Basketball IQ for Young Players

Every coach has seen her: the one kid who is already standing where the ball is going to be.

She is not the fastest player in the gym. She does not dribble the most. While nine kids chase the ball, she reads the play, guesses where it is going, and gets there first. Most youth coaching treats that as a gift. This book treats it as a skill you can teach.

Youth practices are built around what you can see: shooting form, ball handling, layup lines. The thinking is invisible, so it goes untaught. Basketball IQ for Young Players gives you a simple framework for the half-second between the catch and the decision, and practical ways to build it in kids from 7 to 18.

• Why kids freeze when the game speeds up, and why the extra dribble is a security blanket, not a skill
• Eyes up: how to build the habit of seeing the floor before the catch
• Spacing as everyone's job, and how to stop the swarm around the ball
• Reading the closeout: shoot, drive or pass, decided before the ball arrives
• Reads, not rules: cuts, screens and handoffs taught as decisions, never as set plays
• Defensive IQ and transition: help, recover, talk, and the seconds between the baskets
• Mistakes as lessons, timeouts that teach, and the questions that work better than instructions

Fifteen chapters include a Try This game you can run at your next practice with a half court and two colors of pinnies, and an Age Snapshot from U8 to U18. Plus a four-month season plan, twenty IQ games, a coaching questions library, and a player assessment you can photocopy.

For volunteer coaches, club coaches and parents who coach. No playbook, no whiteboard, no jargon. From the author of Soccer IQ for Young Players.