TeamArete Practice Planning

Part One:  Organizing Practices

So many coaches have asked us over the years about our practice plans and what is the key to running successful practices.  With so many books and videos coming out on the subject, it appears that practice planning is becoming a topic very much on the mind of coaches at every level.  With our program, the key to our practices is organization and versatility.  Our practice plans are broken down into minutes, days, weeks and months.  This allows our staff to know how and when we will break down every component of the game in our practices.  Versatility is important because I don’t believe you can have great practices consistently when a coach is running the exact same drills day after day for 3-6 months, depending on how long your respective season is.  Here is how we break down our practices.

General Thoughts

The key to good practice planning is keyed on several principles:

1. Have a plan. If you want to get the maximum use out of your facility and time, you must know what you want to accomplish during practice.  What do you want to have in?  When?
2. Finally, have a system.  Know what offense and defense you want to run.  Know your offensive and defensive philosophies.  Then, either develop or find drills that allow you to teach YOUR teachings.
3. Players must understand that practice is a time to improve their fundamentals and develop the skills necessary to succeed in game situations.
4. Players should work on skills that they will use in the game.  Practice game shots, defensive skills that reflect your philosophy, etc…
5. Rules need to be enforced.  How do you handle tardiness?  How are players disciplined in your practices?
6. Every drill should include as many players as possible.  Use all the resources available to you, whether they are multiple baskets and balls, or simply incorporating managers and coaches so that more players can participate at one time.  You want each player to have as many repetitions as possible!!!
7. Give your drills a name and explain their purpose.  Players want to know why they are doing a particular drill.  Let them know!

Practice Planning

Having a master practice plan and an idea of what fundamentals you are going to teach your team gives a staff and their players an advantage over their competition.  A master practice plan is a schedule of all our your practice sessions and a base outline of what is going to be taught in every practice for the entire season.  Our master practice plan not only extends from the first day of practice to the last day of practice, it also incorporates our off-season workout and conditioning plans.  ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE, ORGANIZE!  Here is our master practice plan.

Master Practice Plan

Offense

A.      Team

1.        vs. man-to-man

2.        vs. zone

3.        vs. combination

4.        vs. pressure

B.       Individual

1.        without the ball

2.        with the ball

Defense

A.      Team

1.        man-to-man

2.        zone

3.        combination

4.        pressure

B.       Individual

1.        on the ball

2.        away from the ball

3.        pivot or post area

Conditioning

A.      Physiological

B.       Psychological

Fundamentals

A.      Footwork

B.       Passing

C.       Shooting

D.      Dribbling

Rebounding

A.      Offensive

B.       Defensive

Conversions

A.      Offense to defense

B.       Defense to offense

Free Throw Situations

A.      Offensive alignment

B.       Defensive alignment

C.       Plays out of

Jump Ball Situations

A.      Offensive circle

B.       Defensive circle

C.       Plays out of

Out of Bounds Situations

A.      Defensive end

B.       Sideline

C.       Offensive end

For us, this master practice plan represents all the things we would like to cover before our first game.  Sometimes, we don’t get to everything we want to as soon as we would like, still, this plan gives us something to work from.  Once a coach has their philosophy and master practice plan down, now they can start working on daily practice plans and implementing their drills.

Part Two:  Daily Practice Plans

Many coaches have asked how valuable it truly is to plan your practices months ahead of time.  Even more have asked if planning your practices months ahead makes a staff unwilling to alter those practice plans when it is clear that changes might need to be made.  I answer both these questions simply:  By planning our practices months ahead of time, we now have a base guideline of what to teach and when we need to teach it.  Of course, this doesn’t mean that our practices can’t and won’t be changed depending on a variety of variables.  However, this base guideline provides a foundation that each week and each day of practice is built upon.

Our weekly plan looks like the following.  Obviously, four such plans comprise a “monthly” plan.  Our weekly plan is comprised of five individual components:  Individual Offense, Individual Defense, Team Offense, Team Defense and Specials.

Then, for each day of practice, we develop a daily practice plan.  This plan includes our Thought of the Day, our offensive and defensive emphasis, and the drills needed to teach those emphases and our philosophy of offense and defense.  

