How to run a basketball clinic

How to Run an Effective Basketball Camp

By Don Kelbick

I have run hundreds of basketball camps. Some camps were as large as 700 players per week for several weeks and others as small as 1 week with 20 players. There are common threads that run through all of them. I am not an expert on the finances or marketing of camps, though. So, I'll stick to the administration of the camp...

The Type of Camp Affects Your Decisions

First and foremost, you have to decide what type of camp you want to have. This philosophy will affect every decision you make, from staffing to schedule to equipment. Teaching camps require more staff because it is to your advantage to have a smaller staff to camper ratio. If you are going to have a camp that is primarily "play", you only need 1 coach per team.

Creating an Effective Schedule

Next, you need to organize your schedule. You must plan your activities that not only match your philosophy, but provide enough variation to keep your campers interested and eager to come back.

We used to use activity blocks, as opposed to times. Our blocks would be instruction, competition, scrimmage, choice and games.

Our instruction block would be when we had coaches in front of the players teaching and the players drilling.

Competition would be for practical application of the teaching. They might be shooting or ball handling games or other activities where players had to enact what they were taught in a higher intensity environment.

The scrimmage block would be for team integration of the skills. We would use a 3-on-3 league, control scrimmage (where coaches would stop, teach and correct in a scrimmage type activity) or team practice.

Choice would be where we would have several activities being conducted and the players could choose which one they would want to take part in.

Games would be where we played our 5-on-5 league games.

Then, all we had to do is decide which activities we wanted to conduct inside the blocks and place those blocks in the daily schedule.

How long are the blocks and where do you put them?

How long the blocks are depends on your available time and the number of campers you have. I typically would like to have 2 instruction blocks, 2 game blocks and then one of each of the other blocks per day. By changing the activities inside the blocks, it created an interesting but very organized camp day.

Administration of Activities (Important to Get Right)

The administration of your activities is extremely important. This needs to be flexible and responsive to the participants in your camp. You might like to structure your teaching a certain way, but if the players in the camp cannot respond to your method, you have to look at your method.

Often, the manner in which you teach your team won′t fit the teaching necessary in a camp. This is because you will find a larger variation in skill level, maturity and concentration level in a camp. On your team, you have consistent reinforcement for your teaching, which allows you to progress. In a camp situation this might not be true.

You also have to structure your game rules to you campers. How long are the games, will the clock stop or run, do you shoot foul shots? What are your substitution rules, how many players on a team? There may be rules you like to play by because you feel that they are the best way to play for you. But, often you have time constraints that will prevent you from playing in the matter you like.

Remember, this is camp; everyone pays to come so they should all have equal experiences. You might like to have 8 on a team, but if that creates more games than you have time for, you might have to go to 10 on a team.

Adjust Game Rules to Improve Efficiency

You might like to administer your games as if they are regular season games. But, you may have to play with a running clock. Do you want your campers to spend a significant percentage of the games shooting foul shots while the clock is running? Remember, that lessens the actual time that the campers get to play.

The rules we always played by were, the only foul shots that were taken while the clock was running were shooting fouls. All non-shooting fouls were inbounded. In a situation where there was a shooing foul and the shot was made creating an opportunity for a 3-point play, we awarded 3 points and treated it as a made basket where the other team takes the ball out. With the clock stopped, we shot everything.

These are all issues that need to be solved before the first camper walks into the gym. To conduct an effective, high quality camp that can be enjoyed by all, you need to be prepared and focused on the goals of the camp. Be flexible, but be clear. Confusion is a camp killer.

Find a Basketball Camp Near You

Breakthrough Basketball offers a number of camps across the country. Check out this camp map to find the camp closest to you.

What do you think? Let us know by leaving your comments, suggestions, and questions. ..

How to put on a summer basketball camp

Your resource for building powerful sports programs

May 15, 2018 • Features • From the Bench • Winning Hoops

by Don Kloth, contributing writer

When I became a head varsity coach, I strongly believed it was essential to organize and run a youth summer basketball camp at the high school. Prior to this time, there was not an organized youth basketball camp in the community.

