What’s better basketball teams or basketball skills?
Is it betters to do basketball teams or practice on your skills?
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This is a question we get asked the most by many parents looking to put their child into a basketball program.
Overall we recommend basketball training over basketball team games, but first lets start off with the pros and cons of each:
Basketball teams and league games:
Pros:
- Play on a team and learn team dynamics
- Learn the rules of the game, IQ and different plays
- Have fun in a formal environment with pressure situations
- Make new friends from different places
Cons:
- The potential for poor coach and parent coaching from a parent who has no idea about basketball
- Limited playing time, if a team have 10-12 kids on the roster it is challenging to get a lot of playing time
- Limited game repetitions, for example you may only take 5-10 shots in a game, when in skills practice you can take over 300!
- In other words, you can lose confidence from limited playing time and a lot of traveling.
- When you play in league games, your child may travel for over 2 hours to play 5 minutes in one game.
Basketball skills training and practice:
Pros:
- No sitting on the bench!
- Improve confidence by working on your weaknesses
- Get a lot of repetitions in of ball-handling drills, shooting drills, footwork practice and lay-up skills
- Play mini-game and scrimmaging that will get your child more game-like situations
- Improve your basketball shape and conditioning
Cons:
- No “real-game” exposure to referees, rules and pressure of live game
- High number of kids and low number of trainers, when this happens players are not getting proper instruction and improvement is limited (at Premier Hoops we limit the size of each class and have 1 to 7 ratio of coaches to players)
As a result of this analysis, we definitely recommend putting your child into skills training and private training for most improvement and results.
Therefore, If you are on a competitive team, where there are 8-9 players on the roster and they are offering 3-4 days of team/skills practice during the week, this would be the best case scenario!