Coaching Basketball: 50 Two-Minute Intensity Drills

By Kevin Sivils

Give Your Basketball Practices a Shot in the Arm!

Use one of the 50 drills in Coaching Basketball to:
- Increase practice intensity!
- Build great basketball habits in your players!
- Emphasize the little details of the game!
- Never have a stale, boring practice!
- Teach your players to have focused, controlled intensity when they play!

Eight time Coach of the Year Kevin Sivils shares 50 drills designed to inject intensity to any practice.

Illustrated with 108 diagrams to help clarify how the drills are to be taught and executed. 29 Photographs are included to illustrate the some of the concepts taught.

This book will serve as an easy to use and valuable reference for any coach. Each drill is described in an easy to understand format.

Sample practice plans to demonstrate how to schedule intensity drills into your practices are included. Rules and guidelines for planning entire practice sessions for maximum productivity and utilization of intensity drills are included as well.

Drills to increase intensity in practice are included for:

- Basic footwork and movement
- Specific drills to focus on intensity
- Passing and catching
- Fast Break
- Post Play
- Defense
- Rebounding
- Shooting

Make your practices more fun and productive by adding two-minute intensity drills to pick up the pace and intensity! Players love practices that move quickly and have high levels of intensity!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kevin Sivils
• Release date: Dec 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502257970

Kevin Sivils

A 25 year veteran of the coaching profession, with twenty-two of those years spent as a varsity head coach, Coach Kevin Sivils amassed 479 wins and his teams earned berths in the state play-offs 19 out of 22 seasons with his teams advancing to the state semi-finals three times.  An eight time Coach of the Year Award winner, Coach Sivils has traveled as far as the Central African Republic to conduct coaching clinics.  Coach Sivils first coaching stint was as an assistant coach for his college alma mater, Greenville College, located in Greenville, Illinois. Coach Sivils holds a BA with a major in physical education and a minor in social studies from Greenville College and a MS in Kinesiology with a specialization in Sport Psychology from Louisiana State University.  He also holds a Sport Management certification from the United States Sports Academy. In addition to being a basketball coach, Coach Sivils is a classroom instructor and has taught U.S. Government, U.S. History, the History of WW II, and Physical Education and has won awards for excellence in teaching and Teacher of the Year. He has served as an Athletic Director and Assistant Athletic Director and has also been involved in numerous professional athletic organizations. Sivils is married to the former Lisa Green of Jackson, Michigan, and the happy couple are the proud parents of three children, Danny, Katie, and Emily.  Rounding out the Sivils family are three dogs, Angel, Berkeley, and Al.  A native of Louisiana, Coach Sivils currently resides in the Great State of Texas.

Book preview

Coaching Basketball

50 Two-Minute Intensity Drills For Daily Basketball Practice to Build Sound BAsketball Habits

Kevin Sivils

KCS Basketball Enterprises, LLC

KATY, TEXAS

Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Sivils.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Sivils, Kevin/KCS Basketball Enterprises, LLC

Katy, Texas/77450

www.kcsbasketball.com

Book Layout ©2013 BookDesignTemplates.com

––––––––

Coaching Basketball: 50 Two-Minute Intensity Drills For Daily Practice to Build Sound Basketball Habits/ Kevin Sivils. —1st ed.

Contents

Why Two Minutes?

Fitting Two-Minute Intensity Drills Into Practice Sessions

Intensity Drills

Footwork and Movement

Passing, Catching and Moving

Fast Break

Post Play

Defense

Rebounding

Shooting

Sample Practice Plans

Lagniappe - Something Extra

This book is dedicated to coaches who work hard to master our profession and to make a difference to the players we coach. To Coach Jack Trager and Coach Don Meyer, two coaches who made a difference for me.

The information provided in this book is on an as is basis. The author and publisher shall have neither the liability nor the responsibility to any person or entity with respect to loss, damages or injury arising form the information contained in this book.

Chapter One

Why Two Minutes?

Why two minutes? What not one, five or ten minutes? Great question, and the answer lies in how coaches teach, athletes learn and what goes on in an actual game. Since games are how coaches, players and teams are all tested, it makes sense to examine what goes on in a game.

