Skills and drills, from a coach who runs them

Why these pages exist

Most junior basketball advice online is written for American high school players with a gym, a full time coach and five sessions a week. That's not the situation almost any Victorian family is in. A domestic player trains once a week for an hour, plays a game on the weekend, and everything else happens in a driveway or it doesn't happen at all.

So these pages are written for that reality. Every drill here can be run on a single ring, most of them on no ring at all, and none of them need a second person unless the page says so. Where something genuinely does need a gym or a partner, I've said that up front rather than wasting your evening.

What actually moves a junior player forward

The players who improve fastest are almost never the ones doing the most. They're the ones doing a small number of things properly and often. Fifteen minutes four times a week beats two hours on a Sunday every time, because a skill is built by repetition spread out rather than repetition crammed in. The brain needs the gaps as much as it needs the reps.

The second thing is honesty about what they're actually bad at. Every kid practises what they're already good at, because it feels better to make shots than to miss them. The improvement is almost always sitting inside the thing they avoid, which for most juniors is their left hand and their defence.

The third thing, and the one parents find hardest to hear, is that improvement isn't visible week to week. A kid who is genuinely getting better will often look worse for a month while a new habit overwrites an old one. That dip is the work happening, not the work failing.

How to use these with your child

You don't need to know basketball to help. What you need to do is watch, count, and tell them what actually happened, because a child can't see their own shot. Counting repetitions out loud is the single most useful thing a parent can do at a driveway ring, and it costs you nothing but attention.

Don't coach technique from the sideline during a game. Whatever you shout, the effect is that your child stops playing and starts managing you, and a kid managing a parent isn't a kid competing. Save every technical thought for the driveway, where there's no scoreboard and nobody watching.

A warning about drills you find online

There's an enormous amount of content showing advanced ball handling with two balls, tennis balls and an agility ladder. It looks impressive and it's mostly useless for a ten year old, because it trains a skill that never appears in a game. Nobody in the history of basketball has beaten a defender because they could dribble two balls at once.

Judge any drill by one question: does this look like something that happens in a game? If the answer is no, it's entertainment rather than training. The drills on these pages are deliberately plain for that reason.

The same applies to anything sold as a shooting aid or a training gadget. None of them are necessary, most of them are expensive, and a child who practises properly with a correctly sized ball on any ring will beat a child with every accessory and no routine. Spend the money on a decent ball in the right size and put the rest away.