I was 40 years old at the time, and I planned to be a head coach in that community for years to come. I believed an organized youth basketball camp program would pay tremendous dividends in the future years. It will always take a few years when you start something new to get it exactly the way you want it be, so it’s critical to be patient, work hard, stay organized, and have good instructors working your camp. In all likelihood, there will be some trial and error before you’re totally satisfied with what you’ve created.

When I started, these are some of the questions I had to consider:

• How many weeks should I run the camp?
• When is the best time to run it?
• How many hours each day should it be?
• What facilities will I use?
• What will be the cost per camper?
• Who will be the instructors/coaches?
• How much should the instructors be paid?
• What will be the camp’s format
• How do I advertise the camp?
• Will the basketball program make or lose money?
• What’s the real purpose of the camp?

Here’s a breakdown of each question and what I learned along the way.

After about three years of running the camp, we decided to run it just one week.

I know that some youth camps run two or three weeks, and there’s nothing wrong with that. My coaching staff thought that if we scheduled the camp early enough, and parents knew what week it would be, they could more easily work it into their summer plans. What we found is that many parents would actually plan their vacation around our camp. As a result, we always seemed to have good attendance.

I was fortunate to have been the first coach that ran an organized camp at the high school and, as a result, I usually had my pick of when I wanted to hold it.

There were three junior highs and nine grade schools that sent students to our high school, so I checked their school calendars to find their last days. I also would check with my coaches about their availability, and I would then decide what week to run the camp. Usually, it would be either the second or third week of June. It’s important to do your best to avoid holidays.

After a few years, we decided to run the camp Monday through Thursday. We discovered that if we ran it on Friday, attendance declined significantly since families left town on a long weekend.

Grades four through seven went from 9 to 11:30 a.m., and grades eight and nine went from 12:30 to 3 p.m. Some might think that two-and-a-half hours is too much for grade-schoolers, but it was never an issue. Having the eighth and ninth graders during the early afternoon worked extremely well and gave us plenty of time to cover many areas of the game that we felt they needed to be exposed to.

We were fortunate to have outstanding camp facilities at the high school. During the morning sessions, we had a field house that had two full-sized courts side by side, and each court had six baskets — it was a perfect camp facility.

For the afternoon sessions, we had use of our main gym right across the hallway from the field house. I have worked camps were facilities were not adequate for the number of campers present, and this is a factor you must consider for your own event.

We kept the cost of the camp as low as possible. I was not interested in making money for myself. In fact, I never paid myself a penny.

What I wanted was to make our attendance as high as possible. My goal was to have an outstanding basketball program at the school, and that meant reaching the highest number of kids. The community was a low- to middle-income area, so it was critical that I didn’t price them out of the camp. Learn about the makeup of your own community before setting a price.

I typically had a staff of five coaches, including myself. Most years, I was fortunate enough to have three coaches work the camp who were on my staff at the high school, plus one capable junior high coach. I paid the coaches as much as I could, because the overall quality of a camp is determined by the staff that’s working it.

When it comes to the format, that varies greatly based on the philosophy of the head varsity coach. The fundamentals taught and the drills used should be relatively similar throughout the program.

For our fourth- to seventh-graders, we set up stations where they worked on shooting fundamentals (jump shot, layups), dribbling skills, passing and catching, perimeter skills, post skills, rebounding, and defense. We then did some full-court group work (passing, catching, dribbling, fast break) before transitioning to half-court games of 3-on-3 and 4-on-4. We would finish with full-court games.

We invited and encouraged parents of campers to arrive with 15 minutes left in the camp. We did this so we could tell them and show them the drills that we completed that day in camp. We received a lot of great feedback from parents on this.

During the afternoon session with eighth- and ninth-graders, we basically ran a typical high school practice. We started with offensive improvement — shooting, ball handling, passing and catching, post and perimeter work, free-throw shooting. We then did fast-break drills, rebounding drills and man-to-man defensive drills. We followed with half-court games and the basic offense of our program against man-to-man defense. We finished with full-court scrimmages.

