This week I read a piece from Kevin Eastman (twitter @KevinEastman – a great follow) on "Bullet Basketball", a great piece that discusses keeping coaching points to 3-4 ‘bullets’, making the main point easier to remember.

For the record, Kevin is an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics. Youth coaches, please pay attention – the assistant coach for the BOSTON CELTICS is emphasizing that the best way to reach players is to teach this complex game with a simple, easy to understand approach. He does this with professional players – you think it might work with kids???

I could not agree more. I wrote about the power of three in a previous post, which is basically the same concept. While it is a challenge, coaches at EVERY LEVEL must find a way to make every game simple – simple to learn, simple to play, simple to love.

Here are a few examples from Kevin’s newsletter (this is free via subscription, available via the website highlighted above) – and I love these:

  • Screening:
    • Take your screen to the cutter’s defender
    • Can’t get low enough OR wide enough (fantastic!)
    • Put your back to the area of attack
  • Shooting:
    • Be ready on the catch
    • 10 toes to the rim
    • Perfect follow through – up and over the front of the rim

EasyHard

All of these little things add up over time – remember the saying that "inch by inch, life is a cinch and yard by yard, life is hard."

I’ve been conducting basketball sessions for boys in the 9-11 year-old age group for the past four weeks and this will continue up until school starts. My approach has been to break down the game and, week by week, build out the bigger picture of the game. This has been the plan – as you’ll see, it is broken into pieces the kids can remember:

  • (Intro, week 1) Parts of the game:
    • Offense
      • Triple Threat (Intro, week 1) – in order:
        • (Week 1 Focus) Shooting
          • BEEF (Balance/Base, Elbow, Eyes, Follow-through – again, 4 points)
        • (Week 2 Focus) Passing
          • Types of ACCEPTABLE passes (chest, bounce, overhead – three points)
        • (Week 3 Focus) Ball-handling)
          • Types of dribbling (High, medium, low (3 points) – how, when and why)
      • Structure (week 4 focus – 3 points):
        • Spacing
        • Rebounding
        • Movement
    • Defense (week 5 focus – 4 points)
      • Position (hands, feet, eyes and butt/shoulders)
      • Communication
      • Help
      • Rebounding
    • Transition (O-D) (week 5 focus – 3 points)
      • Locate the ball
      • Sprint to action
      • Make the stop or slow the action
    • Transition (D-O) (week 6 focus – 3 points)
      • Secure and protect the ball
      • Push with intelligence
      • Score when possible

There are so many aspects to the game, I picked these 6 plans to cover with these boys so that they can get an appreciation for the big pieces. We have had time to work with some players on positional play as well (post players, guards, etc.) and apply the same principles – keep it simple. We play games to emphasize the drills and points and the feedback from the boys has been great to this point.

As a coach, your job is to make your players better – this concept is simple, but the application is hard. I have seen too many good coaches go straight to lecture to make a simple point, and the result is rarely good for the coach or the players – players tune out. Keep it simple, keep it fun, keep it moving.

Would love to hear some of your ideas – and not just basketball so please feel free to share!

Please remember to listen, hustle and have fun™.

Coach Rick

Picture courtesy of: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Other_Metaphors_and__g307-Hard_Easy_Computer_Keys_p95003.html

*KISS is an acronym for Keep It Simple, Stupid – it is used often in military and business settings to remind people to dumb down concepts to make them easier to communicate and understand.