Coaching Youth Basketball - Spring Edition

We had tryouts for our spring team last week. What you do with your youth team will effect your kids potential for making a team like this. Let me give you an example.

We had one kid that could do some things on the floor, get to the basket a bit, shoot it some, decent rebounder. But he was hampered by his terrible habit of driving the lane and jump-stopping before going up to score. If you'll remember from a previous post, we talked about how the jumpstop is the most useless fundamental taught by youth coaches today. It looks good, it makes the kid look like he has been coached. But where is the benefit to using this tactic?

When someone jumpstops, that player immediately becomes weaker. The defense has time to catch up to the dribbler and the offense is usually left with only one option - pass. Perhaps even more important, the offense loses all of his aggressiveness, all of his "attack" mode when he jumpstops.

I'm not saying don't teach it. I'm not saying it will never be used. Here's the rule I use. "If you jumpstop, you had better be shooting."  Everything else comes from being on the run.