Whether you are a coach or a parent, one of the most important things you will do when teaching basketball skills is selecting age appropriate drills. If you are a coach your practice time with your team is limited and taking the wrong drills for basketball means that the valuable skills that your players need will not be reinforced. And often the drills you are working on won't succeed because the skills required to accomplish them aren't there.

For a parent it is just as important to select the correct drills as your child's love for the game and therefore their success with it will often develop from the successes they achieve with the drills. If you start them off with drills that are too complicated or demand prior skills that they haven't mastered, not only can it get them frustrated and have them lose interest, but it can also make them develop poor form. This can often result in interim success at the drill, while insuring long term failure at the skill. I often question when seeing some of the shooting styles of players that lack any semblance of effective technique, how much of it is because they started out shooting at hoops too high or from a distance to far, driving them to toss up the ball just so they can view it strike the rim and now and then go in.

So what is age appropriate? When you commence looking for drills for basketball you will encounter an endless supply. In my own library I have numerous books. Online there untold internet sites committed to them, and you could spend a small fortune on videos with inestimable drills. I know I have and have not even scratched the surface of those that are out there.

One of the things I attempt to do with my blog when talking over drills for basketball is identifying at what age they are appropriate for the child. In order to do this I will break it down into a range of ages to initiate these drills. I will also break it down within these age ranges into difficulty degrees of introductory, novice, intermediate and advanced. It is however crucial to recall that there is such a sizable variety of coordination maturation amongst children that these age brackets are not written in stone. Always regard the individual child's abilities and swing the range up or down to meet them. Construct their development on smaller successes and you will have a happy and successful basketball player, and even more significantly a happy and successful child.

For further discussions on age appropriate drills visit my web log at www.drillsforbasketball.humenews.com.