That Basketball Life

My son had a baseball game yesterday and in that game his coach had to sit 4 of the 13 players that showed up to play for him.  He had no choice of course since you can only play 9 in the field at a time.  He decided to sit these 4 players for the first 2 innings of the game and he also had all 4 of these players batting at the bottom of the order.  In essence he had these players sit and watch for the first 30-45 minutes of the game.  In the pros that is not too unusual but we are talking about u10 baseball here.  It's tough enough to keep them engaged when you have them playing, let alone when they are sitting doing nothing.  I decided to pay attention to those 4 boys and see how they would do for the rest of the game.  In the end they all did poorly at the plate and many of them were not as engaged as they should have been in the field.  This got me thinking about basketball and keeping players engaged.  How can you make sure that all of y...

A few years ago I wrote about the comfort threshold .  Back then I said: As a coach I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to push players to improve.   Whether it be ball handling, shooting, passing, defense, rebounding, or footwork there is a natural tendency for a player to stay in his/her comfort level when playing basketball.   I call this comfort level the comfort threshold and it is the point where a trigger occurs in a player’s mind which warns the player that if you go beyond this point there is no guarantee of success and the odds of failure are greatly increased. As a coach, it is very important for you to keep pushing your players past their comfort threshold.  The best place to do this is at practice.  As a coach you should quickly evaluate the skill of each of your players and then start using drills which push those players beyond their comfort limits.  Encourage them to play fast in practice, to try things they have not tried or have not perfected yet.  Every ski...