Ways to Make Your Opens and Summer Workouts More “Fun”

Summer can wear basketball players down — especially your most committed hoopers.

They’re working on their game on their own (hopefully), traveling all over the place every weekend, participating in other sports, AND coming to your workouts/open gyms.

That’s a lot.

Here are a few ideas you can implement to make your workouts a little more “fun”, while still helping your players improve their game:

Shooting Competitions

• Whenever you add an element of competition to your shooting drills, the energy in the gym rises
• Players can compete against the clock, their previous scores, or each other

Brackets/Tournaments

• If you convert ANYTHING into a bracket or tournament format, players have more fun with it
• instead of doing a finishing drill, have a 1v1 double-elimination tournament
• instead of doing 3v3, have a FIBA 3v3 tournament
• instead of doing a shooting drill, have players advance (winners play winners, losers play losers)
• roll out a white board, put it on a piece of paper, print out a blank bracket and fill it in with your player names — whatever — just have something they can physically look at.

Bring in alumni

• Having former players come in always amps up the fun (and competition) of open gyms.
• There’s probably nobody who would rather a.) help your players improve and b.) beat your players up than your alumni

Jump in/have staff jump in

• If you’re capable (or your staff is), jump in some drills or pickup games.
• Kids LOVE having the opportunity to dog their coaches…and they just love the fact that you’re out there with them.

Play music

• The 30 minutes before open gym officially begins, during shooting drills, while they’re playing 5v5 — WHENEVER you can add music to the equation, do it.

High scores get music choice

• Speaking of music, let the high scorers of a certain drill choose songs for the day.
• For example: highest score in 3 Minute 3s gets to pick music for warmup time tomorrow.

Contests for gear

• Have some extra gear sitting in the storage closet?
• Whoever comes to every open gym gets a shirt…or the highest score in _______ gets a shirt today…or whichever team wins 5v5 scrimmage today gets a shirt.

Take them to the park

• Coaches always complain that the parks are empty, kids don’t work on their games, the playground is never used, blah…blah…blah
• well, take them to the park then!
• Instead of hosting open gym in your air conditioned facility, tell them open gym has been moved to the local park for the day

Classic games (21, Knockout, Around the World, Dribble Tag, relays, etc.)

• Playing the old school games is always fun for your players

As you can (hopefully) see here, you can get better AND have fun.

It just takes a little creativity in your planning to add elements to your workouts/open gyms that your players will enjoy.

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