Whether you are a coach or a parent, one of the most important things you will do when teaching basketball skills is picking age appropriate drills. If you are a coach your practice time with your team is limited and picking the wrong drills for basketball means that the valuable skills that your players need will not be developed. And often the drills you are working on won’t succeed because the skills needed to accomplish them aren’t there.  For a parent it is just as important to pick the right drills as your child’s love for the game and therefore their success with it will often develop from the successes they achieve with the drills. If you start them off with drills that are too complex or require prior skills that they haven’t mastered, not only can it get them frustrated and have them lose interest, but it can also make them develop bad form. This can often result in temporary success at the drill, while ensuring long term failure at the skill. I often wonder when seeing some of the shooting styles of players that lack any semblance of good technique, how much of it is because they started shooting at hoops too high or from a distance to far, forcing them to chuck up the ball just so they can see it hit the rim and occasionally go in.

So what is age appropriate? When you start searching for drills for basketball you will find an endless supplies. In my own library I have numerous books. Online there untold sites devoted to them, and you could spend a small fortune on videos with countless drills. I know I have and have not even scratched the surface of those that are out there. One of the things I will attempt to do with this blog when discussing drills for basketball is identifying at what age they are appropriate for the child. In order to do this I will break it down into a range of ages to start these drills. I will also break it down within these age ranges into difficulty levels of preparatory, beginner, intermediate and advanced. It is however important to remember that there is such a wide variety of coordination development amongst children that these age brackets are not written in stone. Always consider the individual child’s abilities and swing the range up or down to meet them. Build their development on small successes and you will have a happy and successful basketball player, and even more importantly a happy and successful child.