Footwork...the Key to Success?

Here at TBL we've spent years refining our coaching philosophy. Early on in our coaching careers, we spent little time looking at footwork and how important it is in basketball. We just assumed that if you do enough reps of a skill you would eventually get the footwork down as a by product. The older we've gotten and the longer we've been coaching the more we've come to realize that if you take the time to coach kids the proper footwork the better they will become as basketball players.

Basketball is about coordination and about quickness. Spending time working on footwork helps with both. As a matter of fact, if you spend time once a week for half an hour doing footwork skills you will become quicker. This is a fact because you are committing the practiced skills to muscle memory the more you do them thus making them become second nature to you. So if you want to speed up your shot off the dribble you don't necessarily want to rush your shot but rather speed up the process or the steps you take that gets you to tour shot. We like to use the motto "quick to the shot, smooth through the shot." What this means is that with footwork practice you can quickly get into your shot process without actually having to rush your shot.

The above example is just one of many that we apply footwork mechanics to. To us there are 3 different types of footwork areas of concentration and all 3 are equally important:

  • Stance - includes all drills involving the stance including on ball defending, pivots, jab steps, passing lane defense, box outs, close outs, defensive dribbling and more.

  • Coordination drills - jump rope, ladder drills, box jumps, line jumps, broad jumps, change of direction and more.

  • Ball skills - covers all footwork involved with the ball. Off the dribble shots, off the pass shots, right footed layups, wrong footed layups, floaters, and more.


Over the next few posts we will cover this important topic in more detail.

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