I'm starting my first season and running a fullcourt press defense. I am now at the point where I'm setting practice strategies. I'm debating the virtues of training high on footwork for my guards. On the one hand, I want a very strong overall team defense, but the other attributes that footwork improves are unnecessary for guards (so I've been told).

So the question I guess is should the minutes I'm using training footwork be better spent on conditioning for my defense? By the way, if you want to correct any of my assumptions, I would appreciate it. I'm still learning.

I wouldn't say the other things footwork trains are "useless" for a guard. Obviously they won't use shot blocking much but it'd still be nice to have, and the other thing it trains is low post, which is fine for a guard to have.

I've never run a FCP but I know conditioning is paramount so regardless of your other practice minutes, you do need to make sure you put plenty into conditioning since the defense basically won't work unless your team has speed and stamina. However, defense is very important too, as that rating works in tandem with speed and athleticism (and IQ) and the better your players' defensive ratings, the fewer points you'll hold your opponents to (generally). So even if you think defense is the only important rating affected by footwork practice, it's still an important rating if you want to be a good defensive team.

Conditioning is most important.  However, if you are trying to improve low potential ath/spd/stm and could be improving high potential def, I would go with the defense.

I'd advise you to recruit already acceptably high defensive players that also have high stamina.  It's preferable to practice conditioning over defense, since ath and speed are more important than lp and blocking (although, like prezuiwf said, they're by no means useless).