Sometime is not what you say, but what you do as a coach that impacts your team and impacts your practices. All coaches want their teams to have high energy practices.
I believe the first 20 minutes of every practice are important for determining what the practice will be like. Here are two little things that I felt helped me create a high performance practice.
Get After It In the First Minute- If we were scheduled to practice at 4:00pm, our players knew that at 4:00pm they were expected to have their shoes on, their practice gear on, and they were expected to be doing our Prepractice Routine.
The message to the players was that we don’t waste time. I wanted to have something the players knew they were going to do immediately. The idea was that is was no longer “their time”, it was the “team’s time” now.
Go- When you get done with your warmup, do something that is high intensity. It can be a competitive shooting drills that requires movement or a drill that gets you going up and down the court. I liked to do some competitive transition work- maybe just making layups, timed 5 on 0, or 3 on 2. The point is to set a tone.
Attention Getter- This is something that I did only 3-4 times the entire year. It was completely premeditated on my part. I chose to do this on a practice day that I wanted to have a good, intense practice.
At some point in the first 20-30 minutes, I would stop practice and say, “Everybody on the line.”
I would have the players run one down and back. Usually we only did one trip, or sometimes I might for effect pause and tell them, “Do it again, but do it hard this time.”
When they got back, I would simply say, “We MUST have a good practice tonight. I am not going to tolerate average tonight.”
I did not yell or scream. I wanted to come across as being unhappy and that I meant business. I am sure the players thought I was in a bad mood. Or the players assumed it was a reaction to them not practicing hard enough.
The following is a detailed look at practice intensity.
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