One of my favorite things about coaching is designing practice plans. I love the attention to detail involved in designing a practice, the competitive atmosphere that a well design practice creates and the environment that it creates for players to improve a particular skill. Here are some key factors that make a practice effective.
1. All drills must serve a purpose and must match the philosophy of your program. There are thousands of great drills out there. However, when selecting a drill, it should be designed to teach a concept that is important to your philosophy as a coach. If you simply use the drill because it is a good drill, but it does not fit with your system, is it really helping your players for game success?
2. Length of drills: In our practices, we like to have short drills that are usually 5-10 minutes long. In these drills, we focus on high intensity, competitiveness, and lots of reps. We really try to minimize the amount of stopping the drill to talk to a player. Instead, we try to pull that player aside when he is out of the drill so that we don’t stop the flow of the drill for the rest of the players.
3. Player Reps: One of my biggest pet peeves in practice is players standing on the side watching other players do drill work. We really make an emphasis when designing practices to get as many reps for our players as possible. If players don’t get the reps, the skill does not become a part of muscle memory and they end up thinking too much which will slow the reaction time.
4. Competitive atmosphere: There are many ways that drills can become competitive. You can keep score on specific items during a drill. For example, during a shell drill, keep score on items that need to be improved (effective ball pressure = +1, strong box out = +1, poor closeout = -1…….). When we work on defensive closeouts, we will put 3-4 basketballs on the ball rack. For every poor closeout or lack of proper verbals, we take off a ball from the rack. When the rack has no balls left, we do a form of conditioning to get our focus back. We keep score on our shooting drills, free throws and anything else that we do to create a competitive atmosphere. There are drills where we will put a team at a disadvantage. For example, we might be working on a transition shooting drill for our sideline break. We will have 3 teams (Varsity, JV and Freshman). We will start the Freshman at +12, the JV at +6 and the Varsity at 0. We will put 2 minutes on the clock and the winner does not have to do conditioning. This improves the player’s effort and serves as our conditioning as well.
5. Assigning names to drills: This is such a detailed item to practice planning, but it is so important. Mike Dunlap stresses this a lot. He talks about giving a meaningful name that will trigger an automatic reaction and having the players echo call out the drill (coach tells one player the name of drill and the player yells the drill out to the rest of the team).
6. Don’t become a slave to a drill or to time: There are times where a drill just is not working. As coaches, we need to be able make practice adjustments just like we need to be able to make game adjustments. There are times where a drill becomes counterproductive. When that time comes, it is time to move to the next element.
7. Setting the tone in practice: How you start your practice can determine the success of your practice. It is vital that your players get engaged physically and mentally right away. Using a competitive shooting drill or defensive drill is a great way to get your players invested in that particular practice.
There many other factors that can determine the effectiveness of a great practice. I highly recommend that you research Mike Dunlap and Don Meyer. These are just 2 of the great practice coaches out there.
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