If you’re going to run a basketball camp, it’s extremely important to have multiple ways to advertise or disseminate information to prospective campers.

I was able to get an announcement in both of our local newspapers starting in early April, and I asked them to run it as often as they could. I would run off about 1,000 brochures and drop some off at the junior highs and grade schools in the area. I would take others and drop them off at the park district. The announcement in the newspaper would mention that the brochures were at the schools and the park district. Interested campers also could contact me, and I would mail a brochure.

Once we had run the camp for a few years, I would mail a couple brochures to campers who attended during previous summers. I also contacted the local AAU programs to get names and addresses of potential campers. It was a lot of work, but it’s essential if want to get the attendance that you desire.

We never lost money on the camp; most years, we broke even. Each camper left with a basketball camp T-shirt, a camp basketball and a packet of drills they could work on during the offseason for individual improvement.

Here’s a shortlist of reasons for why we created a summer youth basketball camp:

• Create interest in the basketball program.
• Provide quality instruction on basic basketball fundamentals.
• Introduce the philosophy of our basketball program to campers and community.
• Have players come in contact with the high school basketball staff.
• Demonstrate to players, parents and the community that the staff is dedicated and willing to put in the work needed to have a quality program.
• Introduce eighth- and ninth-graders to our offensive and defensive systems.
• Create a positive learning experience for the campers.

Before you start running a summer basketball camp, make sure you put in the necessary thought and preparation about what you want to accomplish. I know that each school, program and community is unique, but hopefully some of the ideas help you get off to a fast start.

Don Kloth is the sophomore basketball coach at Warren Township High School (Illinois) and is the all-time winningest varsity coach at Lake County High School (Illinois).

basketball, summer camp

Basket Hall - PBK Lokomotiv-Kuban - the official website of the professional basketball club

About the arena

The home arena of the professional basketball club Lokomotiv-Kuban was opened in 2011. For Krasnodar, the appearance of a basketball palace of this level was a real event. Practically in the first days of work, the Basket Hall was completely filled, and this happened at the home match of Loko in January 2012. The Krasnodar basketball arena just a year later became a real landmark of the city and the region. Basket Hall is not only the home ground of Loko, now it is a modern sports complex for holding competitions in team sports at the highest level.

The central hall, where all Loko basketball matches take place, can accommodate 7,500 people. Comfortable conditions have been created here for creating a truly powerful sports show. Special sound equipment PSSO is installed along the perimeter of the hall, and high-quality lighting can enhance the effect of a bright spectacle and create an excellent picture for television broadcasting. Basket Hall is especially proud of its HARO parquet, which meets NBA standards. Since the 2011/12 season, in order to make the basketball festival a truly unforgettable event, a new large Mondo screen has been installed in the central hall.

The Basket Hall has all the conditions for the work and development of athletes: on the second floor there is a training hall with sliding stands for 500 seats, as well as a set of exercise equipment, showers, comfortable locker rooms that meet the high requirements of professional sports.

Even now, when all the most basic things have been done, the improvement of conditions continues. Parking has been expanded, fan shops are open for fans, and work is underway to create additional food outlets.

In the summer of 2016 Basket Hall underwent a restyling. The interior of the arena was changed from white to dark gray.

On September 17 of the same year Basket Hall hosted the Basketball Day dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the professional basketball club Lokomotiv-Kuban and the first ever match of the Russian team in Krasnodar. The program of the basketball festival also included many events that preceded the meeting of the national team with the Swedish national team.

Since the 18/19 season, in order to make the basketball festival a truly unforgettable event, a media cube has been installed in the central hall of the arena.

Panorama of the arena

For your convenience, we have made a panorama of the Basket Hall arena so that you can assess the visibility from the sector you have chosen before buying tickets.

How to get there?

Transport: The basketball arena can be reached by buses of small and medium capacity on the following routes:

No. Prigorodnaya (settlement Severny).

