Shooting Hoops

We're a few weeks into youth basketball season around here so I thought I'd post up some of my thoughts on it. My son in third grade is playing for his third year. In the past two years the league was structured so the boys were divided into teams at the beginning, and parents were asked to coach. Nobody wanted to coach (including me) so I ended up coaching rather than have the whole thing fall apart. It was supposed to be a competitive league and winning was supposed to be important. This sucked. If you were lucky enough to draw one or two kids who were good at basketball then they stayed in the whole game and just ran over the other teams. If you either had a lack of talent or thought it was a good thing to rotate all of your players so they got to play, you got creamed. Every game. Couple that with parents who thought that yelling like drunk college students during a final four game was the appropriate way to cheer on their six years olds, and it wasn't a whole hell of a lot of fun.
When my son brought the flyer home for this season I was relieved to see that things had changed. A new high school coach had arrived and he had some different ideas. He wanted his boys to coach the little kids to get experience coaching as well as feeling the pressure to live up to being a role model. He also focuses much more on fundamental exercises than we had time for, and teams are newly formed each week. It's working out great. The kids seem to be having more fun, they're learning more basketball, they listen to the high school players better than they ever listened the parents, and the parents in the stands are even quieter. It's amazing how the structure of a program can dramatically change how things work out.
I'm not sure that everyone, or anyone for that matter, needs to play organized basketball at such a young age, but having tried to do just that I've learned a few things I want to pass along. Hoop height is really really important. There's probably nothing more important in fact. When your kids are little, they need a shorter hoop. Lowering the hoop to 8 feet allows kids as young as kindergarten to be able to shoot properly. If it's too high you don't learn how to shoot so much as throw the ball and hope it makes it. The league keeps them on 8 foot hoops until they are in 4th grade and it's a great idea. Use a smaller ball too, a girls sized ball works great. It fits their hands better and it's lighter. It's a lot easier for them to get used to shooting a heavier ball at a higher hoop later than to have to completely rebuild their mechanics when they get the strength. Dribbling while looking at anything other than the ball is hard. Practice is the only way you get better but dribbling is the least fun part of practicing. The more you integrate dribbling into other drills that allow shooting, the more practice they'll get.
That's about all I have to say about basketball. I only played for one year in 7th grade and only made one basket. I was bad. You don't have to be good at basketball to help your kids learn how to play, you just have to be a little patient and make it fun. They tend to like doing anything with dad as long as it's fun enough that you're both still smiling. It also helps that I can dunk on an 8 foot hoop. Someday they'll figure out how unimpressive that is, but for now, I'm awesome.