You’ve just started coaching youth basketball for a club and you get asked the question, “how many players would you like in your team?”. Most of you may not get a choice, but if you do, what’s the perfect number of players on a youth basketball team to get the most from your season?
How many players should be on a youth basketball team? 8 players provides a coach with even numbers for practice, working in pairs or fours. A 30 to 40 minute match duration provides each player approximately 20 to 25 minutes on court, when spread evenly. Coaches can also provide more detailed feedback when managing a smaller group.
Coaching youth basketball is more than just x’s & o’s. It’s about communicating with parents, organizing practice, locating facilities to train, keeping kids learning, practice being fun, sometimes mentoring young kids through tough times and hopefully helping that young athlete be the best basketball player they can be.
So why do we believe 8 players is the perfect number for coaches and athletes when playing in a youth basketball team? This article is here to explain why.
Important Note To Start
We’ve mentioned a number of times so far, this article is from the viewpoint of the coach. However, depending on where you sit in the team makeup equation, this question can bring up different answers.
A clubs lack of coaching resources and court availability for practice may force them to create larger teams.
Individual coaches, who run academies or clubs as full-time jobs, may want to maximize profits and create groups of larger teams also.
Parents may be the opposite and want as little athletes as possible on the team, so their child can get more specialized training and maximum court time.
Everyone wants value for money right, even when playing youth sports?
So if you as a coach are ever in a position to make this call, I need to assure you that someone involved in the inner circle will suggest you’ve made the wrong decision. That’s ok. Be ready for it and just be sure to explain the reasons behind selecting 8 players (which I’ll detail to you now) and agree that you’ll always have different views. But this is what’s best for your child’s basketball growth, in the context of the youth sports team environment.
Practice
When conducting drills at practice, your job as coach is to keep all players engaged as much as possible and having fun. One of my biggest pet peeves when attending youth basketball practices is watching a drill being conducted with more players standing off the court, than those working on it. The development of your team and players will take longer than most if you keep that up!
A great article on the 6 mistakes I made in my first season coaching youth basketball, talks about the impact on playing small sided games (source). I’m regularly providing feedback to coaches to incorporate drills into their practice plan that include all players at once, or allow you to work in even numbers. As such, when having 8 players, over 7 or 9, makes this process a little easier.
One of the biggest issues in youth sports as a whole, not just basketball, is a lack of training facilities. You might be lucky enough to find a nice outside court, weather permitting, though this doesn’t provide you with a chance to reserve it just for your team. Therefore, the majority of you are probably working on a smaller sized court, or may only get to practice in the half-court.
Good luck trying to run a practice session for a team of 12, where you get enough repetition in your skill training, across only half a basketball court. This is extremely difficult even for the best coaches and albeit not impossible, it would require you to spend a lot more time putting together your practice plan for drills that incorporate all players in that space. Working with 8, you could divide the half court into 4 sections and put players into pairs, providing them plenty of space to work.
In Game
We’ve written a great article here on the responsibilities of a youth sports coach, where winning isn’t the be-all and end-all at such a young age. Albeit we support the notion of sport being competitive, your role as coach is to help these players develop to be the best players they can be. To be successful, all players need time on the court, in high-pressure situations, to put into place what you’ve been teaching them at practice. 5 minutes when the game has been decided doesn’t allow for this.
The primary purpose for a child at the youth sports level is to have fun. As such, it’s our view that court time should be spread evenly, or as close as possible, across all players.
When talking about organized youth basketball, games typically run anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes in playing time. When time is spread evenly, a team of 8 players provides the capability for each to gain approximately 20-25 minutes of court time. Going with 10 players drops this number down 15-20.
Rotations will determine when you have your strongest lineups on the floor, but this shouldn’t be at the detriment of all players receiving the same amount of court time.
For those of you struggling to work out even court and rotations for your team, we found this cool website playingtimecalculator.com, where you can put in your number of players in the team, number of players on the court and game time. It then works out the rotations all for you – nice and easy!
Tournaments where you play multiple games on a day or over consecutive days, could allow you to go with a larger squad. However, guidelines from the NBA & USA Basketball state that “players, parents and coaches should demonstrate caution in scheduling or participating in more than one game per day, especially on consecutive days” (source). We also support this, due to the strain on the young athletes bodies and the risk for potential injury.
Related link: Is Youth Sports Too Intense? A Message For Our Coaches
What Happens With More Than 8 Players?
This is a good dilemma to have. It means that people want to play for your team or club and you should embrace this. This is youth sport and the last thing we’d ever recommend is for you to cut a player because of numbers. As such, we wanted to offer some suggestions on what you could do when numbers exceed 8;
- Could you go out and recruit a few more players to make a second team?
- Could you ask the kids if they have any friends/siblings/cousins who may also be interested in a game?
- To ensure enough court time in the game, could you roster players off each week so that you only ever suit up a maximum of 8 players? Ask families when they have events, vacation, birthdays, etc. You’d be surprised how evenly this could work out.
- Is there another club only 10-15 minutes down the road that’s short on players? Does your competition allow you to “loan” a player to a team for a game? Could they move to them just for the season, until you recruit enough for a 2nd team?
Summary: How Many Players Should Be On A Youth Basketball Team?
There is never a perfect science to coaching youth basketball, because if someone did master it, their demand would be off the charts!
However, when it comes to providing the youth of today the best chance to become the ultimate basketball version of themselves, it’s our responsibility to place them in a position to succeed and support them along the journey.
Providing them an environment where they can get maximum practice time to work on their skills, even time to transition what’s taught in practice into a higher intensity game situation and receive personalised feedback on how to keep improving is going to have the parents and players wanting to work with you for future seasons.
We believe the number of players to achieve this is 8.
What’s your view on the perfect number of players in a youth basketball team?
Cheers,
Daniel
