Hello, I wanted to get some advice or what you offer to help make my first season Head coaching 7th grade girls basketball to go smoothly. It is a short season so I need simple offense defense inbounds plays etc.

I want to prove to myself I "got this".

Thanks for any help.

Connie

Hey Connie!

Well, I'll step out on a limb and say "you've got this", simply because you're reaching out for advice. Good stuff on this site.

Wondering if we're talking more casual recreational type league here or a competitive league with tryouts?

Philosophy
First thing I would do is establish a coaching philosophy. This is one of the most underrated things a new coach can do. It doesn't have to be complicated, you don't have to spend hours developing one, it can be tweaked as you go along, but it can come in extremely handy when situations arise during the season.
https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/coaching/coaching_philosophy.html

Parents
Decide how you will communicate with your parents. I'm a big advocate of being up front before the season begins and making sure everything is as crystal clear as possible. I try to make it simple. They know the key points of my coaching philosophy, my expectations of the players with regards to practice (e.g., being on time, giving notice in a specific way if they can't make it), my expectations with the parents (e.g., no yelling at the refs, no coaching your kids from the sidelines, etc.), how we will communicate during the season regarding games, practices, schedule changes (e.g., text, email, phone) and what to do if they have a concern.
https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/coaching/dealing-with-parents.html

Assistant
If you don't have an assistant coach, I'd highly recommend considering it. This will help give you someone to help with practices, parents and someone to keep you from throwing that chair on the floor during a game.

Practices
I think it's important to have written practices plans with times written by the drills or activity with extra drills listed at the bottom just in case. You can have a few points you want to emphasize next to each drill as reminders. The plan isn't meant to be rigid, but more of a guideline. The times are there to help you keep the practice moving. It can be easy to find yourself getting carried away on one or two drills with tons of concepts you didn't cover.

Keep the practices challenging, but also throw in some fun. It could be drill A is tough physically and mentally so you add a fun drill after that one. "If you give me 100% for the next minute, we'll do fun drill B".

I'd go with a 5 out motion offense and play M2M defense.

I'll let others chime in here and see how the thread progresses. Don't want to dump tons of info in the first post here.

You can see what we do with our teams here. Very similar from 3rd grade to high school. I would do something similar with 7th graders.

http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/haefner/what-we-did-with-our-3rd-grade-boys-team-offense-defense-drills-plays/

http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/haefner/what-we-did-with-our-5th-grade-girls-team-offense-defense-drills-and-plays/

http://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/haefner/what-we-did-with-our-sophomore-boys-basketball-team-offense-defense-drills-plays/

Focus on skills and keep things simple. Good luck!