Basketball inbound plays for youth: two plays, not twelve

Your team had the ball out of bounds under their own basket last Saturday. You called the play. The kid with the ball held it above her head, looked at the referee, looked at the four defenders in front of her, and threw it to the only part of the court with nobody in it. You called the same play in the fourth quarter and the same thing happened.

Search this and you get five plays, or eight, or twelve. Basketball For Coaches has five with diagrams and coaching points, and they are good plays. The Hoops Geek folds three inbound plays into a list of ten easy plays and adds a whole-part-whole teaching method. Neither page tells you the thing that decides whether any of them work, which is that the play is almost never what broke.

Keep a tally of your own inbound turnovers for one game. Over a U12 season mine came out roughly in thirds: a pass thrown into traffic, a five-second call, and a catch the receiver did not hold. The play design was the problem about once a month. So this is the inbounder first, then two plays, and nothing else until those two work.

Fix the inbounder before you teach a play

The inbounder has three jobs and most kids have been taught none of them.

Slap the ball. Nothing moves until the ball is slapped. Not the screen, not the cut. Nine-year-olds start cutting the moment the referee hands the ball over, so by the time the inbounder has looked up, every cut has already been made and covered. One loud slap, then everyone goes.

Count out loud. In practice, have the inbounder say "one, two, three" out loud. You get five seconds. Kids have no idea what five seconds feels like, and the ones who panic are panicking at about second two. Hearing themselves reach three with the ball still in their hands is the fastest cure I have found.

Name the safety valve before the ball is live. One player, every time, is not in the play. Their job is to stand where nobody else is, usually high and wide, and to be there at second three whether anything else worked or not. Say it to them out loud: "You are not in this play. You are the bail-out." That one instruction removes most five-second calls.

Ten minutes on those three, once, with no plays and no defence. Just the ball out of bounds and the whole squad taking turns inbounding. Then put a defender on the ball so it gets uncomfortable.

The catching half matters as much. If your receivers cannot land and hold the ball with someone on them, the play is irrelevant. Jump Stop & Pivot is the U8 to U12 version, run off a chair, six minutes. Catch Under Pressure: Two Outlets is the live version and it is tagged U14 and up for a reason. Under 12, keep the chair.

One rules note worth getting straight before game day. After a made basket your inbounder can move along the baseline. After a dead ball or a timeout they cannot. Junior referees enforce this inconsistently, so ask yours before tip-off rather than finding out in the third quarter.

Play one: baseline, box, screen down

Four players in a box. Two on the blocks, two on the elbows. Inbounder under the ring.

On the slap, both elbow players screen down for the player on the block below them. Both block players come up off the screen. The ball-side cutter goes first and comes to the elbow. The weak-side cutter goes second and cuts to the rim, not the elbow. After screening, both screeners step out to the corners and show their hands.

That gives you two scoring looks and two bail-outs from one set, and because it is symmetrical there is no left side and right side to remember. At U12 that is worth more than a cleverer play.

Three things that break it.

1. The screens move. Kids set a screen while still walking, which is a foul and also useless. The screener has to arrive first, stop, and be still for a count of one before the cutter leaves. Drill the stopping, not the screening. Cross-Screen Seal and Feed is the U14 version of getting this legal.
2. Both cutters arrive in the same spot. If nobody has told them the order, both come to the ball-side elbow and you have four bodies in two square metres. Ball side first and high, weak side second and to the rim. Say the order every single rep.
3. The corners watch. Once the play "works" the screeners stop stepping out, which means on the night it does not work you have no bail-out. Make the corner step-out part of the rep, not an extra.

Play two: sideline, release first

Inbounder on the sideline near the top of the key. Three players stacked in a short line in front of the ball.

On the slap, the player nearest the ball screens away from the ball. The player furthest from the ball cuts to the ball. One comes, one goes. The third is the safety valve, high and behind.

The point of this one is not to score. The point is to get the ball in and start your offence with four seconds of the possession spent instead of a turnover. Tell the players that. Teams that treat the sideline inbound as a scoring chance throw it away.

Three things that break it.

1. Everyone runs at the ball. This is the default behaviour of every under-12 team on earth. The fix is the rule, not the coaching point: one comes, one goes, and whoever is closest is the one who goes.
2. The receiver catches on the line. A kid who catches with the sideline under their heels is trapped, because the line defends for the other team. Teach the catch stepping in toward the middle. Sideline Inbound: Release Under Pressure is built around exactly this, though it is tagged U14 to U16.
3. The pass goes to the near shoulder. The inbounder throws at the cutter rather than away from the defender. Pass Fake, Find the Second Window is the fix if your group is old enough, and a V-Cut to Get Open is the fix if they are not. The V-cut is tagged from U10 and takes six minutes.

The twelve-minute block

One block, once a week, for three weeks. That is all two plays need.

• 2 minutes. The inbounder's three jobs. Whole squad, no defence.
• 4 minutes. Baseline play, five on none, two groups at opposite rings. A rep plus the walk back is about twenty seconds, so four minutes is twelve reps per group.
• 4 minutes. Baseline play, five on four. Playing a defender short means the play finishes, which is the point. Go five on five only in the last minute.
• 2 minutes. Sideline play, walked once, then run three times.

That adds to twelve. Twelve reps of the baseline set, unopposed, is more than most junior teams get in a season, and it is the unopposed reps that make the cuts automatic. Resist adding a third play in week two. The teams that run two inbound plays well beat the teams that half-know six.

If your group is already past this, Baseline Inbound: Two-Window Read and Inbound with Three Seconds are the U14 to U16 progressions, where the job stops being the set and starts being the read. A Backdoor Cut off the elbow is the counter once opponents start sitting on your first option.

When not to run a play at all

Under 10, do not. Put your most reliable passer out of bounds, put everyone else in a wide spread, and teach one thing: get it in. A U8 or U9 team running a box set is four kids doing choreography while the fifth throws it away. The five-second count is the only opponent that matters at that age, and spread beats structure against it.

From about U11, two plays. From U14, read instead of run, which is a different article.

Two plays and a named bail-out is a small enough package that you can build the block around it rather than squeezing it in. If you plan your sessions in Practli, the drills above are in the library with the court diagrams animated, and the game day run mode keeps the two sets in front of you on the bench, which is where you will forget them.