How to coach a basketball game

USA Basketball - 5 Keys to Being a Great Basketball Coach

If you want your youth basketball team to have an All-Star experience all season, there are a wide range of ideals you need to focus on to make the experience as positive as possible.

Here are five ways that you can be an All-Star basketball coach.

All-Star Qualities

• Sportsmanship - Remember basic courtesy and good manners? Use your practices and games to reinforce these basic principles. Make sure your players can give a firm handshake with eye contact to officials and opposing coaches, as well as a high five to opposing players.
• Teamwork - Teach your players that "we over me" is what most often leads to "us over them," in team sports competition. Encourage your players to be selfless and supportive teammates in both losing and winning efforts.
• Positive Attitude - Life is not fair and basketball is worse. Help your players get over it and still do what they need to do to succeed. Playing sports is one the best ways to practice overcoming adversity and preparing to handle tough times in life. Humor helps!
• Respect - Pay it forward and get it back. How a coach interacts with other adults--coaches, parents and officials--will naturally influence the behavior of your players. Be mindful that you are a role model and are always being watched. Insist that your players respect coaches, officials and opponents--like you do. Have the courage to enforce your rules with every player and parent involved with your team.

Coaching

• Philosophy - Want a surefire way to be a great youth coach? Lighten up! Here's a tip. Not one of your games will be Game 7 of the NBA Finals. Billions of people don't even know you exist, let alone feel that your practices and games are important. Recreational league and even elite travel team coaches should understand that kids want to play sports and to have FUN! Let your players figure things out. Ask questions, but don't give instruction or answers. Stop teaching so much and give your players a chance to learn. Watching them grow will be fun for you too!
• Communication - Have a team meeting to start the first practice of the season, or as soon as possible thereafter. Limit your postgame analysis to positive things that occurred in the game and deal with what went wrong by establishing a specific goal to work on starting at the next practice. Ask parents to delay or even eliminate the dreaded postgame interview with their child. When you need to correct a player, use the "compliment sandwich" State something positive the player did well, give a very specific correction, then restate the first positive thing.
• Continuing Education - All-star coaching requires continuing education. I have been privileged to learn the game of basketball from seven coaches who are in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Each one of them was always striving to learn more. In your efforts to learn, make sure the substance of the material is appropriate for the skill, age and maturity level of the players that you coach.
• Use Resources - There are several organizations that offer assistance to youth coaches. Do an online search for youth coaching information sources. Read books, watch videos and attend coaching clinics in-person whenever possible. One hour online could make you a better coach.

Practices

Play to learn, play to practice, and you will win when you play in games. Remember how much fun you had growing up when you used to just go outside and play with your friends? We advocate using the "compete to learn" approach to practice--it lets kids play and have fun while competing. This type of practice, using competitive drills, does a better job of preparing players to compete in real games. Technically, this is called transference. What you do in practice carries over into what you do in games.

• Individual Skills - Want to improve your team's ball handling? Games like dribble knockout are very popular. Every player must have his or her own basketball. Coach starts the game. Every player must dribble constantly, stay in-bounds and try to knock the ball away from all other players in the game. Lose control of your basketball or go out-of-bounds, and you're eliminated. Boundaries for 10-12 players could start as half the court. After several players are eliminated, the boundary is reduced to only inside the 3-point area. Boundary is reduced again to the free-throw lane. Finally, when there are just two players left, they play the "finals" in the free throw half circle.
• Team Concepts - Run half your offense by playing 2-on-2 or 3-on-3 restricted to one side of the floor. For example, make even (by size/ability) teams and conduct a 10-minute tournament using an action like the pick and roll. Allow for 20-second timeouts and allow players teach themselves how to make the play work.

Game Strategy

• Keep It Simple System (KISS) - Basketball is a simple game. Keep it simple! If you are a regular reader of instructional material, you might think that you need to have lots of practice drills and a complicated or intricate system to win games. No, you don't. Establish one or two alignments and three or four actions, and that's it. At the youth level or even in the NBA, most successful coaches try to have their team master a few simple things. 8-10 year olds can do this successfully. Try KISS at your next practice and even in your next game, your team will show instant improvement!
• Simple Transition Offense (Fast break/press break) - Score a lay-up in less than five seconds without dribbling.
• Simple Half-Court Offense (Ball movement/teamwork) - Everyone must catch and make a pass before anyone can shoot!
• The Best Offense Ever Designed - Give the ball to Michael Jordan and get out of the way. You can't get much more simple than that! However, that is an actual "play," as it is part of the "complicated" triangle offense. The triangle is a patterned motion offense that has several basic actions such as give and go, pick and roll and give the ball to Michael and get out of the way -- otherwise known as a clearout. By the way, that offense has won nine NBA championships and you, even as a youth recreational league coach, can run some of its actions to win games in your league.

