New Ideas

I'm looking for web sites or clinic notes to get some new ideas for the blog. If you have any to share please contact me. Might be a small change to a drill that I already know about that I can use this season or put up on here.

Question to ask yourself
What are three things you are focusing on now to make your practices better for the upcoming season?

bmoore@plano88.org

Full Court 4 Corner Shooting

Great drill for shooting on the move. While we don't like to shoot a lot of jump shots off the fast break we do want our players practicing shooting at a fast pace. Too many shooting drills are too slow. We want our guys to practice at a pace as fast if not faster than they will in a game. This is one of several full court shooting drills we do. Most practices consist of at least one of these with time on the clock and a goal for how many points we will score in that time.

http://www.box.net/shared/o5ui242km3

Sorry if the print is hard to read. Fast Draw just updated their software and I'm having a couple of issues.

Florida Post Development Drills

I have been focusing on player development drills for the past couple of weeks. Here are some drills that I have found from Billy Donovan that are great for your post break down time in practice. Drills can be done with a partner or coach being the passer. All of the drills are pretty simple. If you have two post players that can work together I would suggest looking at all of the Info you can find from Coach Donovan. His post drills and plays were pretty good from their national title run.

http://www.box.net/shared/zi6fejstm7

Fast Break Post Finishing Drill

We use this drill to start our post break down work. We want our post players to get a good feel of how to finish at a fast pace when they are running rim to rim. Only takes a couple of minutes, and our players like this one quite a bit.

http://www.box.net/shared/9o2qhzdi0b

3 Shooting Development Drills

Here are three shooting drills that can be done at any level.

http://www.box.net/shared/9fkfkzhhfc

Fall workouts are almost here. Do your players know drills that they can do on their own to get better. Or do your players come in and go 5 on 5.

Thad Matta Player Development

Ohio State does 45mins of skill work everyday all year

Likes to study other teams and takes the best drills from each

Put’s pressure on players by using clock in practice, they have to make so many shots before time expires.

Good shot is a shot his guys can make 70% of the time with no one guarding

Cycles drink breaks half team gets a drink while half the team does a skill development drill

Full court 3’s working on footwork and squaring up

Pat Sullivan Coaching Notes

I have gone to several of Coach Sullivan's clinics in the past couple of years. He was the coach at St. Francis in Joliet IL before retiring this year. Great teacher and put on really great clinics every year at the beginning of the season. At each of his clinics he handed out a 50 page or so notebook full of notes from an area that he had studied that summer. 1 year before retiring he had spent an entire summer working with coaches from across the country on mastering the ball screen offense. I would have to figure that a lot of coaches in his position probably had given up on learning but not Coach Sullivan.

Here are some ideas from his notes at a Nike Clinic that I thought were pretty interesting.

Pat Sullivan
It’s not what you coach it’s what you emphasize
- I have read a lot of great coaching notes and almost every one of them talks about emphasizing three things. They feel that anyone should be able to watch you practice or play a couple of times and be able to notice these without having to be told. Some simple questions that I think are very important for all coaches. 1 What are the 3 main things that you focus on? 2. Do your players know what these things are? 3. Do these things fit your team this year? 4. What are you doing to make yourself better at coaching the things you focus on?

Remember that the best coaches of all time have all done different things
- I went to the Nike Clinic in WI this spring and watched each presenter. And all of these great coaches had different areas of focus, and each of them taught things differently. There were great coaches from HS and College talking about their ways of doing things. 1 coach talked about denying all wing passes and the success he had with that. The next coach who had a ton of success with his program had a completely different style. I personally think you can have success with any style if it fits your team. We have all coached against teams that do something different from everyone else that makes us spend 20-30 mins of practice working on this. I always like to ask my assistants what do you think teams are doing to prepare for us.

Has 1 minute drills for repetition sake
- I just found this idea last night and started thinking what type of drills I could do in 1 minute and when would I do them. Coach Sullivan talks about repetition being the key to learning. Just think how much you could improve 1 simple skill that you anticipate your team struggling with if you spent 1 minute on it each day. One time where I think we are going to add this idea is with our drink breaks. In the past we put 5 minutes on the clock kids had this time to get a drink and come back into the gym and shoot free throws. I bet the average kid got in 8 free throws in this time. I mainly used it to re group and talk to my assistants. Maybe we could use this time better by breaking them into 2 groups. While the first group gets a drink the other group works on a skill. The first skill that comes to mind for us is catch rip and square. My idea is to have each player grab a ball spin the ball out and work on whatever skill we give them. Rip and create space, rip and jab step, rip and reverse pass. If they get in 15 square ups in this minute and we do this at every practice we have the thousands of attempts it takes to master a skill. Also might look at doing this when we have to set up for a drill or we have a break for some reason.

Believes that 65% of turnovers come from poor balance
- What do you do to work on balance during practice? What drills can you do to work on this and cut down on turnovers?

