How do you manage your practice minutes, in terms of team offense/defense vs. individual skills development? I've been told younger teams or teams with new recruits that don't match with team O/D should have 20+ minutes devoted to each, then you can reduce that and add to indiv skills once their IQ rises.

My (somewhat limited) experience is that as soon as i drop team practice minutes, my team plays like crap the next game. Looking forward to some sage advice here. Thanks!

sort of backwards - younger teams, teams with new recruits, programs still being rebuilt - they often have 20 in each off/def or something along those lines, a lesser amount, because higher potential younger players need more individual practice. established programs who are in the NT regularly and a deep run threat fairly often, those teams are usually running more like 25/25. but anyway, 90% of decent teams run somewhere from 20m to 25m per set, with hcp teams usually being perhaps more like 20/20 in the main sets and 10 in hcp, or something along those lines. less than 20 isn't really a thing folks do unless they are practicing 3 sets.

there's no relationship between yesterday's team practice and today's results, essentially. an extremely small one, i suppose, because there might be a practice in there. the iq which is the culmination of all prior practices, matters a lot. but not what you practiced yesterday.

thank you, gillispie. i have benefitted from your wisdom several times in the past, and now i will again!

I use to do 25/2,5 but I found many times my players are being capped out in skills during their junior season, and my guys are not becoming A+ til sometime during their senior season. I upped it to 28/28 and my guys are still mostly becoming all red by their senior season, except now I am hitting A+ closer to the end of their junior season or start of their senior season. I am even considering jumping up to 30/30.

At 28/28 I have 5 guys in their senior season. I am going to take away points in WE and DUR. I am currently 23 games into the season.

This is how many points these players have gained as seniors minus WE/DUR

Mark Heldt-0 (All red)
Loren Hudson-5 (All red) 2 of the pts in low post and he is a PG/SG
Glen Matthews-8 Still room to improve..Deep bench player averages about 10 mins a game for his career.
Robert Hibner-27 (All red except per). He has gained 26 points in perimeter. He is a PF who only plays C/PF and he only had PER not red so I put in 20..
Gordon Strouth-12 (A few secondary yellow) He is my starting SG and he has REB, LP, and passing yellow all the rest red.

interesting plague. there's definitely room for variation here, even in like, meta-only views. i am currently running 52m of practice, because its just where i ended up i suppose. i have ran 30/30 before but i didn't see enough value to justify it to me, but i also ran a zone OR press scheme (full IQ in both) once where i was putting like 62m in total, maybe even 64, and i saw value there, and was able to tolerate the individual minutes - but the recruiting power i had at that time at that program, while not crazy for 2.0, doesn't really exist today. i feel like it would be harder today to live with so little individual practice, and i ultimately bailed on the scheme after considering it not meta-competitive (i based that on a 5 season stint with 2 titles and 2 runner ups, so its not like it was bad). although the two sets has WAY more value today, so maybe on balance actually its more viable today? but regardless, i think the two defensive sets are really fun, and piman at ucla in tark runs full zone and press iq today and is super successful with it. i am not sure if that's common for him elsewhere as i just have the 1 team in tark (the two sets part)... anyway, the point of the rambling is, i agree there's plenty of good stuff to do with those team minutes.

the downside though, is the sophs. one of the things that is really really important to going from a very good coach to a great or elite one, is having exceptional end of season sophs. exceptional sophs just change the nature of the game, you have 3 classes to pull top notch players from instead of 2, it can make all the difference in the world. i've had a number of really critical, sophmore lead championships. my 2nd season back to 3.0 i had a team that was a big title favorite, and got the job done, that had 2 stars who lead the team who were both sophs. there's a lot of others... 3rd title of my d1 5 peat after a horrible luck 5 ees, sophs came up huge and saved what is more or less my greatest accomplishment. most folks don't really imagine winning big like that with sophs, but there's no reason you can't. its one of the top couple things i reference as keys when folks ask me what to focus on to transition from a 'normal' a+ d1 team to the next level above it. and too much team iq makes it hard to optimize your end of season sophs. so that is the big down side you face IMO, its not really about whether your seniors are wasting all their minutes, that is generally happening to all of us regardless.

Gillisipe....I haven't won a championship since I switched to 28/28. However I don't think my issue of not winning championships has been practice. Now I am 25 games into this season I have 2 Sophs. One was a 5 star recruit the other a 4 star recruit. The 5 star recruit has a 880 overall rating and a A- IQ....The 4 star recruit has a 869 rating and a A- IQ......I am not sure I would be benefited by doing 20/20...I think also 20/20 might increase these players odds of them going pro after their 2nd season. That's a trade off to also consider. So far I am liking the 28/28 over 25/25.

It really depends on how much ratings growth they have.

At D2/D3, I often had players with more potential (6+ green & blue ratings as freshman). With those teams I often would sacrifice the IQ for ratings growth.

At D1, where the players begin with higher start numbers and subsequently have less potential to grow, I usually will be in that 25/25 range. 50-55 total minutes is probably my sweet spot at high D1.

Also remember the diminishing returns on practice minutes. For the minutes between 25 and 30 on IQ, I'd estimate you don't get any increase for about 40% of those five minutes. Once you get over 35 min, you're probably getting less than half the extra effort being put into practice.