Ep 370 Should Saturday's Result Change Monday's Practice Plan?

⁠⁠nukehydration.com⁠⁠, or follow along on Instagram @nukehydration. Use Youthhoops15 for 15% off ⁠⁠TeachHoops.com⁠⁠ ⁠⁠CoachingYouthHoops.com⁠⁠ — practice plans, season resources, and the free tryout structure guide under the Free Resources menu ⁠⁠HeySami.com⁠⁠ — new text based youth sports organization tool (Sami with an i) The Hey Sami Podcast — available on Spotify, Apple, and anywhere you listen Questions for Hey Sami: ⁠⁠hey@heysami.com⁠⁠ Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook Group — search "Coaching Youth Hoops" on Facebook Show Notes The guys open by marveling that they are somewhere in the mid three hundreds on episode count, nearly four years of talking about youth basketball, and the Facebook group still produces questions nobody has asked before. Today's is one of those: do you adjust your practice plan based on how the last game went? You won big Saturday, or you got run out of the gym. Does Monday look different? That question assumes two things, as Coach Bill points out. One, that you have a practice plan at all. Two, that your plans are organized and follow a progression across the season. If either is missing, you know where to go. Thirty plus years at the high school level and Coach Collins is always adjusting, but not off the scoreboard. He adjusts off what the team did well and did not do well. In January it might be that they are not shooting, not getting to the help line, not hedging screens. Wins and losses do not drive that. Performance does. The mechanic is simple reallocation. If something is going well it earns less time, and those minutes move somewhere else. Take ten minutes off out of bounds work and move it to offensive floor balance. He compares it directly to teaching: if the class has quadratics down in one area but not another, you stop running examples on the part they own and spend the time on the part they do not. He also plants a warning flag. Go too far down this road and you are the dog chasing its tail. If every week is a reaction to the last thing that went wrong, you spend the season zigzagging and you are not going to like where you end up. Coach Bill's biggest change in the last two months was not triggered by a result. He realized he was holding his players back. He had decided a fifth grader should be able to do X and was capping them there, when what he was really capping was their basketball IQ. So he sped practice up significantly and started teaching advanced skills they genuinely struggle with. Pushing through the barrier instead of playing it safe. His week to week adjustments are smaller and follow the same "what did we do well" logic. After a recent tournament the problem was not ball handling, it was organization: kids clumping, not getting into the right spots in their sets against zone. So this week is more time on sets and more controlled five on five, less on ball handling. He is also asking a lot of them right now, running full court zone pressure out of a one two two and falling back into a three two, sometimes man. That kind of work requires a different type of practice than normal skills training. The start of practice does not move. Coach Bill's new fourth grade girls team does the same opening every single time: ball handling, then their layup drill. He showed up late to the gym recently and they had run the first ten minutes themselves. When he walked in they told him they had their fifty layups in and were ready to go. Fourth graders. That routine is worth protecting. The original question asked whether the adjustment should be more reps and volume or deliberate, slowed down instruction. The answer is that it depends on what you are fixing, and the real skill is pacing. Coach Bill's kids hate when he slows things down, because slowing down means more talking from him, whiteboard visuals, and a lot of questions. Other days he speeds practice up on purpose to put them under pressure. Practice is not one tempo, and knowing when to speed up, when to slow down, when to pile on reps, and when to pull back is a nuance you learn over time. Coach Collins goes in structured every time. He also estimates that roughly half the time the structure gets thrown out in the first five minutes, because Johnny had a bad day at school and Susie has something going on. Forty years and he never walked into a classroom without an idea, but he was always ready to pivot on a dime. You need the outline. You are allowed to deviate from it. That is exactly why having more planned than you can use matters, and how Coaching Youth Hoops started in the first place: Coach Bill had years of elaborate practice plans, other coaches laughed at how detailed they were, and Coach Collins told him to package them up so other youth coaches could use them. Pull a piece from practice three, a piece from practice seven, a piece from practice nine, and build what today's team actually needs. The guys added a future episode to the list: practice plan structur