Practicing in "those gyms" that don't get taken care of

mhagness · **Posts:** 15

I am a Junior High coach and every year there are a few practices where we use the Armory in our town because of gym space when our Wrestling team has a match in town. This is your classic tile floor, two hoop gym, and unfortunately, the floor gets next to no work done to it. During the day the Armory is used as a daycare center and the gym gets used when the little ones have recess. We aren't allowed in there until 3:45 PM and even after sweeping the floor, it doesn't feel safe enough for me to do much full court stuff. The players slide on the floor and I don't want to risk injury if we're only going to be there 3-4 times a year at the most.

What I'm planning to do this year (I've only got 8 seventh graders on my team) is to run these days more like an off-season workout with skill development work, stationary stations, and to review OB plays/quick hitters. Anyone else run into this issue at your schools and have any other ideas?

JeffHaefner · **Posts:** 1280

Sorry for this late reply. We're just realizing there have been problems with our notification system. And there are many posts we didn't see to answer.

I often have small groups at practice and have to make the best of it. Here area few other ideas...

- break down pieces of your offense and defense and play small sided games. As an example, if we want to work on screening action, we might just use opposite lane line as out of bounds and say layups only until you screen away at least once. Nate Sanderson has a lot of ideas for small sided games in his videos.

- We'll practice BLOB plays 4v4 with me as the inbounds passer.

- Basically we just play tons of small sided games to practice skills, offense, defense, rebounding and decision making. You can find a decent number of drill ideas here:
https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/drills/basketballdrills.html

mhagness · **Posts:** 15

JeffHaefner wrote:

Sorry for this late reply. We're just realizing there have been problems with our notification system. And there are many posts we didn't see to answer.

I often have small groups at practice and have to make the best of it. Here area few other ideas...

- break down pieces of your offense and defense and play small sided games. As an example, if we want to work on screening action, we might just use opposite lane line as out of bounds and say layups only until you screen away at least once. Nate Sanderson has a lot of ideas for small sided games in his videos.

- We'll practice BLOB plays 4v4 with me as the inbounds passer.

- Basically we just play tons of small sided games to practice skills, offense, defense, rebounding and decision making. You can find a decent number of drill ideas here:
https://www.breakthroughbasketball.com/drills/basketballdrills.html

Thanks for the guidance, Jeff. I did recently buy Nate’s system and have gotten through about half of the videos. I love those concepts and ideas so far and will 100% implement them into my practices going forward. As far as this year went, we only had one early season practice there, so the dreaded armory wasn’t as big an issue as I thought!