How to run a basketball practice with one coach: two groups, not four

Every practice-planning article you will find assumes there is a second adult on the court. Put a coach on each station. Have your assistant take the post players to the other end. If you are the only grown-up in the hall with fourteen kids and a booking that ends at seven, that advice is not slightly off. It is inverted. It tells you to spread out, when spreading out is the one thing you cannot do.

Coaching alone is not a time problem. It is not a drill-quality problem either. It is this: you can only look one way. Every decision worth making follows from that.

Sort your drills by how much of you they need

Not by skill. By supervision. Three tiers, and you can mark them on your plan in about a minute.

Tier one runs itself. The rules enforce themselves and the kids know when something has gone wrong without being told. Sharks and Minnows is tier one: if you get tagged, you know you got tagged. Red Light Green Light is tier one. So is Dribble Tag. You can turn your back on these for ninety seconds and come back to the same game still running.

Tier two needs your eye, not your voice. Partner Passing and Wall Passing live here. Nobody cheats at wall passing. But nobody fixes their own footwork either, so the reps only improve when you walk past and say one thing.

Tier three needs all of you. Anything where you are the referee, the scorekeeper, or the only person in the building who knows what correct looks like. Shell Drill is tier three. So is Help and Recover. These are not bad drills. They are drills you can only run with the whole group at once and you standing in the middle of it.

Write the tier beside each item in your plan. If you have three tier-three drills and you were planning to run stations, the plan is already broken and you have not left the car park yet.

The four-station trap, with the arithmetic

Stations look like the answer. Four groups, four skills, everybody busy. Do the sums before you commit.

Fourteen kids across four stations is three or four per station. Give it thirty-two minutes, four rotations of eight. You can stand in one place. Each group reaches you once. So every kid gets eight minutes of coaching and twenty-four minutes of nobody: seventy-five per cent of that block unsupervised, with three groups unwatched at any given moment.

Two stations changes the shape entirely. Seven kids each, two rotations of fifteen minutes, and every kid gets fifteen minutes of you out of thirty. Half, not a quarter. More importantly there is only ever one group you are not watching, and one is the number a single adult can hold in their peripheral vision while still coaching.

Two is a ceiling, not a guideline. The moment you go to three you are no longer coaching, you are patrolling.

The line is the thing quietly eating your practice

Layup Lines is the drill every coach defaults to and the worst possible choice when you are alone, because it looks organised while doing almost nothing.

Eight-minute block, one basket, a kid starting every five seconds. That is ninety-six goes in total. Split fourteen ways it is about seven reps each, which is roughly thirty-four seconds of actual movement per kid across a four-hundred-and-eighty-second block. Seven per cent. Open the second basket and you double it to fourteen per cent, which is still a child standing still for seven minutes out of eight.

Now run the same eight minutes as partner work. Seven pairs, both kids working, no queue. The ratio stops being the problem.

The honest rule: count the kids who are not moving. If it is more than two, change the format, not the drill.

Give the group you cannot see a number

This is the trick that makes two stations survivable. The unwatched group needs an output it has to report when you come back.

Not "work on your ball handling." That is an invitation. Instead: how many Mikan finishes can the four of you make in three minutes, and one of you counts out loud. Or Clean Your Room, which already has a score built into it. Or Everyone Touches, where the group has to get the ball through every pair of hands before it can score, so a kid who wanders off is immediately everybody else's problem rather than yours.

A countable result does the supervising. Kids will argue about a number. They will not argue about whether they tried hard.

The failure mode is worth naming: the number has to be small enough to count honestly. Ask for a three-minute total and you get a number. Ask for a ten-minute total and you get a guess, usually a generous one.

Sixty minutes, one adult, fourteen kids

• 0 to 6. Dynamic Warmup, whole group, while you are still counting heads and finding the kid whose shoes are in the car.
• 6 to 14. One tier-one game, whole group. Dribble Tag or Sharks and Minnows. You are not teaching yet. You are getting everyone moving and everyone looking at you.
• 14 to 30. Two stations, swap at 22. You take the teaching half. The other half gets a countable task.
• 30 to 44. Whole group, tier three. This is the only block in the hour where you can teach something that needs your full attention, so spend it on the one concept you actually came to teach.
• 44 to 58. Small-sided games. Fourteen does not split into even 3v3 games, so run one 3v3 and one 4v4 across two baskets: six plus eight is fourteen, nobody sits. Twelve kids would give you two clean 3v3s.
• 58 to 60. Finish together, one sentence about what got better.

That is six, eight, sixteen, fourteen, fourteen and two, which is sixty. You get exactly one full-attention teaching block per practice when you are alone. Planning two is how coaches end up teaching neither.

Where this still goes wrong

Elimination games. Knockout is genuinely self-refereeing and genuinely fun, and it sends your weakest player to the sideline first and keeps them there. Alone, you will not notice for four minutes. Use it at the end of practice, never in the middle, and never as the thing you leave a group doing.

The group that is winning. Whichever half you are not with will drift towards whatever is most fun, and that is almost never what you left them doing. This is not a discipline problem. It is a design problem, and the number fixes it.

Your own voice. With no assistant you will talk more, because there is nobody else to fill the silence. Kids stop hearing you at about the twenty-second mark. Say the one thing, then stop.

Injuries and toilet trips. You are one adult. The practice stops when a kid needs you, and a tier-one game is the only kind that survives you walking away from it. This alone is a reason to bias the whole session towards formats that run themselves.

None of this makes coaching alone easy. It makes it survivable, which is a different claim and an honest one. The coaches who make it look easy are not doing more. They are running fewer groups, with drills that police themselves, and they have made peace with teaching one thing properly instead of four things badly.

If you want a shortcut to the tiering, every drill in the Practli library shows the setup and player count on the card, so you can see before you plan it whether a drill needs you standing in the middle or just walking past.