Summer Basketball is Here!
The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.
With schools letting out for the summer, we wanted to post our thoughts from The Coaching Toolbox as to the best use of the summer for basketball coaches and players.
We realize that both coaches and players have a lot going on in the summer besides basketball, whether or not the coach is a teacher. Coaches have job and personal obligations and most importantly, more time for family time. Players may have other sports, jobs, and need a lot of time just to enjoy themselves with family and friends while having a break from school.
In order to maximize the fleeting amount of time available, it is important for both groups to have a plan and some goals in all areas of life heading into the summer with specific time blocked off for the best way to improve as a player–doing individual skill development workouts. Twenty-five days during the summer with a forty minute basketball workout spent intensely working on improving individual skills is a reasonable goal and will make a huge difference in a player’s performance next season. Forty minutes of hard and smart work is much more productive than hours of time spent hanging out in the gym. Depending on what your offseason rules allow, we would make skills work the number one priority for use of gym time over camps, leagues, and scrimmages.
If you are a select team coach, spend the first 40 minutes of your practice working on drills that improve individual skills. It will help the performance of your team and will help the participants to improve more than anything else you can do.
Five on five games are more fun, but the opportunity to improve comes from the hundreds of shots and dribbling repetitions that a player can get in an individual development workout. A player may touch the ball for a few minutes in a game or scrimmage and, if they are fortunate, get off between five and ten shot attempts. After the player spends ten to fifteen minutes on technique, the rest of the workout should be done at a game pace so that those extra shots are as valuable as shots taken in games.
Players and coaches, make it a goal do 25 Individual development workouts (for everyone on your team if you are a coach) between the day school lets out and the day it starts next fall–at least it used to start in the fall! As the saying goes, plan your work, then work your plan, and you will see the benefits next basketball season!
The Coaching Toolbox has hundreds of free resources for basketball coaching and for basketball players.
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