What to do when kids are not listening at basketball practice: three problems, not one

You are at half court with your hand up. Four of them are looking at you. Two are shooting at the side hoop. One is lying on the floor pretending to be dead. You say "hey" louder than you meant to, and now you are the coach who yells, the one thing you promised yourself you would not be.

Search for help and you get two answers. Set clear rules and follow through every time. Or shorten your explanations and cut the lines. Both are true, and neither helps you at 6:42 on a Tuesday, because they are things you do before practice and you are in the middle of one.

What helps is working out which of three problems you have before you open your mouth. They look identical from the court, they need opposite responses, and the wrong response makes each worse.

Count first. It takes five seconds.

Stop talking. Do not raise your voice yet. Look at the group and count the kids who are not with you.

• Five or more out of twelve. It is the practice, not the kids.
• Two or three, and it is the same two or three as ten minutes ago. It is a transition.
• One. It is not an attention problem at all.

That is the whole diagnostic. It is worth doing because almost every page on this subject folds all three into one thing called discipline, and discipline only addresses the third.

Half the group has gone. That is your design.

If five of twelve have drifted, nothing has gone wrong with the children. You have asked them to do something they cannot do, and there are two usual culprits.

The explanation ran long. Time it next week. If you talked for more than about thirty seconds before anyone moved, you lost the back half of the group in there, and no amount of "eyes on me" brings them back. They are not being rude. They have run out of the thing you are asking them to spend.

The fix is to start the drill badly. One cue, one demonstrated rep, let them go, then fix it while it runs. You will feel like you explained it poorly. You did, and it does not matter: the second and third corrections land better than the first, because by then they know what you are talking about.

They have been standing. Do the arithmetic on your own drill, because it is worse than it feels. Twelve kids in one line at one hoop, eight seconds a rep: a full rotation is 96 seconds, so every kid stands for 88 of them and touches a ball for eight. Split the same drill across three hoops and it is four per line, a 32-second rotation, 24 standing. Same drill, same coach, a third of the waiting. Breakthrough Basketball calls this one of the three L's, laps, lines and lectures, and they are right. What their page does not cover is what to do once you are already in the long line and the plan has fallen over.

The reset. Do not get louder. Change the shape of the activity, and pick something where listening is the game rather than a condition of playing.

Footwork Says is the one I use most: Simon Says with pivots and stance, eight minutes, whole team at once, and the kids who were orbiting tend to win it. Red Light, Green Light does the same at U8 and U10 with a ball in every pair of hands. For U10 up, Speed Dribble and Stop is six minutes of full-speed dribbling that only works if they are watching you for the stop.

These are not resets because they are fun, although they are. They are resets because for six to eight minutes your whistle means something again.

How the reset goes wrong. You run it too long. The energy comes back at about minute four and you leave it going for twelve, and now they are hot and loud and you have spent the back third of your session. Set the number before you start it and hold to it.

Two or three kids, every time, right after a break. That is a transition.

This one hides because it does not feel like a pattern. It feels like two particular kids being themselves. Watch when it starts. It is nearly always in the ninety seconds after a water break, a changeover, or the moment you walked away to set out cones.

That is not a behaviour problem, it is the cost of an unmanaged transition, and it is expensive. Four changeovers in a 60-minute practice at ninety seconds each is six minutes, a tenth of your session, and the hardest six minutes to recover.

The fix is one sentence, said before the break rather than after. Name the next thing and where it happens.

"Water, then you are on the baseline in two lines. Baseline, two lines, go."

Then start the next activity when the first kid arrives, not the last. Waiting for everybody teaches the stragglers that the practice waits. Line Touches is four minutes and needs no setup, so it can already be running when they get there. Dribble Tag does the same with a ball.

How this one goes wrong. You turn arrival into a race with a loser, and within three weeks the same kid is last every time and knows it. It is a starting point, not a consequence. Nobody is out, nobody runs.

One kid. That is not attention.

If eleven are with you and one is not, stop treating it as listening. The likely reasons are short: they do not understand the drill and will not say so, they are the weakest at this particular thing and have decided not to be seen failing at it, they are tired, or something happened at school. None of those are fixed by a rule.

Two things work more often than anything else I have tried. Give them a job inside the activity: hold the spare ball, call the score, demonstrate the first rep with you. That takes the spotlight off their performance and puts them back in the group without a conversation. Then use a drill where being noticed is the mechanic rather than the risk. Name and Claim makes every kid call a teammate's name before passing, so the quiet ones get spoken to twenty times in eight minutes. Everyone Touches does not let the ball go up until it has been through every pair of hands.

Do both before you have a private word, and have it on the way to the car, not in front of the group.

How this one goes wrong. You make them the example. "Are you with us?" costs that kid something in front of eleven people and buys four minutes of compliance. If the pattern holds across weeks, the useful conversation is with the parent, and it goes better if you describe what you saw rather than what you concluded. Some of what sits behind this is not yours to fix on a Tuesday night, and saying that plainly is more use than a sanction.

The thing that does not work

Running them.

It is the default on half the coaching sites and the one piece of advice I would throw out. The kid who triggered it is usually the fittest in the gym, so the cost lands on the kids who were listening. It spends the two things you were already short of. And at U12 and below the problem is almost never unwillingness, so a consequence aimed at unwillingness does not touch it.

The best-known page on youth basketball discipline opens by saying do not punish, then makes its worked example sprinting the whole team until they come when called. Both halves of that cannot be true.

What to actually change on Monday

• Time one explanation. Past thirty seconds, cut it and fix the drill while it runs.
• Count the standing. One line of twelve at one hoop is 88 seconds of waiting per touch. Use every hoop, even without an assistant.
• Keep two reset games in your back pocket, each with its minutes decided before you start.
• Name the next activity and its location before the break, not after.
• If the same kid is the problem three weeks running, it is not discipline.

For what is realistic at the young end, the six-minute block is the format that holds U8 together. On your own with a big group, two groups, not four survives having no assistant.

And if the real problem is that your plan is one long line because writing a better one at 10pm is hard, that is what the drill library is for. Filter by age and minutes, build the session out of things that keep more than two kids moving, and most of the listening problem is solved before you get to the gym.