10 Basketball Coaching Tips On How To Structure Your Practice

The organization of your practice can have a profound effect on the entire experience for you and your team. A good structure will help you keep your players attentive, having fun, and everything running smoothly.

A well-organized practice gives everyone the opportunity to have fun.

Our first and most important suggestion is to prepare well ahead of time and develop a written practice plan.

Take the time to strategically plan out and script your entire practice. You should know exactly which drill to run next by looking at your practice plan, which will help you dramatically improve the efficiency of your practice.

Beyond that, here are 10 basketball coaching ideas to help you better structure your practices:

1 ? Introduce new drills and concepts at the beginning of practice when players are most attentive.

2 ? Limit each drill to a MAX of 3-5 minutes. Young players just don?t have the attention span and brain development to benefit from drills longer than this.

3 - If you have a tough or boring drill coming up, be sure to follow up with a fun one, and let players know what?s coming. Many times, just knowing that something fun is around the corner will help them get through a difficult drill.

4 ? Start to develop a consistent pattern and be sure that you don?t go too long without something fun. If you work on intense stuff for too long, your players will get rambunctious and they?ll never recover.

5 ? Choose drills that are fast paced and incorporate conditioning. Avoid running players at the end because they will become anxious about the end of practice. Your normal drills should be so fast paced that you don?t need conditioning at the end.

6 ? Logically organize drills so there is little down time. If a particular drill requires lots of time to set up, then run that drill directly after a break so you can set up while players are getting drinks.

7 ? Use your players to help you set up drills. For example, you can teach them how to get cones and set them up for certain drills. Have them run to set up the cones between drills so there is no down time. You can even make a game out of it. The player that gets their cones set up first gets two claps. Using this basketball coaching tip will keep your players constantly involved.

8 ? Use your imagination to keep players busy at ALL times. If a certain drill requires only 5 players, have the rest of your players work on ball handing or jump rope on the side to keep them busy. No standing and waiting.

9 - End each practice on a positive note. Team oriented drills give them a feeling of togetherness as they leave the floor.

10 ? Break up the monotony. It helps to break things up throughout practice to avoid boredom. Players generally lose focus after working on the same thing for too long, so the more variety the better. For example, you could do 5 minutes of defensive drills and then change things up to a competitive shooting drill that they enjoy.

Jeff Haefner is the owner of http://BreakthroughBasketball.com. For more coaching tips and basketball drills, check out Jeff & Joe Haefner's Free Basketball Coaching eBook that will help you win more games at http://www.BreakthroughBasketball.com/freebooks.html