My practice plan follows the same general format each day. However, the focus and drills change with each practice. Here is the general everyday practice plan and then I will break down each section into a more in depth explanation.
0-15 minutes Fundamental Drills; Transition; and Warmup
15-30 minutes Individual Defensive Focus
30-45 minutes Team Defensive Focus
45-60 minutes Shooting Drills
60-75 minutes Individual Offensive Focus
75-90 minutes Team Offense Focus
90-105 minutes Scrimmage with an Emphasis
105-120 minutes Game Situations and Close of Practice
This is my standard practice plan. I adjust it each and everyday with different drills and things to focus on but the layout stays the same day after day. I have each section broken into 15 minute blocks. I will then break those 15 minute blocks usually into 3 five minute blocks. Depending on what the focus of the day is, I will also move 5 minutes from one section into another section if more time is needed in a particular section. I am breaking down practice into roughly 24 separate 5 minute blocks for a 2 hour practice. This makes sure practice is up-tempo and the players must always stay engaged or they start to make mistakes. I never want the players to become bored or disengaged with practice so practices are always moving and changing.
Now I am going to breakdown each section into what the 5 minute blocks look like. I am also going add a couple of my drills for each section to hopefully give you an idea of what a practice would be.
0-15 minutes- Fundamental Drills; Transition; Warmup
I have my players stretch before practice. Players are suppose to be ready 10 minutes before practice starts. These 10 minutes are for the players to stretch and loosen up. I will also use this 10 minutes for any announcements that need to take place.
Fundamental Drills
I have about 5 drills that fit into the first 5 minutes of practice. These drills get the players moving as well as focus on a fundamental aspect of the game of basketball. I am always looking to add more drills or variations in drills to put into the beginning of practice. However, each drill needs to focus on the fundamentals.
2 cone ball handling
This drill focuses on dribbling. Two cones are placed in a line, one at the foul line and one just before half court. The player start on the baseline, dribbles to the cone at the foul line, makes a change of direction move, dribbles around the cone just before half-court, makes another change of direction move at the foul line cone again, before finishing the drill by dribbling back to the baseline and giving the next player in line the ball. The four change of direction moves I teach are crossover, behind the back, between the legs and spin. I will change which move is to be done after every minute or so. Once the players are able to do all four moves individually, I will make them do 2 change of directions at the cone. Then I will make them do 3 and so on.
Full Court Back Dribble
This is another dribbling focused drill. This is a full court drill. I have cones setup foul line extended on each side of the court as well as two cones on the half-court line at the tip circle. There are six cones total on the court. This drill simulates a trapping situation and how we want to attack the trap so not to make a turnover. The players start on the baseline and dribble to the first cone. Once there they have to back out of a trapping situation. This is done by putting their butt into the trap and exploding backwards with two hard back dribbles. Once they take the 2 back dribbles, they make a change of direction move and continue to half-court. They repeat the trap and back dribble at half-court and again at the other end of the foul line extended cone before make a layup or shot and moving to the other side of the floor. This is a great drill for ball handling as well as getting everybody moving up and down the floor.
Partner Shooting
This drill works on dribbling, passing, rebounding, shooting, and conditioning. Two players are in a group. Player A simulates getting a rebound and outlets a pass to Player B. Player B then dribbles the ball into the middle of the court to the other end stopping at the elbow. Player A runs to the outside of the court and down to the other end trying to catch up and pass Player B. The drill ends with a two man game shot. This could be a layup, pick and roll, pick and pop, or just a direct pass to a shot on the wing.
Transition
I want my team to score in transition as much as possible. I also want to play fast. In order to get the players playing fast in transition, they have to be comfortable in what we are doing. I also do not want transition turnovers. All of this leads my to work on our transition game everyday. We start with our normal transition break. Next we add our adjustments for how to react to a press. Then we add little counters if our opponent take away our point guard or try and take away having the ball in the middle of the floor. I will also use this to make a change in our offense for our next game. For instance, if the opponent has a great post player and plays man defense, then I may have the player he is guarding set a ball screen every time down the floor. This forces the opposing post player to play and guard a pick and roll every time on defense. My hope is this constant defending causes the post player to fatigue quicker and earlier in the game. By doing transition every day, the players develop great muscle memory and an understanding of where everybody will be so we create scoring opportunities while reducing turnovers.
Warmup
The last 5 minutes of the first block of practice is the warmup drill. This is designed to get the players in a nice sweat and ready for the rest of practice. This is also the time period where I introduce any new drill. If a see a drill another coach uses then I will put it here for a couple of days to see if I like it or not. I would rather lose these 5 minutes to a bad drill rather then 5 minutes in a team offense or defensive drill block. A lot of the drills I like the most started right here in this 5 minute block. This gives me a chance to watch it and either scrape the drill completely or make the adjustments to make it a better drill before putting the drill later in practice. Here are a couple of my favorite warm-up drills. These are my go to drills to create a competitiveness attitude in practice.
