Whistles Galore!

[coach101 0]

I recently took a group of 7&8 year old kids to a tournament. The kids had fun and managed to win a couple games but we were whistles sooooo many times for traveling. Particularly after we caught the pass and then made our first move. I am wondering if there any specific ballhandling drills that might help?

Also, we don't seem to come and meet passes very well. Any drills that would help in that area.

thanks

[Coach Rob 26]

I recently took a group of 7&8 year old kids to a tournament. The kids had fun and managed to win a couple games but we were whistles sooooo many times for traveling. Particularly after we caught the pass and then made our first move. I am wondering if there any specific ballhandling drills that might help?

Also, we don't seem to come and meet passes very well. Any drills that would help in that area.

thanks

One of the best ways I know to correct this problem is by getting with your refs during the regular season and ask them to call/teach about traveling & double dribbling in the games. I found that some refs would allow our kids and our opponents to slide on this which causes bad habits down the road. Calling traveling during your scrimmages will also help.

With regards to coming to meet the passes, a couple of drills that helped us were a scrimmage with no dribbling allowed. This forces players to work as a team and help out since the person with the ball is stuck. Another drill someone else mentioned on this thread that worked great for us was an inbound drill with two players on defense and two on offense. You basically work an inbound pass with one player throwing it in to his/her teammate and one defensive player on the throw-in player with the other player trying to get open. This works well using two coaches also, one for the throw-in and one guarding the throw-in, which gives you two kids trying to get open.

I used another simple drill having the player slide back and forth along the foul line with me passing. I would pass the ball ahead of them, making them go to the ball instead of standing in one place. They had to anticipate where I was going to throw the ball. You could also run this drill with someone guarding the player receiving the pass.

Passing is the number one skill we emphasize on our 7/8/9/10 yr old teams and it really pays off in the later games of our seasons. The best way I know to get better is to practice during a live game. Try getting a small low cost prize (we used parachute men, cost was about $12) as incentive for passing X number of passes during a game. Tell the kids they will get a special prize for passing it X amount of times. Our kids had to pass it at least 80 times (we started lower a few years ago) and ended up making 86 good passes. That's a huge amount of passes for 7/8 yr olds. There were a lot of interceptions and bad passes, but at least they passed it. I made sure the parents and kids knew that we would make mistakes which wasn't a huge deal. I find that these types of exercises during a live game really add emphasis to a skill. I try to do that early in the season and once towards the end. We tweak the passing each game and teach them to make good passes with the ultimate goal of having passing become second nature when they're on the court.

Hope this helps

CRob

[coach101 0]

CRob, this is incredibly helpful. Thanks for taking time out to help.

[Coach Rob 26]

Couple of other things that come to mind that helped us (this one depends upon how flexible your refs are) was to have them call 5 seconds. If a player held the ball for more than 5 seconds the ref would call it and turn the ball over to the other team. We would also do this in our scrimmages. Some of our younger players would get freaked out about making "the perfect pass" and hold the ball for an eternity, so this helped emphasize the importance of making quicker decisions.

Another drill the kids seemed to enjoy was splitting up into two circles (two teams) and competing with each other to see who could make the most passes in 30 seconds. I'd have a parent count the passes for each team and we told them no passes to the person right next to them. This was a great drill for speed, but it also could get out of control with the kids rushing passes and making their partner run for the ball which wasted time. It was a good teaching opportunity to stress the importance of quick but accurate passes.