Competitive Practice Drills to Develop Skills, Mental Toughness & Prepare for Late-Game Situations

with Tad Boyle,
University of Colorado Head Men's Coach;
2021 National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) 'Guardians-of-the-Game' Award for Advocacy;
first Colorado Head Coach to lead the men's basketball team to four straight 20+ win seasons;
2012 Pac-12 Tournament Champions;
2012 National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) District 20 Coach of the Year;
Northern Colorado Head Coach from 2006 to 2010;
In 2010, Northern Colorado advanced to the postseason for the first time in school history;
2010 NABC Division I All-District Coach of the Year;
2010 The Sporting News Big Sky Coach of the Year;
2010 CollegeInsider.com Big Sky Coach of the Year;
played collegiately for the University of Kansas (1988 NCAA Champions)

This video serves as a useful guide in helping you develop a mindset and approach toward practice design.  

Tad Boyle demonstrates some of his favorite drills – the ones that have helped him throughout his coaching career – for creating a competitive atmosphere and the consistency needed on winning teams, wherever he has coached.

This video will light a fire in you as a coach. Coach Boyle opens up his coaching vault to showcase his best practice drills to show you how you can get your teams to compete at a high level. His intensity and attention to detail allows any coach in any system to find something that they can immediately incorporate into their own practice design.

Warmup Drills

Coach Boyle begins by explaining how the initial warmup drills in your practice should be competitive by design and set up for the pursuit of perfection. 

At first glance, some of these drills may seem to be basic skill-improvement drills, but as you’ll learn by watching the way they’re run, that by demanding perfection in the drill’s execution, you’ll immediately gain a feel for your team on that day.  This segment of the video explains how setting the tone is essential to good practice design.

Competitive Drills

After demonstrating his basic warmup drills that demand perfection and set the tone for that day’s practice, Coach Boyle ramps up the video by demonstrating a variety of excellent and competitive drills, such as…

√  ‘Keep-Away Drill’ - designed to help your team better understand spacing, cutting and passing! Coach Boyle gives you the scoring system and teaches the rules to implement – to emphasize good offensive execution versus pressure defenses! 

√  ‘4-on-4 Cutthroat Drill’ - instantly help your defense! This drill fosters a hard-nosed defensive mindset into your team by establishing scoring rules that apply to defensive stops. Pressure, rotation and communication are points of emphasis within the drill.

√  ‘Perfect Possession Drill’ - demands physical and mental excellence out of your defensive personnel. Boyle helps you to understand how you can demand perfection from every level of your defense by running this drill every day. The attention to detail and the demand for absolute perfection will help take your team to another level defensively!

√  ‘Bubble Drill’  - places your players into game-like situations in which one team is being asked to play with a lead, while the other team is attempting to comeback - you create scenarios in which players will learn how to close-out games in a highly competitive environment. This drill is sure to be an instant add to your practice playbook!

If you want to add new life and energy into your practices, as well as new insight that will get you looking at your current practice drills in a whole new light, then this is a must-have instructional coaching video!

Coach Comment! ‘Coach Boyle is renowned for his detailed and demanding practices. This video helps you understand how he has gained that reputation. I love all the drills he showed in this video!’

64 minutes. 2023.