Basketball
A basketball training plan for your team
A build-up across the season, and a worked session for every training night with drills, timings and coaching points.
A lot of youth basketball trains once a week and plays at the weekend. One evening, and technique, defence and reading the game all have to fit in it. There is no room to spend a night on something the group is not ready for.
Basketball also gets complicated fast. Explaining a pick-and-roll to twelve players while half of them are still losing the closeout costs half an hour and returns nothing. Order matters more here than in most sports: one-on-one and help defence first, systems after.
That order is what gets filled in here, week by week, across the season.
How a basketball week runs
01
One session a week plus a match is the most common youth pattern.
02
With one session it gets divided up: the new work in the middle, finishing at the end, and the game play carries the physical side.
03
With two, the first takes the new work and the second sharpens it for the weekend.
Where this fits in
English-language basketball material is abundant. It is also written almost entirely against American age groupings and against squads that train four times a week, not against one evening with twelve eleven-year-olds.
The library here is written in Dutch and English, fits one or two evenings a week, and keeps the words used on the floor: rebound, fastbreak, closeout, screen.
Rules, ages and limits
The rules, age categories and load limits behind the plan are the Dutch ones for now, because that is the competition structure we have built out. The drills themselves are not country-specific: a four-a-side overload game works the same anywhere, so a second country means rebuilding the rules and reusing the library. If you coach outside the Netherlands, the age bands are the part that will not match.
See how it works for your group
A few questions about your team, and there is a season to judge for yourself.
Set up your team