As mentioned in Part 1, organization is the key to our practice planning.  However, the true teaching starts with daily practice.  A staff must know what they want to teach and how they want to teach it.  The master practice plan is designed to give a general outline to practice.  However, daily practice is where fundamentals, strategy and details are taught.  Here is an example of one of our daily practice plans.  Note that the combination of numbers and letters next to drills is our way of organizing our drills so that we can find them quickly.

Part Three:  Closing Thoughts for Planning Practice

There are several aspects to our practice program that we feel allow us to be successful. Part 1 of this article detailed our philosophy on developing a master practice plan, Part II explained how we break down our daily practices and now, in Part III, I simply wish to share with you some critical keys that I hope will aid you when developing a good practice schedule.

1. Have a Plan for Practice

An important part of practice is the use of a practice outline.  This is where the daily practice plan comes into play.  Every coach on the floor should know what drills are going to be taught that particular day and what areas of strategy are going to be covered…each coach should have their own copy of the practice schedule.  This allows the coach to stay on time and not forget something that they wanted to include that day.  Keep copies of all of your practice plans and file them in order to use for future reference.  This will make practice planning in future years much easier.  Also, use every resource available to you.  Make sure you include your managers and your coaches so that every player is active as much as possible during practice.  Managers should be used as much as possible to free up coaches to coach.  Use multiple baskets when possible…etc. 

2. Plan Chalk Talk Sessions

Chalk talk sessions are important to our program and can be used for a variety of reasons.  They can be held before, after or even during practice.   However, we prefer to use them before practice, oftentimes while players are stretching prior to actual practice.  Coaches can implement chalk talk sessions to help explain drills, points of emphasis or simply, to explain the practice schedule for that day.  This is a good time to make sure that your players and coaches are all on the same page.

3. Consistency and Repetition

We have a certain way to do everything in our program and we don't ever want to stray from that. For example, we might be doing our shell drill program where we work on our half court defensive principles, but we still want our offensive players to properly run our offense and not take shortcuts.  When we are working on offense, we also expect our defense to play as they were taught.  If we teach our players to block out in one drill, we have to demand that they block out in all drills.  Repetition is the key to good basketball habits.

4. Make Practices Difficult

Our practices are designed to put players into stressful situations, situations that place a greater burden on our players then they will see come game time.   One example of this is our transition overload drill where we teach our defense to get back and cover the basket in transition by playing against 7 offensive players.  By playing 5 on 7, our defensive players are under more pressure to communicate and recover on the defensive end.  We run conditioning drills where the team must make 80 lay-ups in 2 minutes with no misses.  We run half court scrimmage situations where the offense cannot dribble but must look to pass the ball in order to get a good shot.  All of these ideas are designed to place added pressure and stress on our team during practice…however, we must always be careful that by adding this type of pressure, we are not creating a situation where practice is never enjoyable for the player either.

5. Emphasis of the Day

Each practice, we post an offensive and defensive emphasis, as well as a general thought for the day.  The thought for the day is generally a motivational quote, promoting a certain character or life skill that is important in day-to-day situations.  The offensive and defensive emphasis, however, are points that we as a staff want to stress for that practice session.  It might be something as simple as blocking out, getting back on defense, communicating on defense or making the extra pass.   Many times, we will try to emphasize something that we felt the team did poorly the day before.  We cover these thoughts and emphasis of the day during our chalk talk sessions.  We want every player to be aware of what we are emphasizing that day.   All during practice our staff tries to reinforce the emphasis with reminders.

6. Don’t Run for the Sake of Running

Every coach knows the importance of conditioning and most coaches agree that they don’t have enough time in practice to teach everything they would like to teach.  Solution?  Try conditioning your players using a basketball.  We never condition without a ball unless it is for punishment…and even this is rare.  Combine conditioning with some full court drills and you can give your players a workout while teaching the fast break, transition game, ball handling, etc.

7. Make Drills Competitive

You can’t expect your players to compete come game time if you don’t teach them to compete during practice.  Besides, competition in practice is fun and keeps things fresh.  It also allows coaches to get a hand start in seeing which players tend to “rise to the occasion.”  Whether drills are 1 on 1 or 5 on 5, I encourage you to keep score as much as possible…teach your players how to win in practice through your drills.

Finally, I encourage coaches at all levels to view as many practices by opposing coaches and teams as possible.  Learn what others do.  We all need to watch people who win.  Watch those coaches who aren’t blessed with great individual talent, but find a way to win with what they have year in and year out.