How I Killed "Rat Ball" in a 1st Grade Basketball Practice

Hi Coach,

Before you dive in, two quick notes:

In today’s issue…

If you’ve ever watched early elementary-aged athletes play basketball (6-9 year olds), you quickly see the game divulge into what I call “Rat Ball.”

The young players treat the ball like a piece of cheese.

They see the ball.

They want the ball.

So, they run to the ball.

The game begins to look like a bunch of hungry rats surrounding a piece of cheese.

It’s an ineffective way to attack in basketball and any other group invasion game for that matter.

Effective offense in a group invasion game is highly dependent upon the spacing of players in relation to one another.

The traditional coach intervention to this problem of “Rat Ball” is usually a stoppage and lecture about spreading out (I’ve definitely done this before), or it’s to remove the defense and show players “where to stand.”

I wanted to solve this spacing problem in a better way.

I recently finished reading Rob Gray’s book, Learning To Be an “Ecological” Coach.

I was challenged and inspired by some of the ideas he shared around using task constraints to change the affordances (opportunities for action) that athletes perceive.

The goal of using a constraint is to help movements emerge that are effective at accomplishing a goal. In this case, the goal being to maintain an advantage and shoot a high-quality shot.

I wanted my players to space the floor to prevent one defensive player from being able to guard two offensive players and to explore moving in their lane to create better passing angles for teammates.

So, I took one of our platform games (I wrote about platform games in more depth here), a simple 3v1 or 3v2 advantage game, and added a task constraint to improve the players spacing.

I called them “Race Lanes.”

The three offensive players could only move within their lane during each rep. They could go up or down in their lane but could not enter another lane.

The defenders (we started with one, then added a second to make it more challenging on the offense as they improved) could move anywhere on the court.

Here’s what it looked like 👇

I put cones on the court where the orange lines are in the picture above to show the offensive players where their lanes were.

Then, we started playing.

A beautiful thing began to happen.

The players stayed spread out and began throwing beautiful passes over and by defenders to open teammates.

Some of the players started moving up and down in their race lanes to create better passing angle for teammates.

Spacing and cutting emerged.

It wasn’t perfect, in fact, it was still messy at times (as learning should be), but it was better.

It was less “Rat Ball” and more basketball.

A thought on how this could apply in your coaching context…

🎧 Listen Now 👉 Spotify | Apple | YouTube

Topics include:

✅ Sideways vs Backwards comparison
✅ The 4 C's for high achieving leaders
✅ The 4 factors needed to foster a winning and sustainable environment

📝 Download the Notes 👉 Free PDF

Thanks for reading, I hope this serves you on your journey.

To your growth,

Luke Gromer, RYG Athletics | A NIKE Sports Camp Provider

P.S. If you’re interested in becoming one of our NIKE Sports Camp directors, reply “NIKE” to this email, and we’ll get on a call! You can see testimonials from over 100 athletes that attended our camps last summer.

Here are a few ways we can help you grow as a coach.

Join the Better Coaching Community to connect with and learn from 450+ other like-minded coaches!

Listen to any of the 125+ episodes of The Better Coaching Podcast.

Get detailed notes on every episode of the Better Coaching Podcast and other free coaching resources.