Basketball tryout drills: what you can actually see in 90 minutes

Thirty kids sign up. You get the gym for ninety minutes. At the end of it you have to name a team, and then stand in the car park and look at the parents of the kids who didn't make it.

Every tryout guide is a list of drills sorted by skill — dribbling, passing, shooting, a conditioning test at the end. They're fine drills. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that you have one pair of eyes, and you're about to make thirty decisions with them.

Start with the number, not the drill list

A realistic ninety minutes: ten to check kids in and get bibs on, five to tell them what's about to happen, twelve of whole-group work, twenty of stations, twenty at the hoops, twelve of small-sided games, two to send them home. Plus three transitions of three minutes each, because thirty kids do not move faster than that. It adds up: 10 + 5 + 12 + 3 + 20 + 3 + 20 + 3 + 12 + 2 = 90.

Now strip out everything that isn't watching. Talking, bibs, walking between hoops: 26 minutes. You're left with 64 minutes of observation and 30 kids to spend it on. That's 2 minutes 8 seconds each — 4 minutes 16 seconds if you have one other adult.

That's your whole evidence base. Every decision you make on Sunday night comes out of four minutes.

Stop trying to score five things

The standard advice is to rate every player on dribbling, passing, shooting, defence and athleticism. Five ratings, thirty kids, 150 judgements. Across 64 observed minutes that's 25.6 seconds per judgement. You won't do it. You'll fill the sheet in from memory in the car, which is a worse kind of guessing.

Cut it to three and it's 90 judgements at 42.7 seconds. Tight, but survivable.

Better again: stop rating, start sorting. Push every kid into one of three piles — clearly can, clearly can't, not sure. Thirty decisions per look instead of ninety, and the piles are honest about what you actually saw. No "6 out of 10 for passing" survives the question "compared to whom?"

The three I'd sort on at U12:

1. Can they change direction with the ball without losing it? Not speed. Direction.
2. Do they look up? Head position on the dribble tells you more in four seconds than a shooting drill tells you in four minutes.
3. What do they do when they don't have the ball? The one that separates players, and the one almost no tryout drill measures — because those drills hand everybody the ball.

Count your hoops before you pick your drills

This is the constraint that actually sets your tryout, and I've never seen it written down. Twenty minutes of live one-on-one, two kids on at a time per hoop, everyone else queuing:

• Two hoops: fifteen kids per hoop, 2 minutes 40 seconds live each.
• Six hoops (two mains plus four side rings): five per hoop, 8 minutes each.

Three times the reps for zero extra minutes. If your gym has side rings and you aren't using them, that's the biggest thing you can fix before Saturday. Mikan is written one player per hoop for exactly this reason.

The sting: with six hoops running and two adults, you're watching two hoops out of six. You will not see two-thirds of your own tryout. So don't spread yourself — stand at one hoop and watch it properly. A glance at all six leaves you with a memory of who looked busy, which mostly means who is tall and who is loud.

The ninety minutes

0:00 – 0:10 · Arrival, numbered bibs, [layup lines](/drill/layup-lines). Numbers, not names — a kid you can't name becomes "the one in red shorts", who gets remembered as one player when there were two of them. What goes wrong: you start coaching. Don't. This block is for getting bibs on straight.

0:10 – 0:15 · Tell them the truth. Out loud: "This is ninety minutes. I'm going to watch all of you. I won't see everything, so if I miss something good you did, that's on me, not you. You'll hear from me by Tuesday." It costs nothing and lowers the temperature of the whole session.

0:15 – 0:27 · Whole-group sweep. Cone weave, then lane slides. Everyone moving, no queues. The only block where all thirty do the same thing at once, so use it for what you can judge across a group at a glance: hands, head position, whether they stop on two feet. What goes wrong: cones too close and everyone looks bad, too far and everyone looks fine. Four or five, about three metres apart. Then walk the line and watch feet, not the ball.

0:30 – 0:50 · Two stations, ten minutes each. One adult per station: V-cut at one, closeout and contest at the other. Fifteen kids in ten minutes is forty seconds of your attention per child — a sorting look, not a rating look. What goes wrong: the queue. Fifteen at one station means twelve standing still, and standing still at a tryout is where kids decide they aren't wanted. Run two lines even though it means you see half of what happens.

0:53 – 1:13 · The hoops. One-on-one from the wing with a two-dribble limit, or Rock, Paper, Sprint. The second is the better evaluation tool, because it starts with somebody already a step behind — which is what defending actually is, and which no drill that starts with both players set will show you. What goes wrong: the two-dribble limit is forgotten inside ninety seconds and the block becomes a dribbling exhibition. Put it on a whiteboard where they can see it.

1:16 – 1:28 · [Three-on-three](/drill/3v3), two half courts. Games to four baskets, winner stays. What goes wrong: you referee. Let a lot go. You're not there to get calls right, you're there to watch what a kid does on the possession after they've made a mistake.

Three-on-three, not five-on-five

Twelve minutes of scrimmage with thirty kids:

• Five-on-five, one full court. Ten on, twenty off. Each kid plays 4 minutes and shares one ball with nine others: roughly 24 seconds on the ball.
• Three-on-three, two half courts. Twelve on. Each kid plays 4 minutes 48 seconds — only 1.2 times more. But one ball between six means 48 seconds. Exactly double.

Playing time barely moves. Ball time doubles, and ball time is what you came to watch.

The drill that tells you nothing

The three-man weave is on nearly every tryout list published. Good warm-up, terrible evaluation tool. Three kids run the same path at the same speed and it succeeds or fails as a unit. You can't tell which of them can play. You can tell which has done it before — so you're measuring prior coaching, a proxy for how much basketball a family has already paid for.

Same caution for anything timed. A sprint test at U12 measures who's had their growth spurt. Sort your registration list by date of birth and check it against your shortlist. If the top eight were all born in the first four months of the intake year, you haven't picked the best eight players. You've measured age.

Writing it down

One line per kid on the numbered list, and make it a thing you saw rather than a verdict. "Never once looked up in the weave" is useful in three days. "Good potential" isn't — you'll quietly fill it in with whether you liked them. Write nothing during a drill; write in the three-minute transitions. That's what they're for.

Where this falls apart

• You're not cutting anyone. Most U8–U12 clubs place every child. Then it's a grading session, not a tryout, and the honest move is to say so in the first five minutes. They already suspect.
• Fifty kids. Run two sessions. Ninety minutes cannot evaluate fifty children and no drill selection fixes it.
• One session only. Weight the last twenty minutes above the first twenty, and offer a second look to anyone who was ill. Kids arrive nervous and warm up into being themselves.
• U10 and below. Closeout and contest is written for U12 up — swap it for something in the library filtered to U10, and cut stations to eight minutes. Thirty seven-year-olds queuing for ten is a behaviour problem you're creating on purpose.

The part nobody writes about

You'll have to tell some children no. Do it by phone, not email, and do it yourself. Give one reason, and make it a thing rather than a quality. "He's not comfortable with his left hand yet" is something a nine-year-old can go and fix. "He wasn't quite at the level" is something he'll decide is about him.

Say the sentence out loud before you dial. It comes out badly the first time. Better it comes out badly to your kitchen.

The drills above sit in Practli with animated diagrams and age filters, so a tryout session takes a few minutes to assemble instead of a night with a pen. But the ninety minutes is the thing. Get the arithmetic right and almost any competent drill will do.