Motivating young Ballers
When I’m not playing around with tech I’m a father and a basketball coach. When my 8 yo son started playing and the club asked me to help out as a coach I jumped right in. Now the first season is over - older kids left the team, new kids started learning the basics and my son is somewhat in-between. The next season is far in the future, summer has a lot of other cool things you can do. And of course there’s always competition from Nintendo, Netflix and Disney.
I remember this myself when I was his age: After the season ended there was nothing to look forward to and you easily got in a slump.
The answer came right before summer holidays. One of the older coaches approached me and handed me a cardboard box. In there were materials for the player badges of the DBB (German Basketball Association). The idea is simple: As in other sports there are bronze, silver and gold badges that you can earn by showing your skills.
Bronze Badge #
| Type | Challenge |
|---|---|
| Dribble | Dribble a distance of 10m with each hand |
| Pass | Pass 10 times to someone 3m away |
| Jumpshot | Hit 1 of 10 shots |
| Layup | Hit 1 of 10 layups |
| Game | Play a game with simplified rules for 5 min |
Silver Badge #
| Type | Challenge |
|---|---|
| Dribble | Dribble a slalom of 10m with each hand |
| Pass | Pass 3 stationary players while running |
| Jumpshot | Hit 3 of 10 shots |
| Layup | Hit 4 of 10 layups |
| Game | Play a game for 2x 10 min |
Gold Badge #
| Type | Challenge |
|---|---|
| Dribble | Dribble a slalom of 10m while crossing hands |
| Pass | Pass back and forth with another player while going to the hoop |
| Jumpshot | Hit 7 of 10 shots (or 3 free throws) |
| Layup | Hit 7 of 10 layups |
| Game | Play a game for 2x 15 min |
Bonus: While searching for references to put into this post I found that the DBB even published an awesome guide that goes along with the badges and gives a lot of detailed information and ideas for the practice sessions! Here’s the Guide as PDF
This is awesome and it helped a lot to keep the kids motivated through the holidays. But is there something else I could do? How far could I ride this?
We need to go further! #
When I talked with some friends about the badges and how much of a success they were we came to the conclusion that it would be awesome to have more of them. We brainstormed a larger number of ideas, and I was keen to take this further.
In comes ChatGPT. It’s awesome to explore ideas with it, so I fed the basic concept and a number of ideas and prompted it to fill the gaps - and the result was exceptional! Where I was at a rough concept with 80% of the content being in my head it was the AI that turned it into a polished result. I then used Cursor.ai to generate a static website (using Hugo with a custom theme) which details everything and provides a printable layout so I could create physical handouts for parents and players.
Here are the 5 special badges:
- Passing: Show that you can forward the ball precisely and efficient
- Shooting: Hit the basket from different positions with a high accuracy
- Dribbling: Control the ball with great security, even under high pressure
- Layup: The easiest shot is one of the foundational techniques in Basketball
- Teamwork: Kids need to learn to be good teamplayers as early as possible
All of these are available in 3 difficulties:
- Starter: Show that you’ve learned the basic skills
- Profi: For this you need to master the more advanced techniques
- Champion: Only players who are able to operate under pressure are able to achieve these badges
To furthermore support this, I designed the badges myself and printed them with my 3D-printer. It was great fun, now I have a large number of badges my players can add to their collection and show off to their friends.
The page is online at GitHub Pages.