A practice plan that builds something over a season

A practice is not a list of drills

Most practice plans found as PDFs are catalogues: thirty drills one after the other, with nothing explaining why this one follows that one. They are useful as a reservoir of ideas, but they are not a practice.

A practice rests on one question: what should the players be able to do at the end that they could not do at the start? As long as the answer fits in a sentence, the rest is formatting.

A 90-minute template

This split works from U13 to senior level, adjusted for standard and for the time of year.

Time	Block	What it is for
10 min	Warm-up	Raise the temperature, wake the feet up, touch the ball early
15 min	Individual fundamentals	The skill of the day, isolated, with a high number of repetitions
20 min	Small-sided work	The same skill against real resistance: 1v1, 2v2, 3v3
20 min	Team play	Transition, half-court offence, or whatever part of the system this block covers
15 min	5v5 with a constraint	The theme of the day, imposed inside the full game
10 min	Shooting and cool-down	Shots under fatigue, free throws, a standing review

What ruins a practice

• Too many themes. Two coaching points held beat six announced. Past that, players remember the last one.
• Queues. Twelve players at one basket means eight players watching. Two stations running at once doubles the real volume.
• Long explanations. A constraint that takes three minutes to explain needs simplifying, not repeating.

From one practice to a block

A single practice builds nothing. What builds is the same theme repeated over four to six weeks, with the difficulty rising each time.

A six-week block on transition offence, for a young group training twice a week:

Week	Main content
1	Defensive rebound and outlet pass, unopposed then with one chaser
2	Outlet and wing lanes, 3v0 then 3v1
3	Advantage situations: 2v1 and 3v2, reading the decision
4	Full transition 5v4, with a mandatory defensive recovery
5	Rebound to transition to half-court offence if no shot inside seven seconds
6	Assessment: 5v5 counting possessions finished in transition

The shape is always the same: start from the isolated skill, add resistance, then fatigue, then stakes. A block that ends without a measurement never tells you whether the work landed.

Spreading themes across a season

Over a thirty to forty week season, nothing is worked on all at once. One dominant theme per period, with deliberate reminders of what came before, is enough structure for most club teams.

• September-October: individual fundamentals, on-ball defence, 1v1, and the ground rules of the group.
• November-December: two-man game, screens, transition, first defensive collaborations.
• January-February: half-court offence, reading help defence, shooting under pressure — usually the densest stretch of games.
• March-April: linked situations, end-of-game scenarios, position-specific work.
• May: maintenance and out-of-bounds plays, when end-of-season fatigue means cutting volume.

Adjusting to how often you train

Sessions / week	What changes
1	One theme per session and plenty of reminders. Individual work comes before team work.
2	One individual-led session, one team-led session. The most common club rhythm.
3 to 4	Room for a dedicated shooting or strength session.
5 and up	Academy structure: individualisation, video work, and load worth watching closely.

Keeping a record of what was actually taught

This is where paper plans fail. By March, nobody remembers what was really worked on in November, or how often. The season plan becomes an intention rather than a tool.

Writing down the theme of each session as you go answers three useful questions: what was skimmed, what was repeated three times, and what was never covered at all. It is usually in doing that count that a coach discovers rebounding never got its session.

What to remember

• A practice answers a question, not a drill list.
• Seventy percent of the time with a ball and an opponent.
• A theme is built over four to six weeks, not one session.
• Every block ends with some form of measurement, however simple.
• Without a written record, a season plan stays an intention.