Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball

You volunteered to coach the basketball team, but are you really ready? How will you teach the fundamental skills, run effective practices, and harness the energy of your young team? Fear not: Survival Guide for Coaching Youth Basketball has the answers.

Yes, the wildly popular and entertaining coaching guide is back in a new, updated, and expanded second edition. Longtime coaches Keith Miniscalco and Greg Kot return to share their experience and provide advice you can rely on from first practice to final shot. From evaluating players’ skills and establishing realistic goals to using in-game coaching tips, it’s all here—the drills, the plays, the fun.

Develop your team’s dribbling, passing, shooting, and rebounding skills with the Survival Guide’s collection of the game’s best youth drills. For plays and sets that young teams can actually run, flip to the Survival Guide’s offensive and defensive playbook. And to get the most out of every practice, follow the ready-to-use practice plans.

So worry not, coach. Survival Guide has helped countless coaches have rewarding and productive seasons—and a lot of fun along the way!

Keith Miniscalco has been coaching youth basketball for over 30 years. Currently he is the varsity head coach for the Resurrection College Prep High School girls’ team in Chicago. He continues to coach in his travel program, Over the Edge, based in Chicago. The program has been proven effective for young athletes who wish to continue with competitive basketball through high school. Miniscalco has also coached at Our Lady of Lourdes, Queen of All Saints, Loyola Academy High School, and the Chicago Park District. He lives in Chicago.

Greg Kot has been the Chicago Tribune's pop and rock music critic since 1990. His work has been honored by the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the Society of Professional Journalists, and Brill's Content magazine. Chicago magazine selected him as the city's finest critic in any discipline. Along with being a regular contributor to Rolling Stone and other national periodicals, he is the music analyst for Fox TV morning newscasts. Kot’s books include Wilco: Learning How to Die (Broadway Books, 2004), Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (Scribner, 2010), and I'll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the Music That Shaped the Civil Rights Era (Scribner, 2014).

In his spare time, Kot is a youth basketball coach and is proud to say that both his daughters survived his coaching and went on to lead happy and productive lives (so far, at least). He and his partners operate Over the Edge, a travel-team program based in Chicago that prepares grade-school athletes to compete at a high school level with an emphasis on the fundamentals.

Kot has lived on Chicago's Northwest Side through numerous character-building winters with his wife, Deb, two daughters, and far too many records.