No. 29A - TsKR (Kalinina st.) - st. Medium

No. 32 - Anniversary MKR - st. 3rd Labor

No. 38 - Anniversary MKR - st. Ekaterinodarskaya

No. 67 - Cooperative market - st. 9th Silent

No. 106A - Cooperative market - pos. SKZNIISIV (Vodnikov)

No. 163A - Polyclinic (Atarbekov St.) - 16 km of Rostov Highway

No. 182A - CCR (Kalinina St.) - pos. SKZNIISIV (Vodnikov)

Stop: Audi Center.

Scheme of parking spaces of the Basket Hall and its environs

Address of the sports complex "Basket Hall": Krasnodar, st. Prigorodnaya, 24

NBA learns to take psychological problems seriously

Every athlete, at least once in his life, felt it. It could be fluttering in the stomach. This may be a slight weakness in the legs. This may be a feeling of pressure in the chest. You are trying to ignore it. You try to block all these sensations, but they are there, they are inside you and they do not disappear anywhere. It's not a heart attack, but it may seem like it. It's not food poisoning either, although you're likely to be turned inside out anyway. It's all different, it's tension gripping your muscles and your mind, it's one thing and one thing only - pressure. Some guys can handle it and some can't.

It all started with an unexpected tweet. On Feb. 17, DeMar DeRozan, Toronto Raptors star guard, took to Twitter and tweeted, "This depression is consuming me...".

There was a time, not too long ago, when an NBA player confessing to emotional or behavioral problems - even on twitter just by quoting a song - could be met with disdainful comments about masculinity. Instead, today, DeRozan's confession was received positively by most. Numerous other League players and NBA fans have expressed their support for him. A week later, DeRozan gave an interview to the Canadian newspaper Toronto Star and revealed even more to the world. He said that his battles with depression and anxiety began as a child, and depression always struck when he least expected it.

“It's one of those things... you may look indestructible, but you're still human. We all have feelings. Sometimes they take over, absorb you, ”DeMar shared his experiences.

On March 6, Cleveland Cavaliers player Kevin Love detailed the panic attacks he experienced this season in a first-person article published by The Players' Tribune. Kevin cited DeRozan's willingness to talk about his emotional issues as one of his main motivations for writing this piece. Love decided to follow suit and do the same. The dominoes continued to fall the next day, when Washington Wizards player Kelly Ubre Jr. appeared on the NBC Sports podcast to reveal that he, too, has been prone to bouts of anxiety and depression throughout his life.

"People who look at us from the other side of the screens don't understand what we're going through because they see us as superheroes, but we're normal people, man," Ubre said. "We're going through emotional issues that normal people don't."

The NBA is a league of superhumans and the audience wants to see superheroes with a basketball in their hands. If you want to make a living playing basketball, you have to conform to a certain image, such is the unwritten truth of the NBA. Because of this, the players of the League have a fear of being convicted of mental weakness and lack of masculinity. This fear causes all the guys in the League to hide their emotional problems inside themselves for most of their lives.

That professional athletes are prone to depression, panic attacks and anxiety should come as no surprise. According to the US National Institutes of Health, about 45 million Americans, or 18.3% of all US adults, struggle with some form of mental health problem. And research has shown that when it comes to depression, athletes may be at greater risk than the average person.

But the way the general public reacted to the revelations of DeRozan, Lava and Ubre was a watershed moment in understanding professional athletes and the stress they go through, not only physically but also mentally. The courage shown by DeRozan, Love, and Ubre led the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association to announce that they were going to create and fund an independent program specifically focused on supporting the mental health of basketball players.

The importance of this event should not be underestimated. The scars surrounding mental health problems and illnesses are unfortunately becoming more and more widespread in society. In sports, pressure, and with it emotional difficulties, reach a disproportionately higher level. And all of these issues are directly fueled by the toxic notions of masculinity and machismo that are often instilled and propagated in sports culture, starting with children's programs.

"For me, it was a form of weakness that could hinder my athletic success or make me look weird or different," Love wrote. But in the 2017-18 season, he suffered a panic attack in the middle of a game against Atlanta and he couldn't finish the game. With shortness of breath and an inability to focus, feeling like his heart was about to burst out of his chest, Kevin got really worried and took the problem seriously.

