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Teaching kids the enjoyment of basketball can be simple, it is all in how you present the sport to the youth. If you show them that it is okay to make mistakes, they will learn instead of being scared to do the mistake again, in fear of being yelled at. I, being a kid will tell you how to present the game to us, so please go pop some pop corn, grab yourself a soda pop, and come back.

Doesn't that popcorn taste good? Thought so.

1. Fun. You cannot teach us the game without us enjoying it. Plain and simple. Do not just make us do drills over and over and run all the time. I will give you some games to have us do that will act as drills. For conditioning we can scrimmage. Yup that's it. Just scrimmage. We should scrimmage for about 30 minutes straight. We will be getting into shape and enjoy the game. It doesn't get much better. Ball handling is another easy one to cover. Make competitions such as three people in a group and they have to dribble with their left hand to half-court and right hand back then sit down. The first team to have all their players back sitting down wins. Once again, very simple. There is also a game called dribble tag. In this game everyone has a ball and they go around knocking the ball out from team members while they keep their ball dribbling.

2. Competitive. Keep everything competitive. Kids naturally like to beat each other in physical activity. So keep games going instead of drills, and when shooting, set a goal for them such as you're going to shoot 10 free-throws, make 5 and you owe no push-ups, any under that and its 5 push-ups per miss. This will improve their concentration.

3. Pressure. As we are only youth, do not push us to the point where we are scared to make a mistake. We just want to have fun and I'm sure as a coach you do to. Winning would be a bonus but that isn't what it is all about. If your player messes up, show him or her how to do it correctly and reward or praise them when they do. It will make them feel good and like they accomplished something, causing them to want to do this more.

I hope this helped you coaches. All of this will probably result in a few W's to put on the schedule. So remember next time your coaching...just have fun!

Learn more about this author, Michael Lannson.
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