Basketball Practice Drills – Competition & Surprise

A lot of times my players are dragging and see no immediate reward for hard work, so they may slack off.  Therefore, I try to make every one of the basketball practice drills a competition and the winners choose the losers’ punishment (10 sidelines, 1 suicide, etc.)

I have found that in competition mode, the players are always pushing it and trying to win.  When practicing 5 on 5 concepts, a team will receive points for boxing out, talking on defense, running a play correctly and at game speed, and so on.  Once the basketball drill is over, the punishment begins.

Usually, the winning team will run too, as support for the losers. One-on-one drills are immediately stopped and reinforced with running if they are slacking.  Also, when they are running sprints, I will randomly throw a basketball to a player in transition and have him make a lay-up while tired.

Some days, I will come to practice with a card that has anywhere from 50-100 boxes on it.  Each number stands for 1 sprint.  They are aware of the number on the card.  For each hustle or successful play etc, one sprint is marked off.  Sometimes, depending on the degree of the hustle, 2 sprints will be marked off.  Also any sprints that they run during practice is marked off as well. At the end of basketball practice the remaining sprints are run.

If in a rare case there are like 30 left, they would run segments of 3-2-1’s and suicides to account for multiple sprints.  The players love this because they never know what to expect during practice.