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Show Notes
This one came straight out of the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group, and it lit the group up: how do you get kids to focus and concentrate during practice?
Coach Bill opens with what he calls the worst coaching experience of his twenty year career. He took over a CYO boys team that had no coach, a roster loaded with talent, and an attention span somewhere around zero. They could have won everything. Instead, he spent the season pulling his hair out. Coming right out of COVID, he felt the boys had been hit harder than the girls, and the lack of discipline was something no drill was going to fix on its own.
What made it worse is that his best lever was gone. In a CYO league with equal playing time, a kid could skip practice or goof off all week and still had to play. Take that away and, as Coach Bill puts it, the bench is a great teacher. Without it, he tried everything in the toolkit, including having one player run for an entire practice.
Coach Collins pushes the conversation toward the thing most coaches can control: the practice plan itself. Idle minds make idle players. If a kid stands still for more than thirty seconds, he is tugging a jersey, poking a teammate, or starting something. The fix is not more yelling, it is no dead time.
Eliminate the standing around. Keep everyone moving, everyone active, all the time. Most focus problems at the youth level are really pacing problems.
Give the hyper kids a job. Coach Collins always grabbed his most hyper players to be demonstrators. Coach Bill compares it to a classroom teacher making the disruptive kid the monitor. The naughty one goes right up front.
Teach in TikTok sized pieces. If you cannot get it across in thirty seconds, do not do it. Coach Bill draws one small piece of the offense on the whiteboard, sends them to go do it, then pauses and comes back for step two. When a high IQ kid asks what comes next, the answer is "let's just work on step one."
Attach consequences to the small stuff. Dribbling while you are talking gets one warning to hold the ball. After that, there are push ups. Kids learn quickly that their actions have a cost.
Use the pause and the repeat back. In a huddle, when eyes drift left and right and nobody is making contact, Coach Bill stops talking and looks at the player. If that does not land, he asks the kid to repeat what was just said.
Teach the cues, do not assume them. Coach Collins makes the point that a lot of these kids do not naturally read verbal and nonverbal cues. Teaching that is part of the job, not something to hand back to the parents.
Over plan every time. If you have ninety minutes, walk in with three hours ready. Something is going to blow up, something is going to land flat, and you never want fifteen minutes left with nothing to run.
You are not a full time third grade teacher who sees these kids from eight to three every day. You are showing up from work, twice a week, for an hour and a half, with a group of kids who are partly there because their parents needed the energy burned off before bedtime. Both coaches admit it: the parents of the kids who could not settle down were the ones you never saw in the gym.
Expectations also shift by age. What an eighth grader can hold onto is not what a third grader can, and you can stretch the teaching window longer when the group is genuinely focused. The tight structure is for the team that needs it.
Structure buys you focus. Consequences reinforce it. Teach in small pieces and never let the gym go quiet.
Have a question like this one? Bring it to the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group. That is where this episode came from.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
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