1v1 Ball in the Box
🏀 In-Season: The Idaho Basketball Coaching Podcast
Our guiding vision this year is to “Improve Each Day, And Have Fun Doing It.”
Thanks to people like Chris Oliver, Alex Sarama, Jamie Smith and many other coaches out there, our goal is to create a practice environment where players … and coaches! … can work hard while having a good time.
The music is loud and played throughout practice. The girls are typically moving non-stop and getting lots of reps. We’ve incorporated what we called Highlander Free Throw shooting drill — because there can only be one Highlander! — that gets the kids pumped.
We also begin practices with a competitive warm-up activity that emphasizes movement, usually without a basketball. The girls LOVE it!
We’ve noticed that it really gets the energy going to start a practice and carries over into the other drills. To keep it fresh, we try to do a different activity each day. In fact, an assistant coach shared an Instagram reel that inspired the warm-up activity we did the other day. She told the players, “this looked like a Coach Love drill.”
Here’s a game from Jamie Smith that I learned on his Immersion Video series. We simple call it 1v1 Ball In The Box. It’s pretty simple.
We used a tennis ball, a box, and some pennies for flags.
A coach (or player not participating) tosses out the tennis ball to a random location for the offensive player to track down. The game starts it when the offensive player has the tennis ball.
The offensive player scores by putting the tennis ball into the box. (It has to stay in the box for the point.)
The defense can score by getting the ball before it goes in the box (after the offense touches it), or by touching the offensive player with two hand and then grabbing their flag.
We started 1v1 and then went to 2v2, which Jamie Smith demonstrates in his video.
Later, we incorporated a basketball and the offensive player had to dribble it to the box. Because it was the first day and we want players to explore, we didn’t call travels or double dribbles. In the future we will.
This was actually the second activity we did on the first day of practice and it really set the tone for a day of improving and having fun doing it.
NOTE: Camera angle makes it hard (impossible on one end) to see the box in the video, but you should get the idea.
