A 60-minute basketball practice plan, and the 15 minutes you're losing

You have the court from five until six. That is not sixty minutes of basketball.

The team before you comes off at 5:02. Three kids arrive at 5:06 because someone was stuck on the school run. You need the balls in the bag by 5:58 because the next group is already on the sideline. So the real number is closer to fifty. Then transitions, explanations and one badly managed water break take fifteen more, and you drive home wondering why you only got through three drills.

Below is a 60-minute practice plan, minute by minute, for twelve U10s or U12s with one coach and no assistant. But the plan is the easy half. The reason most one-hour sessions deliver about thirty minutes of actual basketball is not the plan. It's the joins between the parts.

The three leaks, with the actual numbers

Transitions. A normal session changes activity seven times. Gather them in, explain, get them moving: ninety seconds each, and ninety seconds is optimistic when the explanation includes "no, the other end". Seven changes at ninety seconds is ten and a half minutes. The plan below chains drills so that three of those seven changes cost nothing — nobody moves and no equipment changes. Four real changes is six minutes. That's four and a half minutes back before you've done anything clever.

Explaining a new drill. Teaching a format from scratch mid-session costs two to three minutes of standing about, plus a false start. So: one new drill per session, maximum. Everything else has to be something they already know. That's the whole rule.

The water break that becomes a social event. Ninety seconds is a water break. Three minutes is a chat.

Ten and a half, three, one and a half. Fifteen minutes. That leaves forty-five, and forty-five well-run minutes is a good practice.

The plan

Times are minutes from when the first kid walks on, not from when you booked the court. Block one is the shock absorber: if you get the floor late or three kids are missing, block one shrinks and nothing else moves.

0–6 · Ball in hands immediately — Speed Dribble & Stop

No circle, no roll call, no "gather round". Every kid who walks in picks up a ball and starts. You coach the arrivals individually while the early ones work.

What goes wrong: they sprint flat out, lose the ball, and chase it into the next court. Shorten the run to the free-throw line. The stop is the skill, not the speed.

6–14 · Dribble Tag

Same equipment, same space, everyone still has a ball. This transition costs you nothing — you just say "taggers are Ella and Sam, go".

What goes wrong: the two best dribblers never get tagged and the weakest kid is out in four seconds and stands there watching. Don't eliminate anyone. Tagged means five pound dribbles on the spot, then back in. Nobody stops moving for more than eight seconds.

14–20 · Jump Stop & Pivot, in pairs

The first real transition. Pairs, one ball between two, one passer and one receiver.

What goes wrong: you spend four minutes correcting twelve kids' pivot feet one at a time while the other eleven stand still. Give one cue, out loud, once: "land on two feet at the same time." Then let them do it badly for a while. They'll get it in week three, not today.

20–26 · Partner Passing

Same pairs, same ball, they don't move. Free transition number two.

What goes wrong: the pairs drift apart until they're throwing eight-metre passes they can't make, and the whole thing turns into fetching. Put a cone down for each partner and tell them their feet stay behind it.

26–29 · Water · 3 minutes

Say the number out loud — "ninety seconds, and I'm counting" — then use the spare ninety seconds to set out the layup lines while they drink.

29–37 · Layup Lines — two lines, two balls

Not one line. This is the arithmetic that matters most in the whole session, so it gets its own section below.

37–45 · Protect the Castle

Defence and passing, disguised as a game, and loud enough that the tired ones wake up.

What goes wrong: it degenerates into three defenders standing on top of the castle with their arms out, and the attackers give up. Mark an arc the defenders can't come inside. Now they have to slide rather than stand.

45–57 · 2-on-2

Twelve minutes of small-sided game, in groups of four, three games running at once if you have the space.

What goes wrong: the same two kids score every possession and the other two stop trying. Pair your strongest with your weakest. If it's still lopsided, rotate one player out on every score so no combination lasts more than a minute.

If you'd rather they queue less and compete more, swap in King of the Court — it keeps everyone in the same game and settles rotation by results rather than by you deciding.

57–60 · Pack up, one sentence

Not a speech. One thing they did well, named specifically, naming a kid: "Priya passed out of the corner three times tonight and she didn't get a single one back — do that again on Saturday." Then balls in the bag while you're still talking.

The queue problem, and why two lines beats one

Take that eight-minute layup block. One line, one ball, twelve kids. Each kid sets off, shoots, rebounds their own ball, and passes to the front of the queue. Twelve seconds per kid from setting off to the next shooter having the ball, and twelve seconds is quick.

Twelve kids at twelve seconds is one full rotation every two minutes and twenty-four seconds. Eight minutes is three rotations. Three layups each, in eight minutes.

Now split it. Two lines, two balls, six kids per line. A rotation takes seventy-two seconds. Eight minutes gets you six rotations. Same eight minutes, same drill, and every kid has doubled their reps.

That's the arithmetic to apply to everything you run. Before a drill starts, work out how many seconds pass between one kid's turn and their next one. If it's over fifteen, split the group or add a ball. The kids' behaviour will tell you the same thing if you'd rather not do sums: count the ones who aren't moving, and if it's more than two, change something.

What this plan assumes, and where it breaks

It assumes they already know these eight formats. In week one they don't, and no plan survives that. Week one is three drills, not eight, and you accept that two of them will be a mess. By about week three the setup is familiar enough that this schedule runs itself.

It assumes twelve kids. With sixteen, the pairs work fine but 2-on-2 gives you four games and you can't watch four games. Run King of the Court instead and referee one court. With six kids, drop Protect the Castle — it needs numbers to be any fun — and give the extra eight minutes to the small-sided game.

It assumes a half court is enough. It is, for all of this, except the layup lines, which want a full-length run-in. If you're sharing a court sideways, shoot from the wings rather than the baseline.

It won't survive a bad Tuesday. Some nights three kids are melting down and the arithmetic is irrelevant. On those nights the honest move is to bin the plan and play a game they love for twenty minutes. That is not a failure. A session that ends with twelve kids wanting to come back is worth more than a session that covered the footwork block.

The only part of this you should treat as fixed is the shape: ball in hands from second one, a hard rule of one new thing per session, and the last twelve minutes always a game. The drills themselves are interchangeable — there are 171 in the drill library, filterable by age and skill, and swapping one for another with the same setup keeps the transitions free.

If you'd rather not do the timing arithmetic every week, Practli's plan templates hold the block structure and let you drop drills into it, which is roughly this article turned into a form you fill in on your phone in the car park.