Even the most well prepared teams, teams that are instructed and led by exceptional teaching coaches behave in the following manner: Players do not do what their coaches teach them. Players do what their coaches emphasize!

A controversial statement, perhaps, but it is a true one nonetheless. Players seldom do what their coach teaches. Players always do what their coach emphasizes. If a coach preaches in practice every player has to hustle as hard as possible on defense, yet allows the leading scorer to jog back in defensive transition, players quickly learn there are two sets of rules. If you score a lot of points you don’t have to play hard on defense.

If the leading scorer takes a quick trip to the bench during a game for a discussion concerning the importance of five defensive players beating all five of the offensive players down the court, followed by some time to consider the importance of this fact, the players all learn the coach is emphasizing defensive transition!

Realistically, it is not possible to emphasize everything in the game of basketball using this approach.  Only the most essential big picture issues, such as defensive transition, shot selection or demonstrating unselfish play should be emphasized using this approach.

So how does a coach emphasize the myriad of details players must be able to recognize and execute successfully during a game? Actually practicing these tiny details that can make such a huge difference in the outcome of a game.

Simply telling the players to remember and then actually in a game execute all of these details won’t work. They have to be practiced and turned into habits in order for players to actually execute these details.

So I ask again, why two minutes? Several reasons actually. Practice time is limited and must be used efficiently. Practicing nothing but the tiny details of the game will result in a team that cannot execute its offense and defense.

The other reason has to do with the very nature of how many of the tiny details of the game, the intangibles so to speak, have to be executed. Diving on the court for a loose ball is not a detail you execute slowly, you dive at full speed. Pressuring the ball while straddling the offensive player’s pivot foot and tracing the ball is a high intensity activity.

In order to build intensity, players must have short, 30-40 second periods and no more, bouts of execution of the skill, tactic or concept in question. Often it is necessary to start with even bouts of activity that are even shorter and duration and build up to longer periods.

Since intensity is a key element in most of the skills included in this book, the suggested guideline of maximum time allotted is two minutes per drill. This allows for sufficient repetitions in a short, but physically intense period of effort. The habit being created is one of performing the skill at maximum intensity, the way it should be during the game.

With a few exceptions, all of the drills in this book can be limited to two minutes in total duration. Most of the drills listed can be used effectively when used for only one minute at a time. The drills that are longer in duration, and there are only a few, should never last more than five minutes and within these longer drills the players always switch roles or skills after one minute.

Chapter Two

Fitting Two-Minute Intensity Drills Into Practice Sessions

Planning effective, quality practice sessions is a topic that can fill an entire book. This chapter focuses solely on using two-minute intensity drills effectively as part of an overall well planned practice session.

Here are guidelines for using two-minute intensity drills in daily practice sessions:

When building intensity, start with short bouts and increase the length over time.

Limit use to no more than three consecutive two-minute intensity drills at a time.

Use consecutive intensity drills for no more than five minutes total at one time.

Rest has to be factored into practice sessions.

Insert intensity drills to change the pace of practice physically.

Insert intensity drills to change the pace of practice mentally.

Limit individual drills to 3-5 minutes.

Limit team concept drills to 8-10 minutes.

Always change drills, regardless of drill after 10 minutes.

If more time is needed for a specific item, split the time into multiple segments.

When building intensity, start with short bouts and increase the length over time.

Physically player’s bodies cannot sustain intense physical effort over prolong periods of time. Players also have difficulty maintaining the mental effort required to perform a high intensity task over long periods of time.

Like nearly every other physical and mental task, repetition combined with increasing the length of duration the task must be performed gradually over time will allow players to increase their stamina, both mental and physical, in performing the task.

Let’s use as an example one of the drills listed in this book, the 4/4/4 drill. This drill combines placing extreme, relentless pressure on the ball for a total of 12 seconds with handling the ball under extreme ball pressure for 12 seconds.

Each pair of players takes one turn on offense and then one turn on defense. If each player takes two turns each on offense and defense a total 48 to 52 seconds will have elapsed.

Physically and mentally the players will have exerted a