Three Elite Drills to Begin a Basketball Practice With

• By Grant Young

Practice is one of the most vital parts of any team's success. A basketball practice or training session is designed to help you address your players' weaknesses, improve their weaknesses, sharpen their strengths, and push them outside of their comfort zone so that you as a coach can advance and develop them into greater players. 

Basketball players can learn quickly, but to master the skills they must practice constantly. It is a known fact that if you practice something every day then you'll eventually get better at it over time. 

Through repetition, basketball drills help players improve their skills. When players practice basketball drills consistently and with the right technique, they develop muscle memory and good habits that can be useful in game situations. 

And few basketball coaches know effective drills better than Michael Fly. 

Coach Fly is in his first season with the Mizzou men’s basketball program as the team’s Director of Scouting and Analytics.

Before joining the Mizzou Tigers, Fly served as head coach at Florida Gulf Coast University from 2018 to 2022. During his tenure at FGCU, he led the Eagles to the third-most wins in a single season in the program’s history with 22 victories during the 2021-22 campaign. FGCU also set school records for non-conference wins, 3-pointers made, 3-pointers attempted, blocks per game, and total blocks in a season.

Overall, Fly recruited and developed two Atlantic Sun Newcomer of the Year award winners in addition to the conference’s Defensive Player of the Year during the 2021-22 season. 

Coach Fly knows how important establishing good practice routines is for getting his players to consistently perform.  This is why he has developed drills to help players get into rhythm at the start of practice. 

In his ‘My Favorite Warmup Drills to Start Practice’ course, Coach Fly breaks down each of his favorite beginning practice drills in detail, including how to run them effectively for your own team, making actual practice that much more effective and impactful.

6 Minute Shooting

Coach Fly notes that once his team is warmed up, they almost always start practice with some sort of shooting drill. 

A favorite of his is called ‘6 Minute Shooting’, which is a simple yet effective drill that is proven to improve players’ shooting. How it works is that Coach Fly suggests setting a six-minute timer and having his players practice midrange jump shots around the elbow or the top of the key. 

A good strategy here would be to have players get in a line, have players grab their own rebounds after their shot, and then pass to the player in the front of the line, to mitigate chaos and ensure that all players are getting the same amount of shots up during those six minutes. 

After about three minutes of this drill, the players who are truly a threat to shoot and make three-pointers in a game will back up behind the three-point line while the post players are still shooting midrange shots. 

Coach Fly loves this drill primarily for the psychological benefits. With college and younger-aged players, seeing their shot go through the hoop — especially at the beginning of practice — is a great confidence boost. This is why Coach Fly refers to this 6-minute drill as a “sneaky way to get a bunch of shots up and get players feeling good,” and is a staple drill that he returns to multiple times per week to start a practice. 

Cone Shooting

Another basketball practice warmup drill that Coach Fly swears by is what he calls the ‘Cone Shooting’ drill. 

This drill will start with your players dividing into two lines at each wing. From there, the player at the front of one line (who doesn’t have a ball) is going to cut to the elbow or around the free throw line. The player in front of the other line (who is holding a basketball) will deliver a bounce or chest pass to that cutting player. From there, the player will either take a jump shot or dribble and penetrate into the paint for a layup. 

After making that initial pass, the player who did so will then cut to the middle in the same way and receive a pass from a player in the other line. In other words, each player will start the drill by being a passer then will cut and become the shooter after that. 

The shooter will grab their own rebound and pass it back in the line from the same place they came from, then will head to the back of the other line. 

Because this drill gives the players the freedom to work on their specific finishing moves, it allows for a lot of customization, and each player can tailor this drill to their specific skill set. 

Defensive Stations

While shooting drills are an important part of getting players ready for practice, defensive drills are also integral.

And Coach Fly’s Defensive Stations drill is a great one that should get your team in a mindset to compete and perform on the defensive end of the floor. 

This drill starts by dividing the team into three different sections (or stations), and placing them at three different hoops around the court you’re playing at. 

From there, you will have each station working on something different as it pertains to your team’s defensive philosophy. For example, one station can be focused on switched during a pick-and-roll scenario, another can be closing out on a jump shooter without fouling, and a third drill can be for anything that a coach wants to focus on in their team’s next game. 

This drill affords a ton of flexibility for coaches and creates a way for assistant coaches to get involved in practices.