Inside Boys’ Varsity Basketball practice: Everything you’ve always wanted to know

Marek Ludkiewicz, Staff Writer

As we at MacDuffie are hopefully all aware, we have several fantastic athletes that play for our many hardworking sports teams. One of the more well-established teams  is Boys’ Varsity Basketball. This year our Boys’ Basketball team played hard in front of everyone at the games, but what went on behind the scenes?  We took a close look at a practice to find out.

Before things officially kick off around 6pm, the players trickle in, and begin to shoot around to get their bodies moving and blood flowing. The boys talk and joke a little and when the time comes for practice to officially begin, they rack the balls and get on the line to get ready to do dynamic stretching. Dynamic stretching, as opposed to static stretching, is movement and doing specific exercises while moving that are known to help avoid cramps and muscle tears. The boys start off by jogging to the middle of the court and back, twice. Then they start high knees to half court and back, twice. Butt kicks follow in the same fashion.

The players then begin to pull their knees across their torsos to more fully stretch, and also stretch their quads to half court, but on the way back they do lunges. After the lunges, they do “Frankensteins” or what soccer players might call toy soldiers, which entails raising their arms out in front of them and kicking their hands to half court, coupled with sweeps on the way back. To wrap up the dynamic stretching, a sprint to half court and back.

The athletes clap it up and huddle up with the coach for a pre-practice talk. Then they get on the baseline with a ball and run a drill called Perfection. In this the players run a full court lay-up drill. Immediately after they run, Secondary commences, which is a practice in groups of five where they work on plays for game time.

The next step is some basic shooting drills with partners. The last drill the team runs through is Transition, which is a variety of fast break situations in which Coach Harris creates two lines of five and passes the ball to one line and the other line has to hustle to the baseline, then return and play defense on the team with the ball. This drill focuses heavily on communication, as well as teamwork.

After this has gone through a couple of times, the team switches back to practicing plays for game time. After these plays are practiced, and coaches make adjustments and offer tips, they wrap up practice with a huddle and a talk about upcoming games and practices.