 Hi, during these trying times of the pandemic, the City of Columbia Parks and Recreation Department realizes that choices can be limited in enhancing one's physical, social, and mental well-being. The Parks and Recreation staff have been involved in developing a number of videos in which citizens can participate in and enjoy in the privacy of their own home. These videos consist of arts and crafts, gardening, physical activity, and sports instruction, with many more to come as we work through this pandemic. The videos will be available to you on a number of our social media outlets. We hope you enjoy and thank you very much. Good morning, City of Columbia. My name is Doug Elliott. I'm an athletic coordinator for the City of Columbia's Parks and Recreation Department. On behalf of our mayor, Steve Benjamin, our department in Parks and Recreation, we hope that you're staying safe, following all social distancing guidelines so we can all see ourselves back together in the near future. I want to introduce you today a couple of ball handling drills for any level of play. If you've ever watched professionals on basketball or on TV, Steph Carey really does these a lot. Very, very basic basketball handling drills, stationary, inside, in a garage or in your room. If you had a harventer floor, you don't have to have a basketball floor to do these drills so they're conducive to any place that you can find maybe four to five foot radius to do them in. All right. Your very first basic drill in the start is a crossover drill. But let me emphasize for you, the thing to understand is that you must maintain your stance. All right. Anytime you sit back while playing, he's never dribbling or playing standing straight up. So no matter how tall you are, how short you are, you must make sure you maintain your stance. And that should be a seated stance or if you're about to sit down, all right. So your stance should always be knees bent, tail like you're going to sit into a chair, back, not bent over, somewhat upright, all right. So the very first drill I'm going to show you is a crossover, all right. So it's a basic crossover within your shoulders, all right. So if we watch a lot of TV, we see a lot of guys do a lot of fancy ball handling drills, a lot of carrying, a lot of holding of the basketball. This drill is a basic drill inside your shoulders, low to the ground. You see I never come out of my stance. The ball spins from one hand to the other very briefly and I'm going in and out, all right. So now you can make this as short as you want to make it for your control or you can make it as long as you want to make it, but maintain your positioning inside your body, all right. So a basic crossover, okay. The very next drill is called a box dribble, very stationary drill, again back in my stance. So at 6'8", which is my height, all right, I should be able to maintain my stance if I'm dribbling the basketball. All right. I want to be able to ward off defenders with my off arm, maintaining consistent dribble with one hand to another with a basketball. So this box dribble helps you maintain control of the basketball on either side of your body while keeping it away from a defender on this side. So I always start on my right side because I'm right hand dominant, but you want to make sure you're teaching your left hand to do the same drills, all right. So the very first part of it is I want to be on the side of my body. So again, watch my legs, I'm not leaning to my side, I'm in my same stance, but I'm doing swooping movement with my right hand and right ball. So this is how it looks from the side. I should be able to look forward in my seated stance, ball in and out with my right hand, all right. So you do about 10 to 15, maybe 20 dribbles on one side. While picking the basketball up, you go to a right front. So if you see, it's a sweeping motion. I'm not doing this, I'm not doing this, I'm doing a sweeping motion with my right arm. So that arm is right in between my legs, I'm maintaining my stance. On the dribble, you want to go from right to left. The goal is to be able to look up, but if you have to look down, there's no problem, all right. So again, if you watch Steph Curry warm up, he's doing these very same drills. So do not misconstrue that this is an idea that they're not needed anymore. All right. These are very basic ball handling drills. On the dribble, I want to go to my left side. Again, as you see, I'm not leaning to my left, I'm just putting the ball on my left side. If there's a defender here, he has to come through me to get this basketball. All right. On the dribble, I want to maintain my seated position and go behind my back. I have not come out of my stance, have not stood up one time, even with all these bad knees. I have not removed myself from my position. I want to maintain a low ability to be able to explode out of one of these moves if a defender decides he wants to go for one of these balls, I can easily explode out of that position. All right. So I just dribble myself into a box. That's what they call it, a box dribble. All right. So if you do 15 to 20, you will maybe do three sets of those. If you do maybe 25 to 50 of the crossovers in front, you want to do three to four sets of those. What I didn't preface in the beginning is, have a plan. I see kids in my neighborhood all the time going out, they're just shooting for hours and hours, not working on the game, but they tell me that's what they're doing. But they don't have an idea of what they're doing. All right. Even if you have a pad that charts how many times you do what dribble, the idea is to have improvement at a certain amount of time. All right. So we did a crossover. We did a box dribble. A very, very basic dribble is called a figure eight. Maintain stance again. Drop the ball anywhere you want to drop it. And this is a low dribble. Figure eight in and out. As you can see, I'm not leaning to one side. I'm not coming out of my stance. I'm still in my chair. I'm controlling the basketball, all fingertips. So you don't want to get to the point where you're padding the basketball. Just like shooting, you want to spread your fingertips as wide as possible and control and keep it low in and out. At your behest, change directions. All right. So you want to get about five to 10 minutes of that. So if you want to break it up into two-minute chunks, that's fine. If your stance becomes something you can't maintain. All right. Now those are three very, very, very, very basic ball handling dribbles that are stationary. All right. We don't have the, this is conducive to those who are locked into their home, kids who can't get outside, kids who only get in their driveway, don't have a hoop, don't have a court. They can designate a very, very small space to do these drills. So you want to graduate, eventually, maybe, to standing up with pound dribbles to be able to go low, stand up, switch hands, pound dribbles, and be able to go low and go up. All these things are stationary. If you want to be able to stand in one spot and throw it down and back in one spot, so we're not going to be able to get to the point where you're doing zigzag drills, but you want to be able to get here and stand here. If you want to be able to stand here and go behind your back, back and forth, those are drills you can do stationary that help you in your movement. Understand anything you do standing up, you should be thinking about it's in a game, just like you're playing an actual basketball game. When I was growing up, I would play by myself in my yard, but I would have nine other me's out there. I would pass to me. I would rebound my misses. I would line up for free throws for my free throw shots. I would call fouls for me. The game starts in your mind. So if you have an idea of what you want to do to improve upon your game, you must begin in your mind. So again, those are very, very basic basketball ballhandling drills for any level, all levels. Again, for introductory, you don't get any more basic than that, and for the professionals, they still continue to do those drills to become better ballhandlers. Thank you very much.