Improving Basketball Skills

As you work on improving basketball skills on your team, realize that you will go through a very normal emotion – frustration.

Since each player will proceed through the basketball skill development process at different speeds, be sure to be patient with your team.

Once you’ve shown them the fundamentals of each skill, it’s now your job to help them on basketball skill improvement.

As your team works on improving basketball skills, they will make mistakes.

Sometimes it’s hard for a coach to see players repeating the same mistakes and it can seem like they aren’t paying attention.

Of course, it’s easy when players get things right. You say something positive and smile to give re-inforcement.

By the way, would you like to learn how to dramatically increase your focus on improving basketball skills without ingesting a pill or drink?


Here are some pointers on how to take your team from making errors to improving basketball skills well:

1) – Realize that getting frustrated sometimes is normal. Be sure to control that emotion and stay positive with your kids at all times.

2) – Break everything up into smaller sections. Let’s say you observe a player setting up correctly for a jump shot, but then doesn’t follow through. Praise and re-inforce the set-up and then teach and work on the follow through.

3) – Be sure to have your players work on one aspect of each skill at a time. For instance, with dribbling, have your players practice keeping the ball low without worrying about keeping the ball close to the body. Once they’ve mastered bouncing at the correct height, then have them master keeping it close and protected. You don’t want to over-whelm them while improving basketball skills.

4) – Realize that as players work on new basketball skill development, another basketball skill they have perfected may suffer temporarily as they focus on the new one. This is normal. Once the new skill is mastered, allow them time to integrate it with the old skill.

5) – Adjust your re-inforcement and rewarding. Once your players become very good at a skill, then reward and re-inforce the best examples. This way, you get them to improve on the basics by getting them to focus on being superior, not average.