Max Benefit of Scrimmage

Some coaches believe scrimmaging in practice should be kept to a few minutes, while other coaches may scrimmage 15-20 minutes or more in each practice. Each coach needs to decide which approach is best. If and when you do scrimmage in practice, I would suggest you consider "tweaking" the scrimmage sessions. At least, give some thoughts to these possible tweaks. I am sure you can come up with many more tweaks than I have.

"Why does someone always have to go to the bathroom at a bad time?"

Some ideas to make practice scrimmage time more efficent:

1) Play 3 or 4 minute games. Keep score and evaluation the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you are using this idea in high school, you may want to give the second team an advantage to begin the game such as the second team is up by 4 points to start the scrimmage. You can play 3 or 4 of these mini games and evaluate. Good for working on time & score situations.

2) Start scrimmage from side out of bounds or baseline out of bounds plays. If offense scores, you can continue play or only continue play if the slob or blob is turned over or the defense rebounds the ball.

3) 3 possession scrimmage. Two common ways to do this. Team A tries to get a score then a defensive stop and a second score in three possessions. If they fail on any of the three possessions, you stop play record their

results and give the ball to the other team who attempts to complete a three possession sequence of score, stop, score. Another way to do this is have one team go for a stop, score, stop. You could use this scrimmage

tweak by going 3 on 3, then 4 on 4, and finally 5 on 5. Very easy to make this competitive. For example the first

team that completes the 3 possession sequence three times is the winner.

4) Start scrimmage from free throw situation. Emphasis on proper execution on offense & defense

5) Time & score situational scrimmage. Possibilities are numerous. Gives your team time to practice end of

game situations. Give them timeouts if you want. Good time to teach how they should execute certain end of

game situations.

6) Scrimmage without your best player on the floor. See how your team reacts without their best player. See

who leads. See how they will react to a situation that can happen during a game.

7) Sudden death. First team to score wins. Watch the intensity rise. Good time to ask why we don't play with

that level of intensity on every possession.

These are just a few ideas you can use to make scrimmages more useful during your practice(s).