Customer Reviews

Game Strategies and Tactics for Basketball: Bench Coaching for Success

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I had the opportunity to read "Game Strategies and Tactics for Basketball" by Kevin Sivils a couple of weeks ago on a plane flight. I honestly was shocked with the amount of information in the 106 page book. I have read books on coaching basketball for the last twenty years and this is one of the best I have come across. It is concise and makes you think about how you handle every situation.

It isn't just basketball coaching, but administration of your basketball program and that is what I am impressed with. I would recommend it to any basketball coach on the high school level, especially the younger guys. It would have saved me from making some "young and dumb" mistakes early in my coaching career.

It is a blueprint on how you should run a basketball program. I really liked his management ideas on how to prepare at home and on the road. He hit on the mark with his view on special situations and how to plan for them. What things you have "control" over before, during, and after a basketball game.

You are going to want to check out this "information packed" book on basketball coaching/management ideas that will make you think.

Coach Peterman

Let's be honest, you can choose from hundreds of thousands of basketball books (I see a collection of 154,000 just on Amazon). However, I have not found any as concise and informative as Kevin Sivil's Game Strategies and Tactics for Basketball. As a young coach, it is easy to get caught up in the X's and O's of the game. Coach Sivils uses preparation as a catalyst to success. It is not the moment that counts, but the preparation it took to allow your team perfect execution in that moment. For all the variables we cannot control as coaches, Coach Sivils focuses his efforts on those variables which we can control through preparation.

If you are a young coach, as myself, looking for guidance and direction, this book is a quick and efficient utilization of your time. I was able to read it in less than a week as it is well organized and straightforward. And, as coaches, do we really have time for anything else???

This book is so well thought out and presented, i am very impressed with it's clarity and focus on team preparation. This book really will help coaches in teaching their players how to be prepared for various situations and how to handle them. Everything from bench decorum and how to control the speed of the game is covered in this book - really brilliant.

I ordered the book as I recently entered the world of coaching. I'm always looking for good material to learn from and grow as a coach and this book did just that. I finished the book on the same day I got it, reading it straight through because of the way the information is presented was interesting and informative. Anyone wanting to delve into the strategies of particular game and practice situations should give this book a try!

Not since John Wooden have I seen a book about basketball that deals with not just the X's and O's of the game but also the people involved. Coach Sivils gives a clear guide for thinking about the game in terms of winning on the court of course. But many of the strategies he presents for dealing with officials and players, especially the players are useful for success other than on the court. It is rare to find a book that outlines for a coach how to win on the court and also achieve the objective that many coaches overlook - how to develop their players into winners off the court in the game of life.

A must read.

Game Strategy and Tactics for Basketball is a must for every coach's library. This is not an X's and O's book. It is about how to use X's and O's. I have never come across another book like it. Fans who want to have a better understanding of why coaches do certain things in terms of strategy or tactics will enjoy this book as well. The book covers topics like how to slow up the game or slow it down, what defense to use, planning for timeouts and a lot more, there is just too

much to list here.

Kevin Sivils has done a great job in explaining coaching tactics and strategies. I found the book to be well written and very informative.

This book is going to be really helpful to any basketball coach who obtains a copy! More than anything, it made me really think about strategy and how I want to manage the games I coach and tactics I want to use to control the game I the way I want.

The coach who wrote the book does a good job with suggestions and examples, but early in the book he says his goal is to provoke other coaches into thinking about strategy for themselves. The book does a good job of this and giving real examples and ideas on what to do.

I was pretty excited when I finished the book and have been thinking about ways to better use the systems I teach and coach now. I realize I could have been more effective as a coach by thinking strategically instead of just how my offense works or my defense should work.

This is a valuable reference for a basketball coach!

I have coached for a long time and my record shows I am a pretty good bench coach. I learned a lot of tactics that I can add to how I do things already and these "twists" will help my teams in tough games.

Also, I have a better grasp of how a coach should think "strategically" when planning. This is going to help me put myself in the shoes of the opposing coach and think like that coach thinks when planning to take on the team I coach. This will help me have insight into how that coach will attack my team and how and what I should do to make sure my team is ready.

I love zone defense but never really thought about why you pick a particular zone defense to play. This was one of the areas where this book was a help. It talks about the strengths and weaknesses of different zone defenses. This gives you an idea of which zone to use against a particular opponent. Really good stuff for planning.

Every coach should have this book, especially coaches just starting out.

Most of the books on coaching basketball that I have ever read have been about x's and o's, in other words, how to run this defense or that offense and how to teach it.

This book is about strategy and tactics to employ a given strategy in the game of basketball. Most of what is in this book I have never read or heard in other books, or coaching DVDs, and coaches tend to learn strategy the hard way, by experience, or from older coaches who mentor younger coaches.

The book is easy to use. Each section is followed by a short summary section with the key points listed again in just one sentence. This way I can bend the corner of the summary page and open it up and jog my memory.

Some of the stuff Coach Sivils shares is substitution strategy, how to speed up a game, how to slow down a game, dealing with your point guard so he or she knows what to do, and the one aspect I never considered, how to develop an overall plan to teach everything the players need to know to play according to the strategy they have been taught.