🔎Our U11 practices start with free play...here's how & why. 👉Problem: Our players are inexperienced and don’t free play on their own. 💡Coaches Role: Create an environment in which players grow. A thread.

Knowing the problem & my role in the solution, I created a free play start & end to practice. One of the key parts of the learning process = Helping players become more aware of themselves & their surroundings by paying attention to what they see, hear, & feel.

It is my responsibility to maximize those possibilities by creating a representative learning environment. 👉How does it work? If our allotted practice time is an hour and a half, the first 15 minutes are designated as free play time.

When 1 player arrives they get a ball & practice on their own. As soon as another player arrives they self-organize into game based free play. For example, if my daughters (2) arrive first, they play 1v1. Another player arrives they play 1v2 or 2v1, another arrives 2v2 etc.

In addition to free play, at the end of practice…we also prescribe tasks - what we call “homework” - where players have a ball & work on coming up with their own solution. We also encourage/demonstrate a task to lead themselves on at home.

Why Free Play? 💡Learning skills is not the process of repeating a solution, it is repeating the process of finding a solution. Our players are inexperienced so we try to provide experiences with variable matchups, advantages, disadvantages & neutral situations.

Players get to explore and self discover without the constraints of specific coaching. Plus they get to self-organize, lead & follow, & manage themselves and handle any conflicts that arise.

Why does it work? Fun is improving. Fun is competing. Fun is belonging. Since my goal is to connect players with the joy of playing a game while still improving & competing, I found one of the best ways to do so is to provide them a judgment free environment to play basketball.

My Role: I observe but I don’t interact beyond my greeting players as they arrive. This is their time. My observations show me what concepts need more or less attention during the body of practice & I can create the scenarios for players to explore needs improvements areas.

The rest of the practice benefits because players have already eaten their “dessert” & are excited to play basketball in a coach led environmental. We all benefit because I can connect & reconnect concepts I observed during free play.

🏀 "The kids love it. I have kids fighting over who can get here earliest to get shots off before school." – Coach Garrison When passion meets performance, Noah Backboard makes it happen. Turn practice into obsession with shot-tracking that players can’t get enough of.

@AlexJSarama Recently told somebody that you will hear coaches say kids don't play pick-up basketball any more, so we structure a lot of our practices with a pick-up style environment.