U14 Basketball Practice Plan

When Alex Sarama worked with the London Lions academy, its under-14 boys got blown out in their first EYBL game. Their coach, Will Twigg, remembered it on EP72 of our podcast. After a couple of weeks of 1-on-1 at the start of the year, the team played out of exactly one trigger, the get, through to December, and that season shaped this plan. Alex credited that restraint for what followed:

Plan #1 of our U14 plans starts with shot selection and gets. Its three written outcomes are to introduce players to the practice methods, ROB shots and shot selection (gold and silver medals), and getting out to space (floor is lava). We've written the session out as it was in December 2024. The rest of the U14 season comes after it. Our basketball practice planning guide covers how we plan any session and lists our plans for every age.

A trigger, in George Vaz's definition, is a simple action designed to start movement, force a defensive reaction and create an offensive advantage. Once the advantage exists, players play dominoes: drive, pass or shoot in zero seconds, space so one defender can't guard two, and get out of the lava.

Why silver medals now? The Routledge book Alex co-wrote explains the progression. Beginners mostly score layups, so their games reward gold. At the youth level, defenses get better at taking gold away, so players need the catch-and-shoot three as another way to create space, and they start meeting late-clock situations where the whole shot spectrum may be needed. The book's simplest constraint is the one this plan leans on: only gold and silver medals score.

Unlike the U12 plan, Plan #1 for U14 gives no station length or total time. The clocks and point targets below are the only timings it contains, so we've left minutes out. The ceiling we'd apply comes from the "3, 10, 30" framework in Transcending Basketball: no more than ten minutes on an activity before changing it, no more than thirty seconds to explain it.

The TLC column comes from Mike MacKay of Basketball Canada and appears in his section of Transcending Basketball. Teach: the coach can stop the activity to draw attention to something. Learn: don't stop it; cue on the fly or when players are subbed off. Compete: don't stop and don't give feedback, like a road game. The pre-practice checklist is the same as our U12 plans (coaches arrive 15 minutes early, high-five and greet every player, an area for bags and water), with one addition: DL shooting as players arrive.

Transcending Basketball is careful to separate DL from the constraints-led approach: there's no defender and no attempt to make the shot representative of a game. The aim is to vary the movement so much that players find ways to shoot they wouldn't otherwise use, and then take that wider range back into the live games.

Choose the add from what you see, to keep the game at the optimal challenge point, where it's neither too easy nor too hard for the offense. A closer defensive start or defensive scoring makes it harder for the offense.

Around the Arc is also one of the activities in Alex's first book, Transforming Basketball, with more ways to scale it. There the offense dribbles around the arc with the defender trailing and can break the arc at any time. For beginners the defender keeps both feet outside the three-point line; for advanced players one or both feet start inside. The book's other constraints include extra points for an uncontested layup or for faking the defender inside the arc before driving, 3 points for a one-dribble rim finish and 2 for a two-dribble finish, a set area where the offense must break the arc (corner to 45, or 45 to 45), and a shot clock of three to seven seconds after breaking the arc.

The plan also gives a rotation for the offense, but it's written two ways (stay for six reps; rotate after two), so we've left it out. Set a rotation that keeps your groups of four moving.

Alex's U14 group at London Lions showed how much one trigger can hold. On EP72 he counted the coverage solutions he'd see in a single practice out of the get: rejects (not using the get at all), backdoor cuts, keeps (not pitching it back), the pitch and slip, twists and curls. Alex's principles-of-play workshop deck lists the get solutions as reject, cut, pitch and slip, keep and twist, with a note: no pops.

When Will's players weren't direct on the drive after the pitch, the staff added constraints. The one Alex singled out was the wall constraint: instead of letting players take a loopy drive, they shrank the space so the drive had to be direct.

The plan lists both solos and gets as the offense's ways to create an advantage; we've reproduced both lines as written. This isn't the Battleship in our small-sided games guide, where a team needs a qualifying basket from each of four locations to win. Transcending Basketball names Battleship as one of three Transforming games built on the principles of popular video games, and it has more than one version. In the version in Alex's first book, the only trigger is the get, and a team needs four scores from four strike locations (the wing, both 45s and the trail) to win. Any other score doesn't count, but the team keeps possession. Run whichever one fits your session.

1. What is a get?
2. What is MIG, and why is it important?

Both questions are about language the team will use for the rest of the season. Keep them short and change them through the year, as Mike MacKay suggests in the book, so players think rather than recite.

Plan #1 is the first week. The U14 season plan in Alex's principles-of-play workshop deck shows where it's heading. It's written as additions: everything listed for U12 still applies.

Some of those terms are defined in our other material:

• Push, pull, hold: how off-ball players react when the ball is driven into the paint, to keep the best spacing for the driver and the team (as described on EP113). Alex's pass-and-cut article describes players reacting to dribble penetration with a push, a pull or a ghost cut.
• Ghost cut: George Vaz's description is a cut where the offense disappears and reappears somewhere spooky, like under the basket.
• Keep the highway clear: keep the middle of the floor free for the dribble push. Clap-back: score within five seconds of being scored on. Both are from George Vaz's Principles Over Rules.
• Two-side break: filling the 45 and the corner on the weak side in transition (Two Side Break, George Vaz).
• Ball, basket, FMD: in emergency transition defense, someone protects the basket, the next player picks up the ball, and the next finds the most dangerous player.
• Turtle: on EP72 Alex describes turtle spacing as the ball on the side with the strong-side corner, two players on the weak side and the dunker, with the offense going to work for a paint touch. Will's players would call "turtle" when a bigger, slower player was guarding one of them.
• Side and Rub: pick-and-roll spacings. Side has the ball on the side with the two side ahead; Rub has the ball in the middle with the two side behind (Alex, EP72).

Pick and roll is on the list deliberately. At London Lions, the U14 group moved on from gets to picks out of side and rub spacing, reading rejects, crack and slip, crack and roll, flips and tags. Alex's response to coaches who think that's too much at that age:

The season plan's half-court defense starts with intense ball pressure. Alex explained on EP72 why that mattered in England: young players were used to guarding inside the three-point line and sagging heavily, because many opponents couldn't shoot well. The staff demanded players get right up on the ball, because they wanted to develop adaptive ball-handlers who can handle pressure.

Will said they built it through constraints. They played 1-on-1 in the full court, off a rebound or from a different starting position each time. When a defender switched off, got beaten to their strong hand or was late to recover, they were subbed off straight away and the next pair came on.

• Not ready for gets? Alex's alternative in the pass-and-cut article is to start from 1-on-1 and dominoes, and introduce a get only when players show they can handle basic spacing. Use FIBA 3-on-3's second add (dominoes through solos only) as the base game.
• Move the challenge point in the shooting game. Make it harder by allowing cuts, then drives, in 2-on-1. Make it easier by keeping the no-drive, no-cut rule longer.
• Shrink the space when drives get loopy, as London Lions did with the wall constraint.
• Keep the age plans in sequence. If your players haven't had the U12 principles, start with the U12 practice plan: the U14 season plan assumes them.

If the get in FIBA 3-on-3 is too much at first, the Routledge book has a smaller game that builds it. It sits in the book's youth section on creating dominoes, after players have learned to keep an advantage they're given.

Plan #1 is one of twenty in the U14 bundle. For the bigger picture, our conceptual offense guide covers triggers and dominoes, and the youth coaching guide covers how principles build from U8 up.