During today’s blog post, I’m going to go over some basketball training workouts that your players can do to get warm and ready for game time or for a great practice.
When we go into our individual workouts, we want the players to come up somewhat stretched. They’re not going to necessarily be loose, but we want them stretched because we work out back to back–four players and then four players. So we want them to come up with their bodies limber. We want to have a little sweat going. Then we’re going to go right into it.
Tipping Drill
The first thing we do is a little tipping drill to get the blood flowing.
And I think that’s where we’ve got to continue to get better as coaches–making sure that our players are continuing to talk to one another, talk on the floor, and get the most out of each other.
So the first thing we do when we start this tipping drill is that your players must call everybody’s name out as they go. And you, the coach, are going to give the different command. You’re going to say “right hand,” “two hands,” “left hand,” etc. Your players’ job is to keep tipping the ball off the board to each other, calling out his name as you tip it to him.
Now you may get behind, he may trip and stumble, but you’ve got to make sure that we’re communicating tipping the ball as well as we can and giving them an opportunity to do it.
We start this for two minutes on the clock. If at any point in time the ball drops in two minutes, we just start over. And it’s amazing how quick we get this done.
Cut Series
Now, we’re going to start with our cuts. We just want to start getting our blood flowing, start moving, and going at it right away.
You, the coach, make the pass. The player will take two hard steps down, set up, and get around him. And what we want to do is catch and go, and catch and sweep.
When we come down – and depending on how coach plays us – we want to put that ball out in front of us as quick as we can. We don’t want to put it on our side.
When we’re coaching the little things in this, we want to make sure the ball’s not behind us, make sure it’s not on our right angle with our shoe, and that we push the ball out. We want to exaggerate it in these workouts.
When we catch the ball on a sweep, we’re going to catch it and sweep the ball hard. Remind your players to push the ball out and get to the basket in one or two dribbles. And they should keep going from side to side.
We usually start in the corner and work all the way around.
To break it down: Your player is going to give you a good pass, take two hard steps down, get open, and catch and sweep. Catch and sweep and going to the rim, as soon as he goes, the next player will go right behind him.
Cut Series with Extra Defender
You can do this is if you have enough people. This is where you can utilize managers, utilize extra coaches, etc.
Have an extra person step into be the defender in the lane. Now the players have to read that extra defender as they make the move. So not only are they getting open on the coach, but they have to make a move in the lane and finish on him.
Now it’s up to the players. They can catch and sweep or catch and go. The only rule is no soft shots–don’t take anything weak to the basket. Make sure everything’s off the glass when you go to the rim or make sure you make a strong pull up by pounding that ball out in front of you.
Not everybody’s blessed to have guys with great first steps, but you can all make your first step better by pushing the ball out in front of you.
With the cut series basketball training workout, start in the corner, rotate to the wing, rotate to the top, come to the left wing, come to the left corner. And it’s rapid fire. We try to do that in about four to five minutes.
Did you enjoy learning about these three basketball training workouts? If so, be sure to follow me on Twitter for even more practice ideas!