What happens when you treat a basketball practice as a session?

Marco van Hout · 5 min read

A 90-minute practice for 5th and 6th graders, designed the way you would design a workshop: a traffic light before and after, three cues, a stat crew and a goal to take home. Includes the full agenda and four printable documents.

A practice plan lists drills. It rarely says what the boys should take home.

A coach of 5th and 6th graders has 90 minutes and a gym. The drills are ready: dribbling, passing lines, a scrimmage to finish. The plan does not say what each boy should notice, how he will see that he improved, or what he does before next week. The practice ends with a whistle and a cheer, and the learning is left to chance.

A session design asks three things a drill list does not. What should each player be able to do at the end? How will he see it for himself? What happens between this practice and the next? This article walks through one 90-minute practice built on those questions, and gives you the agenda and four printable documents to use or adapt.

The plan: nine blocks in 90 minutes

The practice is called Pass and Cut. The focus is passing to a teammate who is moving, then cutting to open space.

  1. Traffic Lights, 8 min: each boy colours a traffic light for "I can pass to a teammate who is moving" and writes what he wants to get better at.
  2. Dribble Tag, 7 min: dribble inside the lines, tag others, switch hands on the whistle.
  3. I Do, We Do Demonstration, 10 min: watch a pass and a cut, say the three cues, try it with a partner.
  4. Movement Break, 5 min: water and a look at the station diagram.
  5. Rotating Skill Stations, 15 min: chest and bounce passes, pass and cut, pass, cut, catch and shoot.
  6. Small-Sided Game, 17 min: 4-on-4, three passes before you shoot.
  7. Solo Skill Challenge, 8 min: guess your score, pass against the wall for 60 seconds, change one thing, beat your own number.
  8. "I Used to Think... Now I Think...", 15 min: the traffic light again, two sentences about passing, a goal for next practice.
  9. Check-Out, 5 min: one word for how practice felt, passports in, team cheer.

Five design choices

Each choice has a reason. Some have research behind them and some are judgement calls. The text says which.

One small game with one rule. The boys play 4-on-4 and must complete three passes before any shot. A June 2026 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology pooled nine randomized trials with 180 basketball players aged 10 to 27. Small-sided games improved technical skills such as passing, shooting and dribbling, and agility. For endurance, sprinting and jumping they showed no clear advantage over traditional training. The authors point to small samples and very different game formats, so read it as a direction, not a guarantee.

Three cues, not ten. The cue card gives the boys three things to remember: snap and step, give and go, show hands. The rest of the card is for the coach. This is a judgement call, not a research result. Three cues are easy to hold while you are moving.

A traffic light before and after. Each boy colours a light for "I can pass to a teammate who is moving" when he arrives and again at the end, and writes what he wants to get better at. Bradley Young and colleagues (Frontiers in Psychology, March 2023) describe self-regulation of sport practice as planning, checking, evaluating and reflecting, effort, and self-efficacy for challenge. They note that coaches value athletes who build these skills because they make practice time count and improve the conversation between athlete and coach. The evidence is theory and survey work, not intervention trials. It supports the reasoning behind the design and does not prove that it works.

A stat crew for the team that sits out. While two teams play, the third counts passes and cuts on a tally sheet. Nobody stands idle on the sideline, and the huddle afterwards starts from numbers instead of impressions. This is another design choice with no study behind it.

"I used to think... Now I think..." and one goal to take home. This is a thinking routine from Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, meant for use after an experience likely to shift how students think. The two prompts are "I used to think..." and "Now, I think..." The guidance is to start with the whole group and move to pairs as students get comfortable, which is why the boys read their sentences to a partner. Then each boy writes one goal for next practice and one thing to practise at home. That last step is the bridge between two practices, and it is the part a drill list leaves out.

What has not been tested

This practice was designed in Metodic and has not been run on a court. The traffic lights, the tally sheet and the reflection are built so that the boys and the coach can see what changed, but there are no results yet. The coach debrief sheet at the end asks for two lines: what worked and what you would change. If you run it, we would like to hear both.

Download the package

Everything below is free to print, use and adapt. The files are sized for A4.

Want a different age group, length or skill focus? Build your own from a short brief at metodic.io and generate the same kind of documents.

Sources

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