High School Practice with a Shot Clock

We are 3 practices into the season, after 2 days of tryouts. One of the things are are experimenting with this year is practicing our offense with a shot clock. We've been using a 24 second shot clock for a some of our small sided games, 5 on 5, and full court work. In our full court work the clock starts with the ball crosses half court.

It's early on, but I'm really liking using the shot clock while working on offense. We want to play quickly and it forces us to do that. It forces players to stop wasting time on offense (over dribbling, dribbling to nowhere, holding it too long, etc). It really forces us to constantly attack and hunt great shots. It's been great to increase our offensive urgency.

The downfall to using a shot clock, obviously, is rushing and throwing up bad shots. In order to discourage bad shots we do have a bad shot rule in our games. If a player takes what we consider a "bad shot" we will not award a point - even if it goes in. The idea is that we want to move quickly in order to find great shots. Our assistant coach Jeremy Christiansen hit it on the head on Friday "We want to play quickly in order to get a great shot more quickly, not just to shoot quickly."

I would encourage you to think about practicing with a shot clock. I think it will force your players to play at a quicker tempo than they are used to. It will make your high school games slow down for your players, which is a key to great offense.