Make All-Star Memories

The experience of playing on a youth sports team can affect a child's development as a person. How will you affect your player's communication, cooperation, goal setting and work ethic? How will your players remember this experience 10 years from now? Most won't remember the score.

If your team employs the ritual of getting together after every game for ice cream or pizza, takes a field trip to a college or pro game, or attends a movie together, your players will remember those good times long after they forget the score of the game. Parents sometimes enjoy these social events more than the kids.

How to coach youth basketball

I coached college basketball for 8 years at Claremont McKenna College in California.  http://www.cmsathletics.org/sports/mbkb/index When I left college coaching to focus on my legal career, I didn't want to stop cold turkey.  Luckily, my son Pablo had just turned 11, and his city league team needed a coach.  I was able to coach Pablo for the next two years, and he ultimately became an all-conference player at Santa Monica High, and then played JC and college ball.  Pablo continues to play today, as do I.

The ultimate goal of coaching young kids is to teach them enough about the game that they will be able to play wherever they go - whether it be for school teams, intramurals at college, city leagues, or just Saturdaymorning pick-up games.  If youth league coaches are really lucky, like I have been with Pablo, they can eventually win city league championships playing on the same team with their sons.  When Pablo was 20, he pushed the ball up court after a rebound, kicked it me on the wing, and my three-pointer went down at the buzzer - we won the championship by a point.   Pablo and I will always have that memory.

With all that in mind, these are a few of my thoughts on coaching young players.

1.       Be organized. The scourge of all coaching at every level is limited practice time.  This is doubly true with youth teams.  As a result, you must maximize the time you have with your team - which means being organized.  Spend time before practice mapping out a practice schedule.  Write down that schedule, detailed to the minute.  Be free to deviate slightly if you haven't accomplished what you wanted, but stick to the basic outline. 

Always arrive early - before practice is a great time to interface with your players.  Start practice with something fun that gets the heart pumping.    Especially with younger kids, move from one thing to another to keep their minds engaged.  Most importantly, before starting something, explain it simply but well.  Practice drills often involve rotating the players:  Have a system - we generally went offense to defense, defense off. Which means an individual player or group will play offense first, then defense, then rest.  But minimize the "rest" part - keep them moving.  Remember:  you have limited practice time.  Don't rush, but be efficient with that time.

2.       Get an assistant coach, or be one. If you have an assistant coach, or are one, split the coaching duties during practice so the two coaches are not watching the same thing.  The simplest way to do it is to have one coach be in charge of offense, while the other coaches the defense.  And switch it up so the players hear from different voices.  If you have enough space for practice, you can also have one coach work with one group on shooting, while the other coach works on ball-handling and passing - and then trade groups. 

In games, the assistant coach should be totally in charge of at least one thing.  In college, I had my assistant handle player substitutions for the first 35 minutes of the game.  It gave him authority, and freed me to focus on the rest of the game.   If you are the assistant coach, do not watch the ball during the game.  Your job is to see whether players are boxing out or hitting the offensive board, determine who is tired, and watch which players are running back on defense - or not.  You can't do that if you are ball watching all the time. 

3.       Spacing. After I stopped coaching Pablo when he went to high school, I transitioned to coaching super-daughter Alissa as she played youth soccer.  She ultimately became a very good high school player. 

Not knowing much about soccer, I was the assistant coach.  I discovered that I was pretty good at it for two reasons. 

First, I could really run a practice.  Eight years of coaching college basketball meant I had been involved in coaching about a gazillion practice drills.  As a result, I was able to conquer point one above - organizing and running a practice. 

Second, basketball and soccer are similar in the importance of spacing.   Kids' sports break down into a giant amoeba moving around the court (or field) when all the players congregate on the ball.  Watch a good basketball team play, at any level, and you will see that there at least two players, sometimes three, on the weak side of the floor.  That forces the defense away from the ball, and allows the offense to change sides of the floor with the ball. 

