Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball - Keith Miniscalco and Greg Kot

Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball

by Keith Miniscalco and Greg Kot

NEW, 184 pages

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About Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball

You volunteered to coach the basketball team, but are you really ready? How will you teach the fundamental skills, run effective practices, and harness the energy of your young team? Fear not: Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball has the answers.

In Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball, longtime coaches Keith Miniscalco and Greg Kot share their experience and provide advice you can rely on from first practice to final shot. From evaluating players’ skills and establishing realistic goals to in-game coaching tips, it’s all here—the drills, the plays, the fun.

Develop your team’s dribbling, passing, shooting, and rebounding skills with the Survival Guide’s collection of the game’s best youth drills. For plays and sets that young teams can actually run, flip to the Survival Guide’s offensive and defensive playbook. And to get the most out of every practice, follow the ready-to-use practice plans.

Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball has everything you need for a rewarding and productive season.

About Keith Miniscalco

With 19 years of youth basketball coaching experience and 8 years of coaching high school, Coach Keith Miniscalco knows how to develop youth players to excel at all levels. He has coached both boys and girls in several acclaimed Chicago park district and youth school leagues, including Our Lady of Lourdes and Queen of All Saints grade schools, Loyola Academy High School, and his own highly respected Over the Edge youth basketball travel program. He cofounded and currently runs Over the Edge in Chicago. The program's goal is to prepare youth-level players for high school competition. It has seen great success and has proven to be extremely effective for young athletes who wish to continue with competitive basketball. In 2008 Coach Miniscalco was named the boy's varsity coach at Northside College Preparatory in Chicago. He lives in Chicago.

About Greg Kot

A full-time music critic for the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot fills much of his spare time coaching with Miniscalco in their Over the Edge program for youth basketball players. An accomplished writer, Kot has been the Chicago Tribune's pop critic since 1990. He is a regular contributor to numerous national publications, including Rolling Stone, and cohosts the nationally syndicated radio show Sound Opinions on public radio. He authored the acclaimed rock biography Wilco: Learning How to Die in 2004 for Broadway Books, and his next book, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music, will be published by Scribner in 2009. Kot lives in Chicago.

Reviews

"Keith and Greg are to be congratulated for providing a simplified book of basketball skills, drills, techniques, and plays for youth basketball. With this survival guide, your season will be more productive and enjoyable for you and your players."

Dick Baumgartner
Director of Dick Baumgartner's Shooting Camp

"Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball is a wonderful book that provides insight, concepts, humor, and truth--which have all been tested. It is a must-read."

Tanya Johnson
Head Coach of Loyola Academy's Varsity Basketball

“Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball is a crash course in how to teach the basic technical skills of basketball. It's a must-have for introducing young players to baseline basketball Xs and Os.”

Amy Tocco
Executive Director of the American Sport Education Program

About Basketball

Basketball is a team sport in which two teams of five players try to score points by throwing or "shooting" a ball through the top of a basketball hoop while following a set of rules. Basketball is one of the world's most popular and widely viewed sport.

A regulation basketball hoop consists of a rim 18 inches (45.7 cm) in diameter and 10 feet (3.05 m) high mounted to a backboard. A team can score a field goal by shooting the ball through the hoop during regular play. A field goal scores two points for the shooting team if a player is touching or closer to the hoop than the three-point line, and three points (a "3 pointer") if the player is "outside" the three-point line. The team with more points at the end of the game wins, but additional time (overtime) may be issued when the game ends with a tie. The ball can be advanced on the court by bouncing it while walking or running (dribbling) or passing it to a teammate. It is a violation (traveling) to walk with the ball, carry it, or to double dribble (to hold the ball and then resume dribbling).

Various violations are generally called "fouls". Disruptive physical contact (a personal foul) is penalized, and a free throw is usually awarded to an offensive player if he is fouled while shooting the ball. A technical foul may also be issued when certain infractions occur, most commonly for unsportsmanlike conduct on the part of a player or coach. A technical foul gives the opposing team a free throw.

Basketball has evolved many commonly used techniques of shooting, passing, and dribbling, as well as specialized player positions and offensive and defensive structures (player positioning) and techniques. Typically, the tallest members of a team will play "center", "small forward", or "power forward" positions, while shorter players or those who possess the best ball handling skills and speed play "point guard" or "shooting guard".

While competitive basketball is carefully regulated, numerous variations of basketball have developed for casual play. Competitive basketball is primarily an indoor sport played on carefully marked and maintained basketball courts, but less regulated variations are often played outdoors in both inner city and rural areas.

The strategies also evolve with the game. In the 1990s and early 2000s, teams played with more "isolation". Teams that had one superstar would let one player, usually the point guard or shooting guard, run most of the offense while the other four offensive players get out of his/her way. Nowadays, teams tend to play with more teamwork. The "Center" position has evolved to become more of a taller "Small Forward" position. Since teams play more teamwork, ball movement has evolved with the game, and more jump shots have been taken as a result.

There are two main defensive strategies: zone defense and man-to-man defense. In a zone defense, each player is assigned to guard a specific area of the court. In a man-to-man defense, each defensive player guards a specific opponent. Man-to-man defense is generally preferred at higher levels of competition, as it is intuitively easier to understand and avoids mismatches between players who play different positions. However, zone defenses are sometimes used in particular situations or simply to confuse the offense with an unexpected look.

Offensive plays are more varied, normally involving planned passes and movement by players without the ball. A quick movement by an offensive player without the ball to gain an advantageous position is a cut. A legal attempt by an offensive player to stop an opponent from guarding a teammate, by standing in the defender's way such that the teammate cuts next to him, is a screen or pick. The two plays are combined in the pick and roll, in which a player sets a pick and then "rolls" away from the pick towards the basket. Screens and cuts are very important in offensive plays; these allow the quick passes and teamwork which can lead to a successful basket. Teams almost always have several offensive plays planned to ensure their movement is not predictable. On court, the point guard is usually responsible for indicating which play will occur.

Defensive and offensive structures, and positions, are more emphasized in higher levels in basketball; it is these that a coach normally requests a time-out to discuss.

Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball