Basketball for Kids - Speed Dribbling

Arthur Jackson: Hi, I am Arthur Jackson from One On One Basketball. We have been talking about the fundamentals of dribbling. We just worked on control dribble on the move but we want to talk about now the Speed Dribble. What happens when you use the speed dribble? First and foremost, anytime there is open court in front of a basketball player they want to get down the court as fast as they can, keeping under control. So, any time the defenders are behind them or equal to them, they want to push the ball out and get down the court as fast as possible. So, we are going to talk about a little bit, the components of the speed dribble, what we need to do differently in terms of getting down the court under control.

The key component for dribbling the ball is instead of pushing the ball down, I now push the ball out, I push it out and run to the ball. So, I rotate my hand from the top of the ball, I rotate it to the back and I am using my fingertips and arms, wrist to push the ball forward and out with my fingertips, we do not want to push down, when we push down the ball comes up and it is more exposed and more likely to get out of control, so that is the first thing. Second thing we have talked a lot about today about staying nice and low, as we are dribbling the ball, keeping the ball by our side. Now, we can stand up a little bit, get a little bit taller, so that we can extend with our body and push that ball out further away from the defense.

We do not have to have our hand up to protect because the defense is behind us. So, we can drop that hand, if they catch up we can put it back up to protect and we would get nice and low and get back into our control stance. But, we want to make sure as we are doing it pushing the ball out, shoulders are squared, moving the ball forward as fast as we can, most important thing is staying under control. Now we are going to have our demonstrator, Lincoln show us the speed dribble, again concentrating on the three main component, keeping the ball extended out, we want to push out with our fingertips and wrist not push down, we want to keep the ball below our shoulders and we want to keep our eyes up at all times as we are doing this speed dribble.

So Lincoln, let us go ahead and demonstrate, not bad. Remember the most important thing when doing the speed dribble is staying under control, when you get to the basket if you dribble down the court, you want to be under control so you can make your shot and if there is defense coming at you, you want to be able to stop and keep your dribble going. So, whenever you are working on speed dribble make sure that you always have the ball; you can stop it anytime and keep your dribble going under control. Now, he stops, keeps the ball protected, keeps it nice and low and his eyes are up on the court, very good, not bad.