5 on 5 on 5
Three teams of 5. For me, this is 2 varsity teams and a JV team. Team A starts on defense on one end, Team B starts on defense on the the other end, and Team C starts at half-court with the ball. They play offense against Team A. If Team C scores then they keep the offensive possession. If Team A gets a stop, rebound or turnover, then they get to go on offense. If Team A gets a stop, then they get the ball and go to the other end against Team B. Now if A scores they get the ball and go back against Team C. If B gets a stop then they get the ball and go down against C. This drill never stops and creates an incentive for the defense to get a stop. For added intensity, I keep score and losers have to run.
Constant 3 on 2
This is the standard 3 on 2 drill with a couple of tweaks to make the drill constantly 3 on 2. Two defenders start on both ends. Three players start at half-court. Everybody else gets into lines at the coaching box on both ends and both sides. This gives each side of the court 2 lines. The 3 in the middle start and play against one side. At the end of the possession, the first player in each line on that side of the court enters the court as an outlet man. One of the defenders gets the ball and makes an outlet pass to one of those two. The outlet man takes the ball to the middle, the outlet passer runs to the side he threw the outlet pass to. The non-outlet man runs down the floor and becomes the 3rd offensive player. Now the outlet passer, outlet catcher and non-outlet man becomes the 3 offensive players going against the two defenders on the other end of the court. The 2nd possession ends and outlet men come out, a defender makes the outlet pass, and the 3 new offensive players go back down the initial end of the floor against 2 defenders that stayed on the floor after the 1st possession. This repeats over and over again until the drill ends. To make things go faster and offense to be quicker, I will add in that the 5th pass is a turnover. This makes the offense get a shot up before the 5th pass but also gives the defense an end goal as well.
15-30 minutes; Individual Defense Focus
The next 15 minutes are focused on playing defense at the individual level. I do not ever run 5 on 5 during this block. I will go up to a 4 on 4 shell drill but not 5 on 5. Even on the 4 on 4, I want the focus to be more on positioning then anything else. This is the time to improve on a defensive weakness or prepare for an upcoming opponent’s strength. If we got beat off the dribble in 1 on 1 situations the night before then we will do a couple of 1 on 1 guarding the ball drills during this time. If an upcoming team does a bunch of pick and rolls then we will work on guarding the screen action. This timeframe can be an improvement period or it can be a scouting period.
1 on 1; 2 on 2; 3 on 3; 4 on 4
In order to be a good defensive team, you have to be able to guard the ball 1 on 1. By reducing the number of players, I have increased the amount of dribbling and guarding the dribble the drill does. I will use every basket I have and as the number of players increases then the amount of baskets needed decreases. I will also reduce the area the offense can play in. I may make the entire drill take place in just the paint area. I may have the players use just the right side or left side of the floor. Using the pick and roll example again, I can start with 2 on 2 with just the pick and roll. Then I can jump into 3 on 3 still using a ball screen to start the possession but now the defense still defends the pick and roll but the 3rd man now helps on the roll. Now I can go up to 4 on 4 and have the pick and roll, the 3rd man help the roll, and the 4th defender rotates to a better position. This gives every player reps on how to guard the pick and roll for the upcoming opponent.
Full Court 1 on 1
Anybody who has played basketball has done this drill. Some people call it the turn drill. It is 1 on 1 and the defender is trying to make the offensive player change or turn his direction of dribbling as many times as possible. It puts the defender on an island and gives me a great look at who can guard in the open court and who cannot.
Rotation Drills
Basketball is moving to an open floor, open post, dribble drive game. Defensively that means backside rotations are even more important to help on any dribble drive to prevent giving up open layups. In these drills, everything is set so the players know exactly what to do. Hopefully, by doing these drills enough we will be able to take the practice work and do the job during the games. One of my defensive keys is to not give up an open layup so we have to be committed to rotating off the backside to prevent layups when a player gets beat off the dribble. I will do these rotation drills with 2 players up to 4 players. I will also start the dribble from different locations. The location of the initial dribble drive changes our rotation rules so we have to prepare for every situation in practice that could happen in a game. So if we get beat off the dribble in a game everybody on the floor has an understanding of what they are suppose to do so we can prevent the offense from getting off an easy or uncontested shot.
30-45 minutes; Team Defensive Focus
After we work on the individual defensive drills, we moved straight into team defensive drills. This usually means we just add the 5th player to whatever drills we are doing. So there are practice days when we work on an aspect of defense for the whole defensive practice. We may start with 1 defender and keep adding another player until we get to all 5 defenders being on the floor. This time period is most usually used to learn how to guard certain offensive movements on an upcoming opponent. However, I will keep coming back to a couple of drills to reinforce our defensive principals.
