Youth Sports

I'm coaching my girls' youth basketball team this year. I haven't played basketball since 8th grade and when I played, I wasn't a starter. Since then, I've learned a lot about coaching and little about a bunch of sports. The combination makes me pretty good at the youth coaching level. Once I started coaching, I began to realize that I had some really good and really bad coaches in my history. In the youth sports, they were just involved parents like I am now. As a kid, I assumed they were experts at the sport. That's an important thing to keep in mind when running a program.

Youth soccer in North Reading does a good job of realizing that the coaches may not have experience in the sport. There is a weekly set of drills/skills to cover and a coaching meeting to go over the goals and key points, prior to the session. The other sports I've done in town (softball and basketball) leave you on your own to develop a season plan. I think that's what makes some sports a complete gamble for the kids. There are some softball teams we played against that were simply glorified babysitting. They didn't teach the kids anything about the sport and were more concerned about finishing early, not letting the kids play the games.

As I coach this basketball season, I'm trying to keep notes of what works and what doesn't. How the kids progress, etc. This should help me for next year and may provide a guide for the 2nd grade program next year.