Basketball Drills for Youth Players

Learn valuable Basketball drills for youth basketball players.

Casey Bass: Today on Club House Gas, long time youth coach, Harry Bacheller is going to work with us on some simpler drills you can do with your young boy or young girl to get them right for the upcoming basketball season. It’s going to be great and informative show, so stay tuned to Club House Gas. Harry Bacheller: You know what I tell my coaches here, they’ve got the toughest job as far as a coach; they’ve got one hour a week usually. They’ve got a half a gym and they maybe have players, they maybe have one or two that are good, three or four in the middle that are average and three or four bottom that are inexperienced. They are there to go outside, have you noticed I don’t have all my players here tonight, but I’ve got two assistants, I’ve told my coaches, don’t be such a control freak, use your assists, let’s get them out, they are better to have one coach working with two or three players than just one head coach working with all their players. And then at the same, we give them a little homework to do. We don’t want to overdo it, with this drills right here, like Isaiah seven, take lesson five minutes a day. I see some coach build on that and try to give them something for 20 minutes, but they’re like on a diet, crush diet. That’ll be good for three days and make one mistake and stop. So if you keep it up five minutes of homework drills, say I’m going to do it two or three times a week, they’ll go out not onto that themselves and they turn it 10 or 15 minutes. We do the Isaiah 7, some of these girls have just done the Isaiah 7 for two weeks now, and someone could go for. So you see tremendous improvement, two weeks if we do it here at practice and if they’re doing it at home with two or three times. Prepare that drill; it feels good drill because again directly when you’re playing as our team we’re going to be very aggressive on defense. If you’re leaving that ball out there, they’re going to go and grab it, steal it or tie it up for jump. So we pave it, we tell them if they ever feel uncomfortable, just pave it and then they’ll get help and that will avoid jump balls. The threat position drill which was sampled by—and when it talks about triple threat, they can put it in to work like we did, and just have them toss the ball and go after it aggressively and with a partner, they would have shot working in proper form of pass or dribble or something like that. So those are three sample drills. Try to do two or three of them at homework and for recreation are pretty good. We also tell our coaches to come prepared to practice. A lot of times, they only get in the half court for an hour, in the first five or ten minutes they’re talking about what they’re going to do. I tell them, I know it’s difficult to get the kids here in the first place, but if they get five or ten minutes, meet outside, tell them what they’re going to do for the day, then they go full speed when they’re out here. Also the kids should expect what they’re going to do for the day. We always start about ten minutes of drills, then we go on to skeleton drills where two or three people are working together. Then we go on a team, team of the day whether it’s inbound phase or play and then we’ll scream it to the last part and that kind of stretch we try to use here. Christ the King. Isaiah Seven Dribble is a drill that I learned from a relative who coached in college ball. I learned it about seven years ago and I’m sure it had its roots with Isaiah Tomas doing himself. He was a great ball hammer. It’s got and easy name to remember and they’re numbered and it’s easy enough for right player and not too difficult and if they work on it daily, you can take five minutes a day and in two weeks you’ll see tremendous improvement. Basically we want them in basketball, good basketball position on up and head up and trying to keep the ball low, and whatever they do, we eventually want to get to this point, some of them will get tired or lazy, the back will hurt and such, but we want to be able to keep speed right here and we want to be able—that’s number one. Number two would be left handed and also I want to talk about this what we do is most people are right handed, so we’ll tell them there are 25 right handed and 50 left handed, a lot of kids just don’t work that other hand. Once you get the little kid, they can work both hands and make some very good player. That was number one and two. Number three and four, you’ll see kids starting on this lane and we like them to work those legs as well, just go back and forth head up, that’s number four. Number five and six, is just get in the front and again, they’ll start swing back and forth, try to keep them a good basketball position. That’s number five. Number six. And then number seven is the easiest one, with both hands. Do other clutching ball drills, but again once you get too difficult, we want to keep it simple, so that they work on it at home, keep it for five minutes, don’t try to given them 20 minutes of drills, they’re stuff. Next drill we’re going to do is triple threat drill where we turn a variation into it to give them something to work with it with. What we want them to do is again as I just talking about getting triple threat position; we’re going to combine it. You have to toss the ball up, go after aggressively, give it a triple threat and then I’ll just yell out a command, tell me to start dribbling or make a pass or to do a shot and work on the proper form for shooting. It’s just a variation on something to tie them with the triple threat. So they go back and toss in there and catch it aggressively in line of triple threat, ready go. [Demonstration] Demonstrate a pivot drill. The wreckage a lot of people will just the ball and either do their one dribble and only go to a triple threat or they’ll stay here, if you do that against teams, that are prepared, the first thing they’ll do is either grab it and steal, and they’re tied up for a jump. So what we try to do is teach a child if they’re in a good position to pass or dribble or shot it, to be ready to pivot especially if they have pressure or if they feel uncomfortable. There are some players that feel uncomfortable and if you teach them how to pivot, they at least stop the ball from being tied up or stolen. Another thing we explained to him is to gain real estate, to keep their real estate as opposed to just right here going back and forth, they’ve got to establish their real estate, keep the hands and elbows pivoting all over them. A lot of new people do this. We have them pivot for seven seconds and they’ve got to keep their eyes up and find the coach and make a good strong pass after seven seconds. [Demonstration] Good job. Casey Bass: All right thanks Coach Bacheller, that was fantastic and remember if you send us to show idea like todays, yours have Club House Gas cap and a Club House Gas t-shirt in the mail. So go over there, teach us an idea, send us your information, if we use you idea, free cap, free t-shirt, that’s going to do us for today and we’ll see you right back here tomorrow on Club House Gas.