Youth basketball shooting drills: find each kid's line first

You set up five spots. You hand out balls. Twelve kids start shooting at a ten-foot ring with a size 6 ball, and within thirty seconds you can sort them into two groups. Three of them are shooting. Nine of them are throwing.

The throw has a shape you'll recognise. Ball starts down near the hip. Shoulder dips. Both hands push. The ball leaves flat and travels out rather than up, and it hits the front of the rim at the same angle every time.

You can call "elbow in" at that kid for the rest of the season. It will not change. It isn't a technique fault. It's a kid solving a physics problem with the body they've got: the ring is too far away for the strength they have, so they recruit shoulders, hips and a second hand to cover the gap. Every cue you shout is asking them to give up the only thing making the ball reach.

What every page ranking for this search does

They give you a list. Wall shooting, form shooting, ladder shooting, three-player two-ball, spot shooting, catch and shoot, Mikan. The drills are ordered by difficulty, and each one comes with the same five cues: balanced feet, elbow above the eye, wrist snap, hold the follow-through, light guide hand.

Those drills are fine. I use most of them. The problem is what the lists leave out. The best of them tells you to "shoot from a range suited to age and strength" and then moves straight on to the next drill. That sentence is the entire job and nobody does it. So you pick one range for the team, and for most of your team it's the wrong one, and you spend eight weeks running good drills that bake in a heave.

Here's the fix. Find each kid's range before you run a single shooting drill, then run the ordinary drills at eleven different distances.

The five-shot line test

Eight minutes, once in week one, again around week six. Three rings, four kids at each.

1. Kid stands one metre from the ring, square to the backboard.
2. Five shots, one hand. Guide hand rests on the side of the ball and does nothing.
3. Watch the flight, not the result. If at least three of the five went up and came down into the ring, step back a metre.
4. Five more. Keep stepping back.
5. Stop at the first distance where the ball goes flat, or the shoulder dips, or the second hand starts pushing. The last distance that held is that kid's line.

Write the number next to their name on your plan. That number is the single most useful thing you'll learn about your team this month.

The maths: four kids, five shots each, about fifteen seconds a shot with the rebound and the step back. That's twenty shots and roughly five minutes per ring. Three rings run at once, so five minutes of shooting plus set-up and explaining. Call it eight.

What you'll find on a U10 team is a spread of one metre to four. Not a team distance. Eleven or twelve different distances, and two kids who can't get the ball up at one metre and need a lower ring or a smaller ball before they need a drill.

Now run the normal drills, at eleven distances

Nothing exotic here. The change is where people stand.

• One-hand form shooting at each kid's line. This is the base. Everything else is this with something added.
• BEEF shooting once one-hand form holds for a full set.
• Catch and shoot at the line, never past it.
• Bank shot for the kids whose line is short. The backboard is a bigger target than the ring and it rewards the arc you want.
• Mikan and power layups for the two kids who can't reach yet. They are not sitting out. They're doing the shooting that's available to them at this ring.

Pairs, one ball each pair. Shooter takes five, swap. In a ten-minute block that's about ten sets, so each kid gets five sets of five: twenty-five shots.

Compare that to twelve kids in a line at one ring with one ball. One shot every twelve seconds including the rebound is fifty shots in ten minutes, split twelve ways. Four shots each. The pairs version gives every kid six times the reps, and it's the same ten minutes.

Every one of these has a way it goes wrong

• One-hand form. The guide hand becomes a second shooting hand the second you look away. Fix: first five reps with the guide hand tucked behind the back.
• BEEF shooting. The acronym asks a nine-year-old to think about four things at once, so they think about none. Pick one letter a week and ignore the rest.
• Catch and shoot. The passer quietly becomes the drill. Bad pass, no shot, no rep. Put your best passer with your weakest shooter, not with your best.
• Bank shot. They fall in love with it and start banking from the corner, where there's no angle and it can't work. Set a rule: backboard from the blocks and the elbows only.
• Mikan. Turns into a layup race within ninety seconds. Count out loud and slow the count down.
• The line test itself. A kid will stretch, step back further than they can hold, and shoot a flat one to look good in front of their mate. Run it with the group facing away.

The ring you probably can't change

USA Basketball and the NBA recommend an eight-foot ring and a size 5 ball for ages 7 and 8, and a nine-foot ring with a size 6 ball for ages 9 to 11 (the 2018 standards). Basketball Australia moved its youngest Aussie Hoops participants to a size 4 ball in 2019, following FIBA mini-basketball guidance, on the reasoning that a lighter ball and a lower ring together give more passing and shooting success (the announcement).

Your stadium has ten-foot rings bolted to the wall and nobody is winding them down for your Tuesday slot. Fine. Two things you can still do. Bring the right ball, which costs about thirty dollars and is the highest-return purchase you'll make. And stop asking kids to do the thing the ring makes impossible. For a kid whose line is 1.5 metres, a ten-foot ring means layups, bank shots off the block and one-hand form work. It does not mean set shots from the free-throw line, no matter what the drill sheet says.

Free throws are a routine drill, not a shooting drill

The free-throw line is fixed at a distance over half your team cannot reach with any form at all. So stop using free throws to teach shooting. Use the free-throw routine drill to teach the thing it's actually good for: same number of dribbles, same breath, same spot on the floor, every time. Routine is coachable at nine. Range isn't.

Games, after the block and not instead of it

Knockout and hot shot earn their place at the end of a session. One rule. Set the spots at the shortest line in the group, not the average and not the longest. A shooting game played at a distance the kids can't reach spends ten happy minutes undoing the twenty-five good reps you just banked.

What a season actually looks like

Most kids move their line by about a metre across a season. Some move none and then move two over a summer, because they grew. That second kid is not evidence that you coached badly. Their arms got longer. The honest version of this job is that you're protecting the shot they'll have at fourteen, not fixing the one they have at nine.

Three things worth tracking, and none of them is a make percentage: does the ball go up, is the guide hand quiet, and has the line moved. Re-run the test in week six. If a kid's line has moved back a metre, say so out loud in front of the group. It's the only shooting progress a nine-year-old can actually see.

Every drill above is in the Practli drill library with an animated diagram, and the practice plan builder will keep a block at the right length so a shooting set doesn't quietly eat your whole session. The plan templates include a shooting block already timed.

But the test comes first. Eight minutes, a notepad, and twelve numbers you didn't have before.