As coaches, we all know the importance of having a well-established feeder system to help build the longevity success of our basketball program. As always, there are multiple ways to organize a feeder program. These are just the steps that we go through each year.
We feel that it is important that our feeder systems have the foundational fundamentals built into them. It is our responsibility to equip the feeder coaches with the proper offensive and defensive philosophy, the proper verbals and language, and proper fundamental development. We feel that if our youth can learn these 3 elements along with team chemistry and effort that they will come into our high school program with a good base. We meet with our feeder coaches before the season starts and discuss with them our expectations and philosophy to the game. We explain to them that we are more concerned about the fundamental development of the players rather than the number of games or tournaments that they win. The feeder coaches are given a packet of fundamental drills and offensive/defensive elements that we would like them to implement. Therefore, listed below are some of the specific items that we emphasize in our feeder programs.
1. Man-to-Man Defense: At the high school level, we play an aggressive 1-1-3 match-up zone with our boys’ team. We apply lots of ball pressure all over the court and use a variety of trap and stunt schemes. However, we feel that in order to properly play this style of defense, kids need to know how to defend the ball, get into help position, front the post, get the ball to a side and force baseline. Granted, you can do all of these out of a zone set, but we feel that man-to-man is better at teaching these concepts to youth players.
2. Base Offense: We feel that all players need to be confident passers, dribblers, cutters, shooters and understand proper spacing. Therefore, we believe that using an open post offense allows us to effectively teach these elements. Too often, players are labeled as post players just because they are tall and never develop any skills away from the basket. Years later, that same kid has not grown at all and is now expected to play on the perimeter but has never developed the skill set to be successful. We just start with basic pass and cut principles and driving actions with proper spacing. From there, we start building in other elements such as down screen and curl.
3. Transition Offense: After years of running a traditional middle break, we made the switch to running a sideline break package. I had numerous conversations with a coach name Wayne Walters, founder of SWARM Enterprises, and his justifications for running a sideline break just made a lot of sense to me. We started putting it in at the high school level and had a lot of success with it. Therefore, we are starting to put it in with the feeder programs. It really allows us to advance the ball up the floor quickly and put constant pressure on the defense.
4. Fundamental Development: All of the drills that we have our feeder programs use are drills that we use at the high school level or at least teach the same fundamental concepts (footwork, language, shooting mechanics and so on). This has tremendous carry over to the high school level because they have a foundational knowledge base that they can continue to build on the first day of high school practice.
By no means is this a perfect setup. We are constantly making improvements and adjusting our methodologies. If you have any interest in studying youth basketball development, I highly recommend contacting Brian McCormick. He has some amazing stuff on youth basketball development.
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