High school hoops 101: Conditioning?

Every young coach, it seems, says “We may not be that great, but we will be the best-conditioned team on the floor.”

I said it. And I had preseason conditioning, lots of sprints in practice, and a team that was in very good shape.

Now, many decades on, I realize I simply wasted a lot of time and energy that could have been better spent acquiring skills. It all starts, really, with basic human physiology.

At age 15 or 16, the human body is pretty much running at peak efficiency. Ask former high school athletes how long it took them to get into shape in their mid-teens, and they’ll pause and say “Oh, about three days.” (We won’t go into the arduous process involved 20 or 30 years later.)

So, I now ask myself, what is the purpose of having high school basketball players do wind sprints in August? Or even October? And even less applicable are long training runs done at a jog. Jogging gets you better at jogging, but if you’re jogging on a basketball court, you’re not playing well – or, if the coach notices, not playing very long.

Then there’s weight training. Strength is good, no doubt, but the received wisdom is that to maintain offseason gains in strength, at least 45 minutes a week must be devoted to weights. If you do not have time in your practice schedule during the season for 45 minutes of serious weight training, then none of that work the kids did in the offseason matters at all. As in zero.

For me, at least, the time my players spend during the season is precious, and I don’t have 45 minutes to spare. (What you practice is what you’re good at, the saying goes, but you never have enough time to practice all the things you want to be good at.) I would much rather have a player who can make shots than a player who is 10% stronger than he was in June.

Which leads to the next point: Why do I need to run sprints in practice if we have drills that combine conditioning and skill development? And basketball games are 32 minutes of playing time, with plenty of breaks. And truthfully, substitutions are made just as often to hand out playing time as they are to supply rest.

Think about it this way: Skills win basketball games; winning races does not. Would you rather have the most skilled team, or the best-conditioned team? Is the object of the game to put the ball in the basket or have the lowest heart rate when the horn sounds?

Basketball is a very difficult game. It requires a lot of physical skills that take time to learn – dribbling, passing, screening out, etc. – and a lot of mental work that’s needed to run an offense, play team defense and be in the right place at the right time. Very few young players have all the physical and mental attributes to play the game well. Usually they have a few, and through their time in high school, they acquire others.

On the other hand, they can acquire the necessary physical conditioning to play the game in a few days, but the other attributes literally can take years. So why would you spend August and September running when an intense game of pickup will teach your kids how to be better players?

In short, conditioning is one of the most over-rated components of a successful high school team. Teenagers can get into game shape with just a few days of hard work, and most of them will be able to function well for as many minutes as you want to put them on the court without a single wind sprint in practice.

But they’re not going to be able to make threes unless they spend a lot of time shooting them.

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Clay Kallam has coached for more than 40 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. He currently works at Carondelet High School in Concord, but has been a head coach at several high schools and was an assistant on three girls’ state championship teams at two different schools.

Photo byKylie O'Sullivan for Unsplash