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Making time for skill development in practice
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...

Psychologically healing injured athletes
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...

Teaching your players to get tough
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...

Team culture wins the locker room
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...

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

‘The Freak’ defense slows opposing offenses
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...

Drills to teach the single-post offense
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...

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...

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...

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...