What are they learning here? In a rare case where you’re in a tournament and are pressing to try to slow a team down that is at your level, okay fine. Press away. When you’re playing the in-school schedule and know a team is no good, and you press them just because you can, you’re making your players worse. It becomes awkward for all of the adults watching, the opposing coach definitely hates you, and your stud players are wasting their time.

Most elementary leagues don’t allow pressing because of people like this. But still, you have these coaches that let them sit at half court and trap against CLEARLY weaker competition. It has nothing to do with “well they gotta get better” when for many of them it can be their first time playing basketball. Not every kid goes to every super awesome all star elite basketball camp and has a team of studs. If your team is as good as you perceive them to be, teach them how to defend in the half court, how to rotate in shell defense, how to box out and rebound and allow them to work on half court execution.

When I coached JR High, I would rarely press with my 8th graders (situationally) and basically never with my 7th graders. I had teams that could’ve won their games by a bigger margin had we done that, but you gotta think big picture. It hurts them as they get older because you now believe you’re a better team than you are and the players are worse at running a half court offense or even a good transition offense after playing good defense. If you’ve got a team that is athletic and can get out and run, teach them transition offense and how to run lanes and pass the ball up the floor. Don’t just sit and press and shoot layups. Make your guys earn the chance to fast-break by defending their butts off and then getting out in the open court and running.