Love was sent to the nearest Cleveland clinic straight from the Cavaliers bench. After undergoing a series of medical tests, none of which could detect any physical problems, Kevin, at the urging of the Caves, began working with a psychotherapist. And it was not an easy decision for Love, because he wanted to keep a secret about his illness.

Why? "I didn't want people to see me as a less reliable teammate and it all brought me back to the strategy I learned as a kid," Love said.

Kevin's strategy was: "Be strong, don't talk about your feelings, get over it on your own." This instruction, like many other principles and values, is instilled in each of us from early childhood. Our parents and mentors drill whole mines in the minds of their children, students, so that in any situation these tips remain clear and doable. As Ubre said, "When I was growing up, my father always told me, 'Don't let anyone see your weaknesses.' No one has seen me depressed, but inside I go through a lot. There's a real hell going on."

Jackson Katz, gender-based violence prevention expert who works with athletes and military personnel and is the author of The Macho Paradox. He was one of the first prominent American figures to note the importance of statements about the mental problems of famous athletes.

“Athletes are people who are seen by many as an example of male achievement and success, and therefore their recognition that they are human and they are vulnerable is a courageous act and a very useful thing for the culture as a whole,” Katz said. Because of the social platforms that NBA stars have and because they live in the spotlight, because of all this, their words have the power to begin to change some of the ancient preconceptions about masculinity, in particular that masculinity and invulnerability are inextricably linked and are synonyms.

"I say that the concept of masculinity is distorted because it's absurd how we perceive this concept, in the traditional sense," continued Katz. - We equate masculinity and invulnerability. But there is no such thing as invulnerability in principle. This is absurd. It's a fantasy... the idea that true courage means pretending you're not vulnerable is essentially absurd."

But there are reasons why Love and Ubre previously embraced Katz's type of "traditional" masculinity. And chief among these reasons was the fear that their admission that they were in a state of clinical depression or anxiety would be seen as a sign of weakness and a sign of personal failure. You don't have to delve far into the NBA's past to find examples of players whose mental health issues have been met with derision. And examples of teams of these players who either could not or did not want to help such a player improve their psychological state.

One of the most notable examples of this situation is Royce White, who was selected 16th overall by the Houston Rockets in the 2012 draft even though he was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. White spent much of his first season in the NBA battling with the Rockets' doctors over their medical prescriptions, preferring to stick to his own doctors' advice. After Royce missed several pre-season games due to mental issues and also expressed a wish not to fly with the team to away games because flying gave him panic attacks, White released a statement in which he claimed that his openness about the problems mental health only exacerbated the rifts between him and the team.

Despite all of Royce White's claims, the Houston Rockets believed that he was nothing more than a simulator and used their arguments to distance themselves from the player as much as possible, citing his inability to adapt to the schedule and pressures of the NBA.

“The information that the Rockets use to tell the public about the current situation contains many omissions and frankly untrue facts. The representatives of Houston support me in the eyes of the public, but the only help I need will be medical help. Here I have no opportunity to use it at all. I decided not to play in the Development League because my personal doctor and I think it's not safe for me. In general, the Rockets front office is simply incompetent in making such decisions, because the club does not have a decent psychologist, ”White said.

Royce was still sent to the NBA Development League. He was also briefly listed in Philadelphia and Sacramento. And already in 2014, White was branded by all the teams of the League as unsuitable and could no longer find a club in the United States. Since 2016, he has played basketball for the Canadian London Lightning, while continuing to call on society to better understand, accept and treat mental health issues in athletes.

According to White in his interviews, if a player asked to be removed from the game due to a panic attack shortly before the start of the match, the team could fine such a player or even remove him from the squad, because the League does not have a specific policy prohibiting clubs in the NBA to do so. White advocates that this approach be changed in the hope that, based on his crippled career, mental illness in NBA players will be seen as an affliction, rather than a manifestation of irresponsibility and weakness.

A similar story happened to Larry Sanders. He was a talented defensive center who abruptly left the Milwaukee Bucks in December 2014. Larry suffered from attacks of depression and often self-medicated with marijuana, which led to numerous disqualifications. When the first reports surfaced that he was no longer interested in pursuing a basketball career and would seek medical attention, many looked at Sanders as a selfish malingerer (at best) who should be grateful for being paid millions despite for nothing. As if millions in the bank account are guaranteed to rule out any health problems.

White and Sanders are far from the only examples of professional athletes struggling with mental difficulties. There are numerous players whose mental health struggles have resulted in them being branded and dropped from their teams.

Delonte West suffered from bipolar disorder and, as a result, abused illegal substances. In his opinion, these difficulties and a lack of understanding on the part of the NBA and clubs on how to help players with such problems directly led to his exile from the NBA.

In addition to the NBA, athletes around the world have made their struggles with mental health public, including stars such as Michael Phelps, Brandon Marshall, Jerry West, Joey Votto and Shamik Holdslow. And all the new names keep appearing on this list. It's only a matter of time before college athletes start talking about their psychological issues with which they come to professional sports. ESPN's Kevin Arnowitz reported that far more NBA players than commonly believed suffer from mental illness and are not given a favorable enough environment to discuss their problems in public: "Virtually everyone in the League can name current or former NBA players who need or they still need serious help in maintaining psychological health, but they never received it, ”summed up Arnowitz.

Back in 2012, an unnamed NBA chief executive told Arnowitz: “We don't do a very good job with player mental health. We don't have any answers to this problem and we haven't studied it well enough yet."

A year later, an unnamed general manager of one of the League teams said that he wanted to create a mental health program for the players at the club because he noticed one of the guys had psychological problems. He approached the team owner to ask if he would be eligible for funding for the idea, to which the owner responded, referring to the player's contract: "I just gave him $30 million a year for 'mental health. ' The program was never launched.

Many NBA fans, as well as basketball club owners, still fail to understand that a player's mental health has nothing to do with the money they earn or the fame that surrounds them. Every club in the League has invested untold sums of money, all in the pursuit of obtaining the best, most scientifically updated therapies most effective when it comes to rehabilitating physical ailments. However, despite the trend towards more mental health professionals at team headquarters, mental health spending is still far behind.

The belief that mental health and its treatment is of a different, but no less important, importance to the club than any other physical illness still defies the minds of many people. But at the same time, today, it is becoming clearer that problems in the players' heads sometimes put them out of action for a much longer period than any injuries, despite the fact that there is no quantitative and trackable time scale for such problems, and therefore the timing of treatment for these problems is always unknown.

“It's hard for people in the NBA to take players' mental health seriously,” Sanders told Arnowitz in 2015. - Everyone says that the game is 90% mental toughness and mentality, but the mental health of the players is not getting the same respect as the concern for their fitness. Games are 90% won and lost in the minds of basketball players, but the League continues to ignore the mental health factor."

What DeRozan, Love and Ubre have done should by no means be overlooked. The NBA is promising new player mental health programs this year, but if it wasn't for these three guys, those programs would be useless. After all, if players and teams cannot overcome deep-seated prejudices about the unshakable mental health of athletes as a sign of masculinity, then no League initiatives will be effective. DeRozan said that people are now more drawn to him, saying that his words allowed them to find the strength to admit their problems. "It's incredible," DeRozan said. "My revelation to date is one of the most incredible things I've done in my career outside of the basketball court. "

The most obvious and yet radical notion conveyed by DeRozan, Love, and Oubre was that any person's decision to disclose their weaknesses and mental problems, however difficult, painful, and frightening, should not occur. condemnation in society. “Everyone experiences something no one else can see,” Love wrote. - I want to remind you that you are not weird or different for sharing your experiences. Just the opposite. It may be the most important thing you do. That's how it was for me."

For many decades now, every person in the world has been firmly convinced of his own objectivity and never believes in someone else's. Perhaps, thanks to this kind of recognition and social initiatives of famous athletes, people will begin to perceive the problems of others precisely as problems, and not as weaknesses. And each of us will see in basketball players, football players and others not minions of fate, crying about their hard life, while sitting on a mountain of money, but also people.

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