Fourteen Things to Do in Your Basketball Practice

Perfect Practice Series Part II

Greet the players enthusiastically as they enter the practice space.
Huddle up for (in non coronavirus times) high fives, fist bumps, and talk about what’s important for the day.
Encourage players to be positive vocally, physically, and with their body language.
Get loose by starting slow and facilitate or make space for small talk that builds relationships.
Handle the ball, pass, and catch. Practice these skills on the move.
Finish fast break layups, offensive rebounds, post moves, and pay extra attention to the weak hand.
Teach and practice shooting from a set position, on the move, and off the dribble.
Teach BBHS offensive tools while practicing defensive situations. BBHS stands for Basket cuts, ball screens, handoffs, and screens off the ball.
Use dummy (non-live) situations into live play. Drill a concept such as playing a switch in a ball screen until it looks like you want it and then call, “live.” Allow for at least one trip down and back of live play. Much of a basketball game is played by converting from one end to the other.
Offensive 5 on 5 play with restrictions. The offense must meet a restriction before shooting. An example of a restriction might be three good screens off the ball or a post touch before a shot. Players should always get layups when they can.
Defensive slides into live play. I’ll take one of our defenses such as man to man, a full court zone press, or a 1-3-1 zone and slide versus an offensive pattern until I call, “live.” Again, I try to convert at least one down and back.
Practice live out of bounds plays with conversions.
End the practice on a positive note such as a player scoring, a great pass, or a standout hustle play.
Huddle up for more fist bumps, slaps, and take time to look back on the practice and look ahead to whatever is next.

06.22.18

Youth Basketball Workout #3

I’ve been sharing some of what my daughters do for their basketball workouts with hopes to create a community of people who discuss ideas for youth basketball development. I’m sharing what my daughters ages nine and twelve do with hopes that some people will let me know what they are up to.

Currently, we have three on-court workouts we do. Afterwards, we go home for some strength and agility work. We work out three days in a row and then take a day off.

Click on workout #3 below to see the PDF file of the drills we did today:

Torgerson Sisters Workout #3

Video below:

I’d love to hear from you if you have any questions, observations, or suggestions.

Thanks for taking a look!

06.15.18

by William Torgerson

Youth Basketball Workout Day #2

Currently, we have three on-court workouts we do. Afterwards, we go home for some strength and agility work. We work out three days in a row and then take a day off.

First, here’s the PDF document that lists what we did for the workout: Youth Basketball Workout #2

Below is a video that gives a brief overview of the workout:

07.26.12

by William Torgerson

What are you working on? Discussion in the Writing Classroom

In the writing classrooms where I teach, we often sit in a circle and do a “quick share” to begin class where everyone offers a brief comment. Examples of what students might say include a golden line from a reading, a question for our fellow writers, or an observation about a project in progress they are working on. Beginning in this way helps me to avoid talking too much to start off the class, and I hope to encourage students who might otherwise just sit back and relax to try and engage actively with the activity of the course.

the challenge of conversation

Even trying for rapid-fire sharing around the room, with up to twenty-five students, writers can get bored, feel left out, or be uncomfortable enough talking in front of a group that they don’t speak in a way that the students in the class can hear them. Even if a student speaks two minutes out of fifty, that’s not much engagement or opportunity to be heard. In considering this problem, I’m taken back to my days as a basketball coach. I was always looking for ways to maximize our practice time and the opportunities each player had to improve. For example, if I were to put fifteen players in a line and have them shoot, get their own rebound, and then pass to the next player, then each player might get three shots in ten minutes. This isn’t helping anyone very much and to my way of thinking, not so different than a student in a writing class who only gets to be heard once or twice. So what to do?

As a teacher, I often go back to my time as an athlete and then a coach. For me, developing as a writer has a lot in common with my development as a shooter of the basketball or training for a long run. When I coached and wanted to get my players more practice, I arranged shooters into five lines of three, and all of the sudden each player got five times the amount of practice than if they were in one big-long line. The classroom version of this basketball solution would be to make use of small groups. Theoretically, a student in a small group has more opportunity to join a conversation about their reading and writing. However, I’ve been in small groups as a student and now as a faculty member, and I’m often not impressed with the sort of work that gets done. There’s often a lot of noise, but it doesn’t often seem to be the noise of conversation about reading and writing. If you want students (or faculty) to work in small groups, then there has to be a plan for how this conversation can flourish. As someone who was beginning to get more and more interested in Twitter, I wondered about the possibility of using it to enhance classroom conversation. More on that experiment in coming posts, and if you’ve got your own ideas about classroom discussion or the use of small groups, I’d love to hear them!

10.27.11

by William Torgerson

What do you tell writers who ask for advice?

At the request of Campus Activities I agreed to participate in what is called “Storm Talks.” It seems the goal of the project is to initiate conversation between students and professors. I talked briefly on video and invited students to tell me about their writing before, during, and after the first year writing course. The video was published via YouTube and Facebook. Questions came in. Here’s one of them: “Any advice for a young writer?”

Click Here to Be Taken to Facebook Conversation

I usually answer that question by saying that the writer should read and write a lot. I suppose it’s a philosophy–PRACTICE– that I used back when I was eighteen years old and cared about my free throw percentage. Okay, I still care about how many I’d make out of 100 if I were to go shoot tomorrow morning, but what I’m getting at is that in order to shoot free throws well, part of that process was that I shot a lot of them. I remember in Donald Murray’s book, Write to Learn, he quotes writer (and Google fighter) Ursula Le Guin about this notion of practice:

“If you want to be a tuba player you get a tuba, and some tuba music…And you probably get a tuba teacher, because there are a lot of rules and techniques to both written music and to tuba performance. And then you sit down and you play the tuba, every day, every week, every month, year after year, until you are good at playing the tuba; until you can–if you desire–play the truth on the tuba.”

Right after I suggest reading and writing to the person who has asked for advice (who am I really to give it?) I say that the writer needs to learn how to read. People often laugh and think I’m joking, but I’m not. As a student at Georgia College in Milledgeville, a generous faculty helped me to begin to read like a writer. I learned to see that when Flannery O’Connor wrote “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she made a choice for conflict in her first sentence: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” O’Connor had many choices when it came to the beginning of her story. She could have delivered dialogue, oriented readers to the setting, or perhaps written images for the purpose of developing character. As I began to read in this way, all of the texts that surround me became my potential teachers, and I can read for lessons connected to dialogue, structure, endings, word choice, and many, many more.

So when asked to give advice I say to read and write a lot, and I say to learn how to read. That feels like a pretty “DUH” thing for me to write. Do you think so? If you’re in position to ever be asks the question, how do you answer it?