Academy / Guides / Teaching plays
How to teach basketball plays to a high school team
Teach a play in four parts: show the whole play, walk it step by step, run it live against a defense, then have players recall it from memory between practices. Most teams stop after the third part. Research on memory suggests the fourth is the one that makes a play stick.
What’s the best order to teach a new play?
Whole, then parts, then whole again, then from memory. Players need to see where the play is going before the details mean anything, and they need to rebuild it themselves before you can count on it in a game.
- Part 1Show it whole
Draw the full play on the board, then walk it once 5-on-0 at game spacing. Name it out loud.
- Part 2Walk it in steps
One step at a time: who passes, who screens, who cuts. Say each player’s job and the read.
- Part 3Run it live
5-on-0 at speed, then against a defense that knows the play, then against one that doesn’t.
- Part 4 · most skippedRecall it
At the next practice, before you run it, have players draw or say it from memory.
- Teach every spot, not just your own. Players get subbed, and a guard who knows only the guard’s path can’t fill in at the wing.
- Teach the read, not only the path. “Cut to the wing” is a path. “If your defender goes under the screen, stop and shoot” is a read. Players need both.
- Use the same name every time. The name you call from the bench should match the name on the board and in the playbook.
Why do players forget plays between practices?
Because watching a play again feels like learning it, and that feeling lasts only a few minutes. In a well-known memory study, college students learned a short passage in one of two ways. One group reread it four times. The other read it once and then wrote down what they remembered three times.[1]
What they remembered one week later
Experiment 2 of Roediger and Karpicke (2006). The recall group read the passage 3.4 times on average; the reread group read it 14.2 times.
Two details matter for coaches. First, five minutes after studying, the rereaders did better. Cramming does work, briefly. Second, the rereaders predicted they would remember the most. A walkthrough right before a game can leave a team feeling ready and still lose the play a week later.
The study used reading passages, not basketball, so don’t expect the same percentages on the court. The lesson that carries over is simple: pulling a play out of memory builds it more than seeing it again.
How should you space it out over the week?
Come back to it more than once, and leave gaps. A review of 317 experiments found that spreading practice out beats cramming it, and that the best gap gets longer the longer you need to remember.[2] A play you need for the playoffs needs reviews further apart than one you need on Friday.
Here is one way to fit a new play into a week. It takes a few minutes a day after the install.
Example plan for one new play. Adjust the days to your schedule.
| Day | At practice | Recall |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Install: show it whole, walk it in steps, run it 5-on-0 | None yet |
| Day 2 | Run it against a defense that knows the play | Before you run it: two players draw it on the board |
| Day 3 | Run it live in a scrimmage | Call a step and ask one player for their job |
| Day off | No practice | Each player draws the play on their own |
| Next week | Call it without warning in a scrimmage | Ask a player to name the read before they run it |
How many plays should you put in at once?
Fewer than you think. A new play is ready to run in a game when most of the team can rebuild it without help, not when you’ve walked through it. If players still mix up a play from last week, review that one before you install another.
What does this look like with a real set?
Take Horns Flare, a standard set. The 4 and 5 start at the elbows, the 2 and 3 in the corners, and the 1 has the ball up top. It has three steps, and each one gives you something to check:
- Entry. The 1 passes to the 5. Check: can every player say where the first pass goes?
- Flare. The 4 screens the 1’s defender and the 1 cuts to the wing. Check: can the 4 show where they set the screen?
- Kick-out. The 5 passes to the 1 on the wing. Check: does the 1 know to be ready to shoot?
You can try this play as a quiz: watch it, then draw each step yourself.
In BenchStats Academy You draw a play once and release it the day you install it. Players open one team code on their phones, watch the play animate, then answer a quiz by drawing each step, which is the recall part done away from the gym. No player accounts. See how Academy works
How do you know your players actually know it?
Ask them to show you, not tell you. “Does everyone know Horns Flare?” gets nods. “Draw it” tells you who does. A blank court on a whiteboard, or the back of a practice plan, is enough. Six ways to do it are in how to check your players know the playbook.
Sources
- Henry L. Roediger III and Jeffrey D. Karpicke, Test-enhanced learning: taking memory tests improves long-term retention, Psychological Science 17(3), 2006, pages 249 to 255. Experiment 2. Checked 2026-11-04.
- Nicholas J. Cepeda and others, Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: a review and quantitative synthesis, Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 2006, pages 354 to 380. Checked 2026-11-04.