Planning Pre-Season Basketball Practices and Games

High school coaches will have only 15 days to pick their teams and then get ready for their season opener on the 16th day if they open on the first Friday in December. They have some tough decisions to make.

How long do they take to pick their teams? If they pick their teams by Wednesday and open up with Pre-season games on Friday or Saturday are they really ready for preseasson games?

They probably are if the team had got some of their offenses and defenses in during the summer programs. Also, if they don’t have many players to select then they could work on their offenses and defenses during tryouts as in many cases it is just a matter of placing players on Freshmen, JV and Varsity Teams.

I always played that very first weekend but we had everything in by the end of the summer program. It was just a quick review during tryouts and then we were ready to go.

We always held our own Tip Off Games at the Auditorium on Friday and Saturday. We played 2 games each day one in the afternoon and one in the evening and we also had light walk thru and shoot arounds in the morning of each day.

The next weekend we would go to Waterville and Cony and play 2 games at each site on Saturday. We usually broke the team into two even groups of 7 and played split sqad.

We would then play one game to win like a regular season game on Tuesday and then open up on Saturday.

This gave us 15 practice days and 9 pre-season games.

After playing on that Tuesday, it gave us 3 days to get ready for the season opener.