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Develop speed, strength and confidence, whether you’re on the court with a team or practicing your dribble, lay-ups and shots alone.
What’s in it for your child?
- Fitness: basketball helps develop speed and aerobic fitness
- Agility: when played in a team, basketball involves dodging, feinting and darting around
- Team sports help kids develop a sense of sportsmanship and learn to work as part of a team
Get started
- Learn to dribble: grab a ball, find a hard surface, and bounce the ball against the ground, touching it only with the pads of the fingers
- Develop your ball-handling skills: experiment with dribbling over distances and with increased speed; try passing overhand and from the chest
Tips and tricks
- Shoot! It takes time to get good at scoring, but practice makes perfect — encourage your child to take shots from a range of different position on the court
- Basketball is a non-contact sport with one very strict rule: players cannot carry the ball, they must dribble it at all times
Terms to know
- Lay-up: this is the name for the move where a player runs and dribbles up to the basked, then leaps in the air to shoot
- Block: in team play, when a player from one team prevents an opposing player from shooting or passing… without touching that player
- Swish: when a player makes a basket without touching the rim — ‘swish’ is the sound this makes
This extract is part of a larger article “Basketball” from Wikipedia.
It is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
