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February 8, 2018

Making time for skill development in practice

by Kyle Ohman, Orlando, Florida

At the beginning of the season, you have many different things you must implement into your basketball practices, and unless you are fortunate enough to have a core group of returners to your program, you may have to reteach everything. You have to b...


January 29, 2018

Psychologically healing injured athletes

by Kelsey Griffith, columnist

Because of the high demands placed on elite athletes, injury is virtually inescapable. With increasing early sport specialization comes a particular vulnerability to developmental and overuse injuries. In 2013, an estimated 27 million athletes betw...


October 30, 2017

Teaching your players to get tough

by Kevin Hoffman, Editorial Director

The most important virtue for any basketball player is talent. But what’s talent without the competitive spirit, or toughness, that consistently motivates your team and drives it to victory? Teaching your team to play tough and battle during every...


September 6, 2017

Team culture wins the locker room

by Matt Richards

We spend countless hours on player evaluations, recruitment, practice preparation, scouting and film breakdown. Those tasks are time consuming but also necessary for our teams to be prepared and successful. But how much time do you spend fostering te...


essentials
August 25, 2017

‘You… and Your Program:’ Five valuable lessons for athletes

by Dick Luther, contributing writer

As coaches, we often fail to define what we actually mean with the terminology in our programs. I’m no different. During many years of coaching, I assumed players understood the meaning behind my words and phrases. For those who make the same mist...


August 9, 2017

‘The Freak’ defense slows opposing offenses

by Ryan Freeman, Burlington Williams High School, North Carolina

We have all tried gimmick defenses to steal possessions or slow down the opposition’s best player. “The Freak” defense is a modified triangle-and-two or box-and-one, depending on how you implement it into your defensive arsenal. The defense wo...


July 24, 2017

Drills to teach the single-post offense

by Michael Murphy, contributing writer

Almost all our team shooting drills will incorporate actions or concepts out of our single-post offense. Practicing the field goals you attempt in a game will only increase your shooting percentage. Furthermore, the proper execution of these breakdow...


May 22, 2017

6 keys to maximizing your assistant coaches

A characteristic of good basketball programs is that they have great assistant coaches on all levels. Assistants play a vital role in a team’s success. There were certain qualities I looked for in assistants, and it’s imperative to have a meeting...


January 22, 2017

1-on-1 with skills guru Ryan Goodson

Since 2009, Goodson has traveled worldwide and trained more than 15,000 players from the youth to the professional levels. He even worked with two-time NBA MVP Stephen Curry and directed Curry’s Skills Academy in 2011. Winning Hoops recently caugh...


September 19, 2016

11 myths about free-throw shooting

College teams average about 68 percent, and professional players are all the way up to a whopping 72 percent. That means that there is only about a 7-percent difference between a highly paid professional and the teenager down the street who plays fo...