Half-Court 4 on 4; Shell Drill
Every coach has there own variation of the shell drill. At the start of the season, we pass the ball and hold it so we can get all defenders into the right positions. As the season progresses we will run shell drill as an possession. Offense is trying to score and defense has to stop them. We do very little standing around later into the season. By keeping it 4 on 4, it also opens the floor a little bit more so we can have a focus during this time. We may work on post to post screens. We may work on getting through a down screen. We may work on guarding a ball screen. Whatever our focus is, I will create a start to the drill to cover that focus. If we are working on getting through down screens then I will have a pair on each side of the floor. Each side will start with a down screen before the ball is passed in and a possession is played.
Half-Court 5 on 4
One drill that I have started using a bunch recently is a 5 on 4 drill. I let the JV play offense with all 5 players. I then have the varsity split up and play defense with just 4. By splitting the varsity, we can have two defenses on the floor at the same time so we can have that many more possessions in utilizing both ends of the floor. All in told we have 13 players are participating during the drill. Add in any subbing and we can get everybody rotated into the drill. This drill is as simple as it sounds. The 5 JV players try to score on the 4 varsity defenders. The reason I like this drill is it does two things very well or the varsity just gets crushed. First they have to be talking to each because they are playing a man down so somebody is always left unguarded. The players have to learn how to talk to each other. And the players have to be able to listen to each other. This drill accomplishes both without much effort as the coach. Secondly, they have to rotate. In order to play great defense, the players have to talk and communicate. And they have to rotate and help if somebody gets beat. The great thing about this drill is it takes no coaching for the players to figure it out. At first the JV is going to score against the varsity. Then the varsity defenders will start to figure out the need to talk to each other and the advantage of leaving the player farthest away from the ball open. This makes the players rotate to the ball. Once they start to figure it out then I start to explain the little nuances of our defense and how the drill translates to game scenarios. This drill has improved both our man to man defense and our zone defense.
45-60 minutes- Shooting Drills
I have a block of time for shooting every practice. The drills are constantly changing but they are focusing on shooting. Kids, nowadays, do not play like they did years and years ago. They have too many distractions. They have all the social media and electronics available to them at all times. Therefore the number of shots kids shoot in the offseason has decreased. I have players that only touch a basketball during team activities. If it is not organized, then they are not working. So we can either complain about it or we have to work through it. Since most kids are not shooting or working on their game outside of team activities then I set aside this time every practice to get shots up. Our shooting percentage has increased every year from the beginning of the season to the end of the season. The winner is still the team that scores the most points. My teams will work on this everyday all season. Here are a couple of drills that I use during this time.
60-75 minutes- Individual Offense Focus
This block will be heavily tailored by your team. If it is all guards then the need to work on post moves is not necessary. If I have 2 or 3 post players then I will separate guards and bigs to have a focus on post moves for the bigs. This period has a focus on the individual players and how can we make them better. Also, this is usually the first place I will pull an extra 5 minutes out if I need it somewhere else.
I do want to make a distinction between the shooting block and individual offense block. Shooting is about getting as many shots up as possible. The individual offense block will still have shooting in it at times but there is a much more incentive to work on dribbling and passing. If the dribbling and passing ability of players increase then the offense will get better. I will use this period as another fundamental period at times.
75-90 minutes-Team Offensive Focus
After working on fundamentals with the individual players we look at bringing everything to the team. I try to keep the team offensive focus on full court situations. We do a lot of transition during this block. Like I said earlier, I want to score in transition as much as possible. This 15 minute block is almost completely full court. We work on getting the most out of our transition game as possible. Here are the two drills that I use constantly throughout the season that I think gives us the most benefit.
5 vs ?
This drill creates an environment to get our players to read, recognize and react during transition. The offense is lined up in a free throw type situation. As the free throw is shot, the offense simulates a box out and begins their offensive transition to the other end. As they are simulating their box outs, a coach has the defensive players all lined up out of bounds foul line extended and calls out a number to those players. Whatever number is called, that many defenders jump out onto the court. This is the read and recognize portion of the drill. The offense has to read and recognize how many defenders are jumping out onto the court. Next they have to react. If they see 1, 2, or 3 then our rules are to attack the basket and get a bucket as quickly as possible. If it is 4 then we try to score in less then 3 passes. If it is all 5 defenders then they run the half-court offense. This drill makes the offensive team keep their heads up and see the floor. It also makes them talk and communicate how many defenders are out in the play. This drill has increased our efficiency in transition more then any other drill in my opinion.
