This drill was from an old Xavier Men’s Newsletter.
You can see their archives and subscribe at this link.
I thought with the World Series in progress, this would be a good time to post this basketball drill that works on 1 on 1, 2 on 2, and 3 on 3 situations in a competitive way.
If you have to wait on some athletes to start practice and need something to add variety to your practice, or late in the season when you are looking for ways to change things up, here is one idea.
Basketball Drills “Baseball”
Diagrams created with FastDraw
Divide teams into two colors.
Blue team establishes a “batting order” and white matches up accordingly to how they want to defend.
INNING 1: ONE-ON-ONE:
Blue team is on offense, scoring as many RUNS (points) as possible until they get 3 OUTS (defensive stops by white)…
Switch to White team on offense. White plays until they get 3 outs…
End of first inning. (To make a long game you can run through this again and count as an additional inning)
INNING TWO: TWO-ON-TWO:
For each inning, we vary the initial actions (ball screen, down screen, flare screen, etc.)
Use whatever actions are part of your offense or maybe your upcoming opponent’s offensive attack to work on defending them.
INNING THREE: THREE-ON-THREE:
Again changing the initial actions to actions that you either use or have to defend.
For each of the innings and individual matchups, you will need to decide what to do with fouls. You can make them an automatic run (point) for the offense, or you can have players shoot them to work on free throws with a little pressure. If you shoot them, the offense gets their point if they make the free throw. They get the ball back if they miss. Like any drill that you see from other programs, you need to make the adaptations that fit the objectives that you have for running the drill.
