Turning back the clock on basketball skill development

Let me paint you a picture. You be the basketball player. You’re either a middle school player or a high school player, it doesn’t matter. It’s a Friday night in the beginning of March and the final buzzer has sounded on the last game of your school basketball season. You leave the gym, go home and start thinking about what you could have done better as a team and what you could have done better as an individual to help your team. After mulling over this for a couple of hours or perhaps a couple of days, you go on with your daily routine of life.

On Tuesday of the next week, your phone rings. It’s your AAU coach. “Our first tournament is this weekend,” he says. Your school season has ended less than a week ago and now it’s time to start playing games again…and again…and again. This is your “off-season” for the next four months, every weekend.

This picture is exactly what has happened to our youth basketball players in the United States. Instead of utilizing the off-season to develop individual skills that will benefit the school team next season, our young players go from in-season games to off-season games, never devoting time to fundamental development. Every weekend during the “off-season”, it’s another tournament with the chance to win another trophy. And for what?

The fact is, players do not develop their individual skills by playing games. The point of playing games is to win. So as a player, if I want to play and want to help my team win, I’m only going to do things on the court I know I can be successful at. That’s why most of the incredible athletes playing in the NBA today don’t shoot the ball very well. They’ve always used their athletic ability to succeed and didn’t spend time in the offseason as young players working on shooting and other essential fundamentals.

Instead our young NBA superstars are products of the travel team basketball system that promotes game play year-round and makes winning the only priority. Could you imagine if a player like Tracy McGrady had the fundamentals, footwork and body coordination of players like Steve Nash or Dirk Nowitski? Talk about your ultimate basketball player!!

My point is that we need to turn back the clock and start focusing less on games and more on skill development. And this needs to start with our young players. The mindset of basketball has to change in our country before this can happen but not only do I want it to happen, I firmly believe that it can happen. It’s time to bring basketball back to the basics.

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