Getting Variety In Your Passing Drills

Q11- I am a youth basketball coach teaching kids 10-13 years old. I am very devoted to teaching my players the basic fundamentals of the game. I stress fundamentals, however I have been disappointed with my ability to teach passing. And truthfully, doing the same drills over and over tends to get boring. What are some things I can do to make my players a more solid passing team? Are there some drills that I can do to help me take this approach?

Damon Boyer
Manhatten Rhinos Youth Basketball Manhatten,

Coach Boyer,
I like your intelligent question. There are always so many questions at clinics about offensive and defensive strategies, it is refreshing to have a coach admit to a need for ideas for one of the least addressed skills in basketball today.

If you asked your best shooting players how many shots they practiced a day, you might get answers like 100, 200, 500. If you asked the same players how many passes they practiced you are more likely to get the answer of 10, 20 , or even none. Therein lies one of the basic problems for coaches. I think most coaches teach the chest, bounce, hook, two hand overhead, and push passes, but unfortunately in our modern game not too many players get recognition for their passing.

One of the ways I attempted to overcome this with my professional team was by having goal boards for my teams. This comes alot from the ideas of Pat Riley, where he used team and individual goals to motivate the "Magic era Los Angeles Lakers" to achieve beyond their imagined playing and skill levels. With a youth team, it might be to have team attempt to get 15 assist in a game. Or they get what we called a star for an unselfish pass that resulted in an easy score. By having offensive and defensive goal boards with possibly 10 or 15 different skills the team, and players are motivated internally to focus on these "mini-successes". They are sort of like candy. The more you give out, the better the team performs, and the more motivated they are to practice the "little" skills that don't show up in the newspaper.

Back to the question at hand. I might try having my players practice 50 wall passes a day, before they can take a shot in the gym. This gets the rudimentary portion of the drill out of the way before the official practice begins. Then within the practice, I would build specific passing drills into actual team drills and situations. Maybe while practice offensive patterns your team is only allowed to practice bounce passes, or in four corner dribble to the middle and pivot drill they are required to make the pass and pivot you call out. Bob Knight has a great philosophy in drills. "Challenge the players" to concentrate and perform at a higher level than you think they are capable. Boredom can't set in when the players must be totally focused and concentrated just to keep from making a mistake which would bust a rapid pivot and pass drill.

You asked about some things to teach to make your team a more solid passing team. First they must have the ability to pass equally well with either hand. Ninety percent of the teams I have coaches against have ninety percent of their players who can only functionally pass with a strong hand. Second, teach your players to pass on balance. Most passing mistakes occurs because players attempt to pass off-balance. This is true for shooting accuracy, what's the difference? Third, I want my teams to be able to pass and make quick decisions off of hard cuts, or full speed sprints. You can tell a poorly coached team by how they pass on the fastbreak, or when pressured. Make sure in each of your practices you spend at least 5 minutes passing from sprint and sprint and stop movements. I normally do this as a warm-up drill where we practice a variety of lay-ups and and work on passing and sprinting ahead of the ball. This is a basic fundamental of good fastbreak teams. Sprinting ahead of the ball. You can't fastbreak if your receiving players are behind the ball, or you have to pass backwards.

Another good thing to practice I picked up from watching some of the old Eastern Bloc teams in Europe. They not only practice passing (such as 2 or 3 on 0) while running, but they do a lot of jump passing. Now before all you coaches get up in arms, I'm not suggesting that you teaching jump passing on the fastbreak. But what it does teach is how to keep energy in your body in the air (which can be used to snap a touch pass back to someone), and how to control your body while gathering in an errant pass from a full speed sprint. They even practiced this while jumping off of one leg. It's certainly a different approach, but I saw some good development in players passing skills from such drills.

Finally, having great fundamentals alone won't help your teams passing if they make poor judgment. You likely need to give your players very specific signals on when to pass. I have seen teams use things like a hand clap, or sticking a hand out to signal you want the ball. I would encourage the latter to give a clear target, but with younger players a very good way is to have them learn to call the passers name, when they extend the hand. On the higher levels of the game, this isn't as effective because experienced players will use the sound to alert them to a pass coming. Professional players use a lot more discreet eye contact, or situational position to determine when a pass will be thrown.

I'll give you one drill here which I also picked up from a Rumanian coach which some young players I worked with loved. In the 10 minutes we had allotted for passing fundamentals once a week, we ran a drill called "Tennis". Tennis is just what the name describes. You take some natural boundaries on a court (volleyball or badminton lines work well), and place a wooden bench or two in the middle. That is the net. The players must serve (pass) the ball (you designate the hand and pass they can make for a given number of games), and it works just like tennis. If a ball bounces more than once, or out of the reach of a player on the opposite of the net then the server leads 15-love. They player until a game is one and the serve is switched. Not only is this a drills for working on fundamental passing, but it is a great footwork drills, because players must start and stop quickly to catch a returned ball (pass) without traveling. You might have them serve and play with right handed push passes only, then maybe switch to left hand hook passes. Now I wouldn't recommend this type of drill to the high competitive level high school and college teams, but for youth teams they'll love it. It's a very good conditioner as well.

The other drill I would highly recommend is the basic four corner passing dribbling drills. Four balls, one in each corner. On a signal each sprint dribbles into the middle and makes the pass and pivot that the coach or captain call out. We also call outside meaning that instead of dribbling to the middle they pass to a corner and follow their pass with one additional exchange. There must be a hundred variation of this drill. The reason I like it so much is that is forces concentration. The caller can pick up the calls and tempo, it creates a very game like situation where players must think quickly, execute pivots, and passes and locate an open player. The more you change, the more challenging it is for the players. No boredom with this drill. Remember to build slowly and feed them new calls and challenges as their passing and pivot skill development permits.

Thank you for great question. The Coach