5 vs 5 with late defenders
I run two variations of this drill. The first variation is I have the offensive team stand on the baseline and the defense stands across their man on the foul line. A coach throws the ball to an offensive player. The defender who is guarding that man has to touch the baseline the offense is standing on. Everybody else starts running on the pass to the other end. Two things happen. First all defenders have to rotate and focus more on the offensive team rather then an offensive player. Somebody has to stop the ball. The next player needs to rotate up to help the ball stopper. The next two defenders need to rotate and leave farthest man away open until the 1st defender can get back into the play from having to touch the baseline. So we are still getting defensive work in. The second thing that happens is the offense has an advantage but not for very long. They are trying to score in transition with their man advantage. If they do not score quickly then the offense needs to execute in the half court to score. The second variation is just like the first except a coach calls out more then one defender to touch the baseline to start. Now the offense is trying to score immediately. The defense it trying to stall long enough to get their teammates back into the play. This drill works great on teaching the players what they are looking for and what they are trying to do in transition.
90-105 minutes-Scrimmage
The last 30 minutes of practice is usually a bunch of game situations. Team offense is mostly full court and our scrimmage time is usually half court. However, if we are playing a team that will press the whole game then we will be running full court scenarios during this time. Outside of those teams then I keep this block for our half-court execution. This is the 4th quarter of practice and we need our best execution during the 4th quarter of games. So this helps to get the players to mentally focus during the “4th quarter” of games. This is where I may put an 8 minute quarter and have the players play a quarter. While we do a bunch of scrimmaging and playing during this block, we also run a couple of drills to help our mental focus and execution.
Half-Court Change Drill
This is a 5 on 5 drill. Their is no restrictions on trying to score. Team A starts on offense and team B starts on defense. Team A is trying to score. When a coach yells “change” team A sets the ball down and becomes the defensive team. Team B grabs the ball off the ground and is now the offense. The only rule is team A must guard a different player then who was guarding them. This means the player on A who set the ball down cannot guard the player who was guarding him and is probably the next closest player to the ball when it is set down. So now everybody on team A must talk and rotate to a different player while not giving team B a chance to score. Defense is easy to play when everything works as planned. When things are not set then how does your team react. I have termed this as scramble mode. The defense is not set and is scrambling to find the right player to guard or get stuck guarding the wrong player. This drill puts team A straight into scramble mode. Now team A must defend when things are the most chaotic. I use this drill to try and keep my teams from panicking in these situations during a game. This is the idea of try to make practice harder then anything the players will do in a game.
Install of Plays
This is the block when I install new plays or practice existing plays. I normally start with about 4 quick hitters and add 1 about every week. Based on my scouting, I will pick about 4 or 5 that I think we will use the most during the next game and we will work on executing those plays during this block. This is also where we cover any plays an opponent will run in the next game. If we have had a good hard practice then this is a time when we can rest the legs a little but increase the mental aspect of the game.
105-120 minutes-Game Situations and Close
I will run a game scenario almost every single day. These game situations will hopefully put everybody on the same page when they come up during a game. This is a chance to get the players to understand what we are doing in these situations. Do we want a 2 or 3 point shot? Do we want to go fast or slow? By having this time in practice, the players can ask questions and truly understand what we are doing. The scenarios can be whatever you want them to be. If our players know exactly what we are doing in a certain situation then it may save me from having to use a timeout. Or it may allow me to let them play quickly and catch the opposing team off guard. Here are some of the situations I go over the most.
Tie game with 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 45 seconds, or 1 minute left
Down 1,2, or 3 with 30 seconds or 1 minute left.
Down 4, 5 or 6 with 30 seconds or 1 minute or 2 minutes left.
Tied or down 1 or 2 points, our ball out of bounds at half-court or full-court with 10 seconds or 7 seconds or 4 seconds.
All of these situations create slight differences in how we are going to play out the game. As the game is coming to an end, I want my players to be assessing the situation. Are we up or down? Is it a one possession or two possession game? Do we have timeouts? Do we need a quick shot or can we run a play or an offense? If we are running a play then what plays could we run? These things can keep players from panicking during games. For instance, I had a game where an opposing player made a free throw to tie the game. I called a timeout. The players were almost upset at me because they knew what to do and what play should be called. They had already talked during the free throw and had it set up should the player make the free throw. Since they knew what should happen there was a level of calmness in all the players that usually does not happen with a tie game with only 4 seconds left. The only person not on board was me because I did not want to show that last second play right before our state tournament started. I wanted to keep that off film so teams could not scout what we would do in that situation. It also helped we were tied and if we missed we would go into overtime. I do not if we would have made the shot but I believe we would have gotten a clean look at the shot. The players had the confidence in running the play because we had practiced it so many times at the very end of practice. Confidence and calmness will win a bunch of close games.
I do not practice over two hours. Ever. At two hours, practice ends. If we did not get to something then it goes onto the next days practice and we do this same style of practice the next day. I believe we get more accomplished during our two hours then most teams. Having everything broken down into 5 minute periods keeps the practices moving in a very quick pace and the players either get used to it or somebody takes their spot. I hope you enjoyed taking a look at a general practice layout for me.