AAU Coaching Boys Basketball Series: Individual Defense Drills

Dump that soft defense and create a fundamental attacking defense that your kids will love to play and will allow them to compete against a more athletic team.

In this video, Fran Fraschilla teaches you how to build proper defensive fundamentals, footwork, and technique using a series of drills that are designed to be logical, progressive, and habitual in nature.

Using a mix of youth players and high school age players, Fraschilla demonstrates drills that escalate from 1v1 to 2v2 to 4v4 emphasizing help defense and on-ball-pressure. Using drill progressions - drills that build on each other - you can teach one concept after another making it easy for your players to understand.

On the court, Coach Fraschilla takes you through four sets of "build up" drills starting with the defensive stance and working his way up to 5-on-5 man defense - with a 2-3 zone thrown in. These drills develop footwork, defensive positioning, slides, closeouts, helpside positioning, on-ball defense, foot faking, and more.

Being able to defend in the full court and in transition takes away a huge offensive advantage. A transition defense series is briefly touched upon using two drills that put the defense at a disadvantage to work on concepts need to defend the break and conversion from offense to defense.

Put everything together using Fraschilla's shell drill to simulate 5-on-5 half court defense. You will see six unique concepts within the shell drill that will help you develop a cohesive defense through several types of offensive attacks. The shell defense series teaches concepts such as rebounding, denying the cutter, help defense, communication and protecting the rim.

From techniques and tactics to positioning and cutters, Fran Fraschilla will help you build a defensive system that is capable of shutting down any opponent and teaching your players how to play the game. Any coach, new or old, will get a ton of tools to teach the fundamental concepts needed to be dominate on the defensive end.

This series of videos was produced by Championship Productions in association with AAU (The Amateur Athletic Union).

88 minutes. 2012.