Simple Guard Development Drills

Going to try to focus on player development drills as we are getting closer to basketball season. These are drills that could easily be performed in practice or during off season workouts.

During any shooting drills I think it's very important to challenge your players. Have them try to beat a personal best score or find another way for them to compete.

Shooting drills and player development doesn't have to be the worlds greatest drill for it to have the desired affect. Maybe just maybe you will even find players doing some of these drills on their own because they are all very easy perform.

http://www.box.net/shared/2hi204m3jv

Knight Notes

Bob Knight
Start practice with quick drills that focus on hand eye coordination
Drills that work on individual skill go no longer than 5 minutes
Team drills shouldn’t go longer than 10 minutes
Hates having guys shoot on their own
Most of the game is elementary
Spend more time on conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense
Call timeouts in practice and work on situational stuff coming out of a timeout

My favorite Coach Knight Quote of all time when he was watching Memphis run their dribble drive offense for the first time.
“This is the dumbest shit I have ever seen in my life, but I like it.”

Theory of 2

Kevin Eastman
Theory of “2”
o Coach can show any skill in 2 minutes
o 2 weeks before player is comfortable with the skill (working every day)
o 2 months before player is ready to use skill in competition (working every day)

Post Entry Pass Drill

I was just talking to one of my mentors in coaching the other day and started thinking about some of the things that I have learned. His basic advice to me before our first practice was don't worry about doing new things at first do what you are comfortable with. This was some great advice especially since I had learned a lot of great things from great coaches. As my comfort level grew I started trying new drills and adapting old drills. One year I only had 9 players which might explain why I have quite a few drills that go 3 on 3 or 4 on 4. Here is one of my favorite drills that I experimented with and have had quite a bit of success with. It might not work for everyone but I have had quite a bit of success with it.

http://www.box.net/shared/9qea75hhxu

Bill Self Quote

Much easier to guard than to score that’s why we work on offense so much

Single Post Shell Drill

I have put quite a few variations of the shell drill up on here so far. This is one that we use because we feel it does a great job of simulating game action. Instead of using 4 perimeter players we use 3 and have 1 post player. Usually bring this one out when we know we are going to have to help our post defenders. Most important parts of the drill are ball pressure, positioning, and rotations.

http://www.box.net/shared/tfch6u50jc

Keep the comments and suggestions coming in. I have had some really good emails from coaches that have gave me some new ideas through their questions.

bmoore@plano88.org

Shooting Development Drill

Another great Kevin Eastman shooting drill

As I have said earlier we want our guys to have structure anytime they are shooting in the gym. It doesn't have to be the worlds greatest drill to have a little bit of structure. This drill can also give players some scores to compete against and we feel that this will be a big help to our team. If my guys have a score of their own or a team high to try to beat they will spend time putting up shots.

If we use this drill in practice we will move the number of makes down to 5 from each spot to get through the drill a little bit faster.

http://www.box.net/shared/dzs1jg5ahu

Consecutive Shooting

Great Kevin Eastman Drill that can be done in practice or in your off season workouts. I also think this would be a great drill for a Pre game shoot around. I am never a big fan of just letting kids shoot on their own because it's usually a waste of time. I also will use it after practice sometimes to get the kids to stay and shoot for a while. Kids usually like the challenge and next thing you know you have guys staying for 30 minutes trying to beat a record.

http://www.box.net/shared/ondrdxx4bb

Transition Drill

Here is a simple adaptation to an old 3 lane transition drill. We want to play the game at a very fast pace and often find ourselves trying to finish a layup with a man coming hard from behind for a block. We do spend time working on 2 on 1 and 3 on 2 situations but this is a drill that we do from time to time. One thing that I will have to say about this drill is that to me it doesn't make very much sense if you have 3 guys going up and down the court while 12 are watching. If we are doing this drill we break up into two groups. I would suggest that even if you don't have an assistant coach to assign a group too find something such as ball handling or free throws that you can have the rest of your team doing.

http://www.box.net/shared/ttxvsr2hln

11 Man Continuation

Great drill that has been around for a long time. I've seen this used as a warmup drill quite a bit by various coaches. I like that keeps quite a few people involved while working on odd man situations. There are quite a few adaptations you can make to this drill to make it competitive. I've seen some coaches add a trailer defender once the ball crosses half court. Some have kept track of turnovers for running at the end. The thing I like most about this drill is that kids seem to love it and it can be a good break for them during a long season.

http://www.box.net/shared/j5zb0h7hn5

Arizona Basketball Newsletter

For those of you who are not signed up already I would highly recommend signing up for Sean Miller's basketball newsletter. He has been doing this newsletter for a number of years now and always puts out some good plays and practice ideas.

Here is the email link to get signed up for the newsletter

feld@arizona.edu