U12 basketball practice plan: your team has split in two

Somewhere between the last game of U10 and the first game of U12, three or four of your kids grew and the rest did not.

That is the thing no U12 practice plan on the internet accounts for, and it is the thing that will decide your season.

At U10 you had one squad. At U12 you have two. There are kids who have started to play with their body and kids who still flinch when someone leans on them, and they are standing in the same line waiting for the same drill. Run a block that suits one half and you have lost the other half for six minutes. Six minutes is a lot when the hall is booked for seventy-five.

So this is a U12 session built to run at two speeds at once. Six blocks, the reason each one is there, and the way each one goes wrong.

What the plans currently ranking for this give you

Basketball For Coaches gives a 50/25/25 formula and four age-banded plans, with U12 folded into an 11 to 14 "middle school" band on a 90-minute clock. Jr. NBA gives twelve sequential Starter-level plans with a percentage breakdown, 5 per cent values, 5 per cent warm up, 60 per cent skills, 15 per cent team concepts, 15 per cent competing, and two PDF layouts including a one-page clipboard version. Transforming Basketball puts its U12 plans behind an email form.

None of them is bad. All three are better organised than what most of us scribble on the back of a team sheet.

But all three answer "what shape should a practice be". None of them answers "what is different about this age", and the second question is the one you actually have, because you have already run practices. You just ran them at U10 and they have stopped working.

The three things that change at U12

They can hold an if, not just a rule. At U10 a kid can keep a rule for a possession. Stay on your side of the floor until the ball moves. At U12 they can keep a condition. If your defender's head turns, cut behind them. If the closeout is short, shoot it. That is a new capacity and most U12 sessions never use it, because they are still teaching stance and shot technique.

Defence stops being one job. U12 is the first age where a kid beats their defender off the dribble on purpose rather than by accident. Once that is true, defence is a two-person problem. If you have not taught the second defender, your best defender is just the last person to give up a layup.

Contact is real and it is not shared out evenly. The growth spread is the whole problem. A drill that is a fair contest for the two biggest kids is a bad twelve minutes for the two smallest, and vice versa.

Everything below is built around those three.

The session, minute by minute

Seventy-five minutes. Twelve kids. Two hoops. One adult.

1. 0 to 6. Dynamic warm-up. Baseline to half, in lines of four. High knees, shuffles, carioca, lunge, sprint. No ball.
2. 6 to 8. Transition.
3. 8 to 18. Speed stops, then jump stop and pivot. Sprint, stop on the call, land balanced, hold it. This is the contact block and it does not look like one. Most U12 collisions are not aggression, they are a kid who cannot stop. Teach stopping and half your contact problem goes away without you ever saying the word.
4. 18 to 20. Transition.
5. 20 to 32. Read the closeout. One passer, one shooter, one defender starting under the hoop. Defender closes out short or long, the shooter reads it and either shoots or drives. This is the first if in the session. Say the condition out loud before every rep for the first four minutes, then stop saying it.
6. 32 to 34. Transition.
7. 34 to 48. Help and recover. Two attackers, two defenders. The on-ball defender gets beaten deliberately. The second defender steps across, takes the drive, and then recovers when the ball is kicked out. Fourteen minutes is a long block and it needs to be, because this is the concept the season turns on.
8. 48 to 50. Transition.
9. 50 to 64. Three on two. Six kids at each hoop: three attack, two defend, one waits and comes on next rep. Two hoops, six each, everyone is on the floor.
10. 64 to 66. Transition.
11. 66 to 75. Cutthroat. Three teams of four. Score and you stay on, concede and you come off. Twelve kids divides cleanly, which is the only reason it survives a Tuesday.

Six blocks, five transitions, seventy-five minutes. If your hall is booked for sixty, cut block 9 entirely rather than shaving two minutes off everything. A twelve-minute block that gets eight minutes is a worse drill than no drill.

How to run it when half the team has grown

This is the part the templates cannot do for you, because it depends on your twelve kids.

Pair by size, not by ability, in every one-against-one rep. Rank them tallest to shortest and pair 1 with 2, 3 with 4, and so on. You get six contests instead of three blowouts and three kids who have stopped trying. One on one live is worth ten minutes on a week you have the time, and it is unplayable if you pair the biggest kid with the smallest.

Give the big kids a constraint, not a bench. Two dribbles maximum, or they have to finish with their weak hand. Do not sit them to make it fair. They notice, and it teaches them that being good is a problem.

Give the small kids a head start, not a smaller target. In three on two, let the attacking group start two steps ahead. Never lower the hoop for some kids and not others in the same drill.

Watch who is not moving. Count the kids standing still. If it is more than two, the block is too big or the lines are too long. Split into two hoops before you change the drill.

Where each block goes wrong

• Speed stops turns into jogging inside ninety seconds. They will jog because stopping hurts. Fix it by making the stop the scored thing, not the sprint. Land, hold three seconds, anyone who moves a foot does it again.
• Read the closeout breaks when the defender starts cheating, closing out at half speed every time so the shooter always shoots. Give the defender a scoring incentive. One point for a contested shot, one point for stopping the drive, and suddenly they play it straight.
• Help and recover collapses into two defenders standing in the paint watching. The recover half is the half they skip. Make the kick-out pass compulsory, every rep, so the recover is never optional.
• Three on two becomes three kids sprinting at one hoop with nobody passing. Cap it. No shot until two passes, and your worst three-on-two week becomes your best passing week.
• Cutthroat goes sour when one team wins six in a row. Rotate one player between teams every four minutes, chosen by you, announced without explanation.

The one thing to keep if you keep nothing else

Block 7. Help and recover.

Everything else on this page is a better version of something you already do. The second defender is the thing that does not exist at U10 and is assumed at U14, and U12 is the only season you get to build it. A team that helps and recovers looks coached from the sideline even when it cannot shoot, and a team that does not will lose games it should win for three more years.

Run block 7 every week until it is boring. Then run it again.

If you want the drills themselves with the diagrams and the coaching points, they are all in the drill library, free to browse. If you would rather not rebuild this session on a Sunday night every week, Practli's plan builder will hold it and hand it back to you courtside.