Pat Colliton's shooting drills from Fairfax

This is Pat Colliton from 6528 Heather Brook Ct., McLean, in Fairfax VA and I am back with more helpful hints on coaching youth basketball. Hopefully, my seventeen years of coaching youth basketball in Fairfax, VA makes this a worthwhile reading.

Repetition is certainly one of the main ingredients in one’s quest for improvement in almost any activity. While there is no denying that some people have a natural born gift for certain things, almost without exception, hard work is the key to one’s success for improvement.

The trick for coaches of young kids is how to get them to focus on the fundamentals or basics of a sport before they get bored or lose interest. One point to always remember is that you must keep your drill lines very short (3 or 4 kids max). This allows for two things; all of the kids get a lot of reps and also, no one has time to get bored and start trouble. Another key ingredient is to make up “team competitions” so that they can feel good about winning.

As you know by now, the low blocks in basketball are my favorite positions on the court. Everyone who plays the game needs to be comfortable “down on the blocks”. Shooting and making the shot from the low blocks is essential for overall success on the court. One drill that the kids love is breaking the team into two lines of 4 and then have a contest shooting from the blocks. Coaches need to keep all games moving, either playing for 30-45 seconds or the first team to make 10 shots. Two balls, two teams – GO. Game ends - so switch sides and go again.

There are a couple of important things to stress to the kids. First, they need to always use the backboard as this helps tremendously with their success. Second, they should always get ready to shoot the ball before they catch the pass, in other words, have their feet balanced and their hands in a shooting position (by their chest). The third thing to stress is to always follow your shot. It is one of the fundamentals of the game and it speeds the contest up and keeps everything moving. Finally they need to deliver a good pass to their teammate who has moved into the low block.

Shooting drills are the easy part of practice as everyone loves to shoot. Kids all love to shoot and even at a young age most will have good success from the low blocks. As the improvement comes it is easy to move the drill around to different spots on the floor, always keeping it close (inside the foul line).

My next blog will talk about how you can make defensive drills both fun and productive at the same time. This is Pat Colliton signing off from Fairfax, Virginia.