Basketball Practice Plan: Template, Youth Plans and Examples

A basketball practice plan is a written script for one session. It names each block, puts a clock on it and says what the coach wants players to learn. This guide gives a template you can copy, example plans by age from age 5 up to high school, the practice orders of several well-known coaches, rules for timing and scoring drills and the points where coaches disagree. It also covers how a plan changes between the early season and the middle of it.

Basketball Practice Plan Template

The three-column plan keeps to time, drill and coaching points, and it takes 15 to 20 minutes to fill out the night before. A longer layout adds a goal for each block and the people running it. Copy the table below into a document and fill it in.

Date ______   Team ______   Emphasis for today (one) ______________________   Total minutes ____

After practice. Was it good or bad? ______ What can we learn? ______ How will we improve the next one? ______

Here is the same layout filled in with a two-hour block order. The clock times are the running total of its minutes.

Above the table, write the single emphasis for the day and the staff job for each block. Below it, ask three questions after practice. Was it good or bad, what can you learn from it and how will you improve the next one? Phil Martelli plans in three layers, a weekly plan, a daily plan and the clock-by-clock schedule. George Raveling's checklist for a drill is a name, a purpose, a goal, a progression, a time and a way to compete. Coaches publish their own blank sheets.

Rules That Work in Any Practice Plan

• Write it, then rewrite it. Set the goals first and then pick drills. Plan the teams, the rotations, the transitions and the water breaks. John Wooden spent two hours each morning with his staff planning and wrote each session on cards down to the minute. Mike Krzyzewski planned the week two weeks ahead and finished the daily plan each night.
• One emphasis a day. Bob Knight picks the key thing for each practice. Don Meyer allows two emphases at most.
• Start on time and never stop. Jeff Van Gundy's rule is that once practice starts it never stops. Knight wants players in the next drill before the coach finishes explaining it.
• Put drills on a visible clock. Knight caps individual drills at 5 minutes and team drills at 10, because players go through the motions when a drill runs long. Vance Walberg capped any drill at 6 minutes and Bob Hurley keeps most drills in the 5 to 10 minute range.
• Hard and new early. Put new and hard material early when concentration is highest, follow hard drills with easier ones and end on something players enjoy. John Wooden's plan rules say the same.
• Nobody stands. Krzyzewski counts coaches, baskets and managers before planning, so one player is never taught while eleven stand. Martelli delegates roles to assistants so the head coach can observe, correct and teach instead of running every station.
• Name every drill. A named drill needs no explanation after the first time. Martelli names drills to build a shared vocabulary, and the drill-bank approach indexes every drill by practice phase so a plan is built from a bank.
• Plan more than you need. Stan Van Gundy lists every drill with minutes at double or more the time he has and then cuts by priority. The buffer version saves 8 to 10 minutes in the plan so the coach can stay with a drill or leave it early as a reward.
• End it on purpose. Close every practice with a wrap-up. Hurley starts and ends with a meeting.
• Practice special situations. Martelli writes one situation a day on an index card, such as down four with seven seconds left, has different teams try it and then coaches it together. The late-game series version runs one, two, three and four point series at 5, 10, 20 and 30 seconds with six scenarios each.
• Teach across days. A three-day defensive install cycles through introduce, review and refine, and reinforce, and never introduces and refines the same skill on one day.

Youth Basketball Practice Plans by Age

Sharks and minnows. The minnows (1 to 5) dribble from the baseline while two sharks (X1 and X2) wait at half court.

Youth plans put skills first, games second and set plays last. The 50-25-25 split puts 50 percent on skill work, 25 percent team strategy and 25 percent small-sided games. It treats the strategy block as a ceiling, so unused time goes back to skill. The fundamentals-first split puts 80 to 90 percent of youth practice on fundamentals and about half at high school. A skill-heavy youth split puts 50 percent or more on skill and no more than 8 percent on team offense. The games-first view calls set plays unnecessary under age 10.

Triangle passing. The ball goes from the top station (1) to the left (2), across to the right (3) and back to the top station.

A youth basketball practice plan can be built the same way at any of these ages. Pick the shape from the table, put two or three of the drills in the skill block and finish with a small-sided game. Youth coaches also put one skill goal on top. For example, bringing the ball up against pressure is the goal in one plan for ages 7 to 10, and passing decisions plus transition defense are the two goals for ages 11 to 14. For drill ideas see Basketball Drills for Beginners, Basketball Drills and Games for Kids and Basketball Passing Drills. The Youth Basketball Coaching Guide covers the wider program.

Several youth programs allow only man-to-man in their plans and leave zones and presses for later. That affects what goes in the defense block of a youth plan.

High School and College Practice Orders

These are the orders published by coaches. They are examples, not a ladder. The table shows the sequence and the minutes where the coach gave them.

Three-man two-ball. The shooter (1) moves wing to wing, the passer (2) feeds from the free-throw line and the rebounder (3) works the lane. It is a shooting drill, so no three-second count applies.

Typical blocks fit the pictures on this page. A shooting block can use three-man two-ball. A defense block can use the shell drill. A transition block can use 3 on 2.

Shell drill, four on four. X2 guards the ball on the left wing, X5 denies the pass to the corner and X3 and X4 help on the weak side.

Three on two. 1 stops at the free-throw line and passes to 3 cutting to the rim while X1 steps up and X2 stays low.

Practice length shrinks with the age of the players and the point in the season. Kelvin Sampson practices 2.5 hours in October and 1.5 hours in January and February, with a time element on every drill. A shell block runs a 10-minute 4-on-4 block with one minute per segment. For the drill menus, see Shell Drill in Basketball and Offensive Breakdown Drills.

Scoring Drills and Consequences

• Score the rep. Nate Oats scores every rep at Alabama. A made three is +3, a made two +2, a putback +1 and a turnover -2, with turnovers charted and losers running.
• Validate the win. Make the winning team earn it with a made free throw.
• Announce the consequence before the drill. The timed-sprint view holds that a timed sprint works and a token down-and-back does not.
• Keep the criteria short. The innings version gives each drill point criteria and a number of innings, never more than three criteria, and posts a win sheet.

Where Coaches Differ

Early Season and In-Season Practice Plans

Many coaches build defense first in the preseason. Tarkanian gives roughly the opening three weeks of a five or six week preseason to individual defense with no ball, and John Brady says the first practices should be mostly defense because players think offensively by nature. An eight-week preseason install puts common drills, practice rules and man offense in weeks 8 and 7 before the season, adds zone offense, zone defense and pressing in week 6 and moves to breakdown work in weeks 5 and 4. Obradovic moves preseason from 70 percent conditioning in weeks 1 and 2 to 20 percent in week 7.

In season, the two-days-out version shows 10 to 12 minutes of opponent film two days out and adds a capped set of opponent actions to practice one day out. For plans that fit those phases see Basketball Early Season Practice Plan and Basketball In-Season Practice Structure. For pacing, read How to Maximize Practice Time for Efficiency, and see Common Practice Mistakes for what to avoid. The Practice Plans hub lists every practice page.

Questions Coaches Ask About a Basketball Practice Plan

More Guides From This Batch

• 1-2-2 Zone Defense: Rotations, Weak Spots and Drills
• Basketball Passing Drills for Beginners and Full Teams
• 2-2-1 Press: Setup, Traps, Rotations and Drills
• Technical Foul in Basketball: Rule, Penalties and Calls by Level

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