basketball

The book has a tremendous amount of positive basketball knowledge. Many coaches get away from fundamentals and this book goes into detail on the benefits of breaking everything down to the bear essentials. A great compliment to this book is the video "48 Championship Basketball Drills" which has some outstanding creative shooting drills. Sid Goldstein should be hailed as "El Sid" on a good effort and worthy teaching tool.

As a coach of a 5th and 6th grade boys basketball team I found this book a tremendous teaching tool this season. Most of the children I coach have had little or no formal teaching in basketball previous to me. This books true value comes from being geared towards all skill levels. A coach at my level, straight through coaches of High school varsity teams, can find drills to introduce to their players.

Every year I've bought a new book on drills because I've never been completly happy with the previous years' purchase. I'm happy to say that next year, and for many more to come, I won't have to buy another.

I'm always looking for books that will help me with the teaching aspect of coaching (which also happens to be the most important). The author has the right idea of focusing on breaking things down to the fundamentals, but does only a so-so job of explaining them. The coverage is inconsistent; sometimes explanations are very clear, other times you're left to fill in blanks. The same is true of information provided on why certain fundamentals are important and why the methodology offered is the correct approach.

The author does do a good job of explaining the order in which skills should be taught, and offers good insight into common misconceptions.

Drills is where this book really fails to deliver. Every coach is always looking for drills that are effective, straight-forwarded, and keep the players interested enough to actually learn something. The author does offer some useful drills, but the a large number focus on one minute skill and propose approaches about as exciting as watching grass grow. Could you really keep a team of 10 year olds interested in 10 minutes of proper wrist movement?

If you have some experience coaching, you can probably use this book to pull together aspects of different drills to create effective and fun drills for your players. But if you're new to coaching, don't let this be your "Bible" on how to run practices.

A final note, the illustrations and diagrams are very low quality. The stick-figure cartoons make the book look amateurish and provide no value.