That Basketball Life

To cut or not to cut, that is the question. One of the most difficult decisions that needs to be made by travel team coordinators is "What do I do if there are more kids than I need for my teams."  The choices are difficult.  On the one hand you don't want to cut kids, especially at a young age.  On the other hand, you can't carry more than 10 players on one team so do you have enough coaches to allow you to form 2 teams?  What happens if your numbers are at 12-14.  You can't have 2 teams of 6.  It increases the risk that you will forfeit some games because some kids won't make it to all games.  What do you do? I like to follow the below template when making my decisions: If I have enough players to form 2 teams then I will.  I want to make sure I have at least 16 players but more preferably 18-20 to do this.  This way I can get 2 teams of 9 or 10.  To do this, we need capable coaches for both teams.  Do not just find anyone o...

It's the time of year where travel teams are holding tryouts for the winter.  As a club administrator it is important that you don't take tryouts for granted.  Regardless of whether you will be cutting kids or not you want to make sure that you evaluate the players who choose to participate accurately.  To do this you need to evaluate players on 3 different criteria: Athleticism/Coordination Fundamentals Skills Application Let's take a look at each criterion individually. 1)       Athleticism/Coordination - Let me preface by saying I'm not a believer that the raw athlete is the player I want on my team so I can mold him into a player.  In a sense I'm not looking for raw athleticism here but rather how coordinated and gracefully a player can move through a couple of athletic drills that have basketball applications to them.  The drills that I choose to run are the following:  a)       Lateral...