiveness. After all, enjoying friendly competition is why kids start to play in the first place. When the kids enjoy the game, they are more likely to want to work hard and be good at the game they enjoy. This creates an early intrinsic motivation, which is much harder to develop at an older age.
Essentially, you need a double emphasis. First, there must be an importance placed on developing players at the youth level and making your program interdependent. Then you must decide what skills to emphasize in your teaching—and be specific. With time, these building blocks will become the foundation of your program.
–
Mike Lee Basketball Services trains thousands of middle school through NBA players across the country each year in their skill development training, camps and coaches Academies. The owner, Mike Lee, is also a former Nike Girls Skills Academy instructor and former assistant director for the Stephen Curry Skills Academy. Recently the company has authored 7 skill development DVDs and created miSkillz Online Basketball training.
–
Click here for more information on Daniel Coyle and The Talent Code