• Man to Man
• Zone
• Constant trap

Usually the better teams play man to man or constantly trap, while the weaker teams usually play zone to try and hide their deficiencies. Depending on your roster though, there are other interesting options that you might choose.

Point 4 Defense

Have you heard of a Box and 1? This is the opposite of that. Basically, what you do is put your tallest player in the middle of the lane on defense. Their sole goal is to stop layups and get rebounds, basically providing a help player at all times on close shots. They also act as intimidation for driving to the basket as usually they can block some shots if they’re tall enough.

The other 4 players then pick up their players man to man. But you’re saying, “One person will be wide open!”…exactly. Figure out their weakest player (or person who just cranks bad shots) and just leave him open. Let him shoot them completely out of the game. A lot of teams have a weak player that you can use against.

I made a video about it below:

Point 4 Trapping Defense

So you’re playing a team that has some inside players but has some weaker guards. This makes it hard to guard them inside as they have a size mismatch, so they dominate you on the boards when you try and play man to man or zone as they just rebound every shot they miss.

The key with this is to never even let them get a shot off. You put your best defender out front, right at the half court mark. Your tallest defender back in the middle of the lane. Then when the point guard dribbles up across half court, you pressure him with a trap or double team, trying to get him to throw a bad pass (or just steal it from him outright). If you have a good defender out front, you can get steal after steal from them for fast break layups. This effective takes their height advantage out of the game, as they can’t get the ball to them in a position where they can score easily (if their tall guys do get the ball, it’s usually 20 feet from the basket, and they’re usually not very strong dribblers). And if you steal for fast breaks, that takes their height away on defense. It allows you to really ramp up the scoring against a team you might lose to playing a normal defense.

I’ve also played defenses where we intentionally leave someone open if they’re a particularly shot happy player who can’t make anything (you know, the kid who shoots every time he gets the ball no matter where on the court he is?). Just let them win the game for you. I’ve seen other coaches use this as well, it’s pretty effective if the other team’s player is significantly worse than the rest of their team.

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Keeping basketballs stats via app

There are a few really good apps out there for keeping stats.  The one I’ve used the most is BreakthruStats on my iphone.  It does all the normal stats + shot charts + multiple games.  I’ve been really happy with it so far, but in a game time situation it’s really hard to keep up with everything when you have turnover/steal then missed layup and then rebound and another missed shot, etc, all in a 5 second period.  Because of this, I’ve really kind of given up on trying to keep stats realtime.  Plus being the coach most of the time means it’s almost impossible for me to do it during the game.

There’s another app out there that people recommend called “”.  I haven’t used it personally, but one of the things it features is a real time scoreboard for those not at the game.  I’m not sure how many people would actually follow along with that though, if you’re that into it that you’re following along on your phone, you might as well have that other person tape the game for you so you can watch it later.

Keeping basketball stats via film

If you’ve seen my other article “How to film youth basketball games the easy way” you know that it’s fairly easy to setup a wide angle lens camera on the side of the court and capture everything except for the far corners.  This makes it really easy to take stats after the game since you can pause and catch up when you get behind.  The disadvantage is that it takes an extra hour to do it this way, and if you’re really busy this can be a pain.  I don’t mind it though, especially now that I’m using the Breakthru basketball app.  I originally was using paper as you can see below:

It’s much organized through the app though, below is a printout of a game we played:

Obviously the app is a lot cleaner and easier to manage.  One thing about the app that is kind of a pain though is initial email setup to get the stats.  If your email isn’t setup on your phone, then you have to go through some menus to set it up, and even then it probably won’t work.  I basically had to turn off my phone and then turn it back on sometimes to get the stat emails to work properly.  I think part of the problem is that they tried to use the built in email stuff from Apple (so they could get your email address as well) and it just doesn’t work the greatest.

Conclusion

So my recommendation is to tape the games and then take stats with an app of your choosing.  That way you’ll have the games for the future when they get older and you’ll be able to enjoy the game a lot more in the moment.  If you’re constantly trying to hit your phone for stats, that isn’t going to be much fun unfortunately.  Check out my filming article for tips on how to make it a lot easier to tape games than sitting there with a video camera going back and forth.  Hopefully all these tips will make it easier to take youth basketball stats.

The post Keeping youth basketball stats appeared first on Master Basketball.

Season 2

The next season I got a little wiser with the competition, and made it the ‘5000 shot club’.  Whoever shot 5000 shots would get a big trophy, and if you shot 3000 you would get a little trophy.  That seemed to work better in that if you couldn’t count, you would only screw me out of a trophy and not another kid.    That’s the method I’m going to use going forward for sure to eliminate the counting problem from the first year.  Here’s a couple pictures of the trophies I handed out both years.

The first year I also handed out gift cards to whoever shot the most shots that week.  It actually worked quite well but got a little expensive so I decided not to do it the next year.  If I had unlimited resources it was worth doing though too, although the same kid ‘counting’ issue could crop up.

Wrapup

Just wanted to share one of the methods than can be used to inspire your team to practice.  Btw, the trophies shown in the pictures were $20 apiece, not bad at all for such a big trophy.  One thing I didn’t understand before I did this contest was how cheap trophies are, I always thought they were like $50 for the large ones, not true at all.

I think this year I’ll probably do the same thing as last year, where I gave out the big trophies for 5000 shots and the smaller trophies for 3000 shots.  I’m also trying to think of some additional goals for the players other than shots, but it’s more difficult because counting dribbles and things like that are a lot harder to do.  If I had unlimited practice time I’d probably make skill competitions for people to ‘graduate’ from and move to the next level but I’ve never had enough time to actually do that.  In most practices we have just enough time to do basic dribbling, layups, etc.

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