Basketball is a fun sport to play, however, you have to play smart. When you are on the court you have to have the tactics it takes to play. This means that you have to be on top of the game and you have to anticipate what the person on the other team is going to do so you can outsmart them when they go for this maneuver.
The first thing you need to do when you learn to develop your basic tactical skills is you first must learn how to make decisions. Teach your players and yourself how to guard or do as defined by the position you play. Always analyze as you play and look at what is going on around you. Go through the options that you are given at hand. A number of drills can be performed to see how the team would react then discuss where they might have went wrong or could have done better.
By doing scrimmages, you set the team up to practice against one another. When you do this though, you are helping them to learn the tactics that you teach them through practice. They can see mistakes as they are made. The players might even be able to help one another to show what is being done and what can be done to correct it.
Yet, as a coach your first reaction is going to be to question your players about what they just did in performing a specific action. If they make errors, lead them into telling them how to correct it. Helping your players with their decision making skills, you can offer feedback. This is their chance to decide if they are going to take the information given to them. It’s no longer that they know what they did was a simple mistake and could have been done differently.
There are a number of things that are available for coaches with assisting you in helping to develop these basic tactical skills. There are conferences that you can attend and can help you with this. There are also books that you can either buy or check out from the library, which can assist you with how you can develop for your team the basic tactical skills. There are many more options of ideas that you can get to help you with this. Do not ever fear that you won’t know how to help your team to learn this.
Depending on how long your players have been playing basketball will determine which sort of activities you will need in order to reinforce this for them. This is something that they will need. Most people do not think that basketball has a lot of tactics and strategy, but it has! Basketball, in a large part, is all about tactics and strategy, and it has to be taught. The earlier your players learn this, the sooner they will be better players and will be able to defend and do more as a team to win the overall game.
Picture credit: SD Dirk • Creative Commons Attribution