I really believe that developing strong feeder programs is vital to the long term success of a basketball program. As with anything, there are a number of different philosophies and methodologies to successfully implementing a successful feed program. Today, I am simply going to discuss my philosophy to a successful feeder program. I won’t be talking about X’s and O’s as much as much as the philosophical elements of the program.
To me, the purpose of a feeder program is to provide an opportunity for youth players to develop program specific individual fundamental skills, program specific team skills, and to have competitive fun. Too often when I watch youth basketball games or go to youth basketball practices, I see an overwhelming emphasis on the end product, winning, rather than proper process of developing fundamental skills.
As a coach, I am not concerned with the number of games that the feeder programs win. Instead, it is more important that kids develop proper footwork, on the ball defense, help defense, spacing, cutting, ball sureness and so on. The development of these types of skills will actually provide more long term success down the road. Granted, both of these, the product and the process, can be achieved, but too often coaches lose sight of what they are there to do, which is improve fundamental skills and prepare the players for the next level of play. For example, I attended a youth basketball tournament a few weeks ago. A team I went to watch started out playing man defense, which I was pleased to see. However, it was not long until they began to have problems defending the cutting actions of the other team. Therefore, the coaches had the team sit in a pack 2-3 zone in order to defend the cutting actions. The really frustrating part, as a coach, was that the high school coaching staff had clearly explained the philosophy that they wanted taught, and nowhere in that discussion was zone defense talked about. Instead, winning became the primary goal. Granted, they ended up winning the game, but I feel that the process suffered along the way.
Another element that I think gets over looked is playing time and how teams are divided. I was talking with a good friend of mine and great coach from a rival school district. He was explaining to me how he was going to use a different approach to splitting up his teams. Traditionally, most teams will be divided by an A Team, which is made up of the top 10-12 players and then a B Team, which will be made up of the remaining players. However, he is taking his top 10-12 players, and is going to split them evenly between 3 teams. The same thing will be done for the other 3 teams. I thought that this was a great idea. If those top 12 players were all on the same team, how much development would players 7-12 get? Instead, these players will get more minutes in a totally different capacity when they are split up from the other top players. They will now have more responsibility in leadership. Furthermore, this will now open up more development opportunities for kids who don’t typically get a chance to start or be one of the top reserves off of the bench.
These are just a few of my thoughts regarding feeder programs. There is so much more that goes into a successful feeder program than what was touched on here, and there is more than one way successful way to run a feeder program. I like to win more than anybody, and it is something that we strive for extensively at the high school level. I just strongly believe that in feeder programs, the proper learning process, which might mean you lose some games, is more important than the number of games you win and ultimately, that process will get you more wins in the long run.
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