Crafty Ball Handling Drill

ball-handling-drill

Last summer (2015) I was working with a small forward who wanted to improve his ball handling.

We did a ton of ball handling drills that you see around that help improve your dribble speed and your overall control of the basketball.

His handles improved.

But still, he couldn’t really use his handles to create his own shot or get a defender leaning.

Yeah he could attack in one direction and then make a change of direction move and get by his defender, but in an iso 1 on 1 situation a lot of times you need to be able to be illusive and basically more tricky with your move.

You need to have some sort of pause or fake that gets the defense thinking you’re going in one direction when you’re really going in the other direction.

It’s hard to build that craftiness into someone’s handles.

So I thought and thought on what would be the best way to do that.

I went back to my old training philosophy of high reps of a game specific move is the best way to improve your ball handling.

I had a few other ball handling drills I put him through, but this one was the one that helped the most.

I call it crafty ball handling, because when you combine the small hesitations and the footwork you can start to build a rhythm to your moves.

Once you do that it helps with that elusiveness I was talking about.

So here’s the video.

I recommend that you do this entire series 3 times through.

You’ll have a good little sweat going by then and can start to get into the next drill as you’ll be mostly warm by then.


If you think that this is beneficial I'd appreciate it if you shared it with your friends.

And remember that this is a ball handling drill that you can do at home, so no excuses!

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