4.  Move the ball from side to side. In a related note, all the studies we did at Claremont showed that our offensive efficiency soared when the ball changed sides at least twice before shooting - and that is only possible if the floor is spaced properly.  The Spurs must believe the same, which is why the ball often goes from one side to the other, and then back again.  One way to do this, especially with younger players, is to designate players to run up one side of the floor or the other.  Even in college, our fast break would assign our shooting guard the right side, and the small forward the left.  

Even if you need to tape Xs on the floor (during practice), make sure to have your players spread out - and then make sure the ball goes from side to side.  That also gets everyone involved - all players want to touch the ball, which is why they instinctively gravitate towards it.  If you can teach your players they are more likely to get to touch the ball by being on the opposite side of the floor, you will have done well.

5..      Do NOT full court press all the time. Coaches love to have their junior teams full court press.  Especially against weak opponents, it leads to a bunch of steals, and easy lay-ups.  It also doesn't teach your players very much about actually playing basketball.  They never need to learn a half-court offense, since they steal the ball and get a lay-up - or give up a lay-up at the other end once they play better teams.  As a result, the players don't learn to play half-court defense either - defending the pick and roll, etc.   Remember that the goal of youth basketball is to teach the players how to play the entire game, not just how to trap and get steals.  

While you can win games with full court presses, and it is something to spend part of a practice teaching, in my opinion doing it all the time is counter-productive to the goal of youth basketball.  And good teams will chew it up.

One of the highlights of my coaching career was coaching Pablo's 12-year old all-star team against a powerhouse travelling team from Westchester.  The Westchester had several future Division 1 and NBA players on it, and had crushed all the other teams with their full court press, averaging about 100 points per game.  After we consistently broke their press for lay-ups, they called it off.  While they had averaged almost 100 points per game before that, we held them to 50.  My guys knew how to play basketball.

6.       Don't teach them plays, teach them how to play. Before one of my city league games, I arrived early and observed a young coach working with his team of 14 year olds.   They were running 5 on 0 in-bounds plays from the side court.  He had four different side-bound plays, and they ran them over and over again.  In my eight years of coaching, we had one play for taking the ball out on the side court.  It worked just fine.  That young coach should have spent the valuable time working with his players on shooting, passing, setting screens, helping on defense, and contesting shots without fouling.  Those skills will last forever - his four side-bound plays will be forgotten.

This is not to say that you should have zero plays, except with the very young players.  You should have one simple play out-of-bounds under the basket, and perhaps one or two out of the half-court set.  Learning how to execute a play is part of the skill set players will need growing up.  Just don't waste too much precious practice time learning plays at the expense of learning how to play.

7.       Play man-to-man defense, not zone. For the same reasons as in the previous section, play man-to-man if your league allows it.   Players who learn to play man-to-man can easily later learn to play in a zone.  The converse is not true.

Also, playing man-to-man allows the chance to teach your players both to cover their own man, and to get into help position when their man doesn't have the ball.  An expression I found helpful to teach younger players off the ball the concept of helping on defense:  "Get ready to help". 

Surprisingly, I found players more receptive to playing good team defense in a man-to-man alignment than in a zone, where they are taught to defend an area, not the other team.  And since the goal is to stop the other team from scoring, whoever actually puts the ball in the basket, players must learn team concepts on defense as early and as often as possible.

8.       Coach - don't referee. Every moment you spend arguing with the referees is a moment you are not coaching.  You are also teaching your young players that losses can be blamed on others.   In youth basketball, the referees are often doing it as a way to stay connected to the game - let them enjoy doing that. 

One simple way is have good interactions with the referees is easy:  Learn their names.  Nothing is less effective in communicating with an official than calling him "Ref".  And using their name helps remind you that "Jim" or "Steve" is an actual person, not just a referee.  Watch Pop on the sidelines - 90% of the time, he is having a conversation with the officials, because he knows them.

9..  Have fun. By your own example, teach your young players that basketball is fun.  Put another way, avoid being one those coaches who suck all the fun out of the game.  If you are deadly serious while coaching, your young players will find it difficult to have fun.  Conversely, if you have fun while coaching, your players will too.   Coach like you like doing it.

Let everybody play, and let everybody start a game every once in a while.   Above all, stay positive - it is only a game.  At least it is until it also becomes a business, but that can wait.

Play and practice | Basketball for children