In pee wee basketball, there is no skill. Children who are a little more physically developed than others are the ones who start playing. Do you have a child who has reached a growth spurt and is four or five inches taller than everyone else? He is your center. You have a short kid who can dribble without dribbling, that’s your base. He fills in the other places.

When you get a bit older, say in elementary or high school, the ability *starts* to creep into it, but even then it’s still almost entirely a function of growth. Older children play, as long as they are coordinated enough.

But then as you get older, let’s say in your junior years of high school, talent and ability start to take over.

The kids who work the hardest are the ones who get to play.

But something funnier happens too. Some talented kids can still get by without trying so hard, that is, without a lot of practice.

This happens so much that some really talented kids don’t practice at all, they just ignore their talent. They can usually get away with it up to the highest levels of high school basketball (college basketball).

So in light of this, how important is practice really? If you can live without it, then why bother?

Here’s a little story someone told me a long time ago about Larry Bird. You may not remember Larry Bird, he played for the Celtics around the same time Magic Johnson played for the Lakers and even a little Michael Jordan played for the Bulls. Bird was one of the best players to ever play, hands down. Not as flashy as Jordan, yet he was amazing in every way.

Still, the story goes that every year, no matter how well the Celtics did (and they won a bunch of titles with Bird), Larry started practicing. Hard.

He started each day with a five-mile run and then practiced eight to twelve hours all day every day. Of course, he had his own practice court, his own personal court to protect him and drill with him. And I’m sure he had his own trainers and chefs to feed himself and his staff.

The punchline to the story is that Bird used to say he couldn’t WAIT for the season to start so he could kick back and relax a little bit from all the hard practice.

Think about that and you’ll start to understand a little bit how important practicing is and how much time and energy you should focus on it. For Bird, all the hard work was done in the off-season to prepare. When the season came around, well, he just had to show up and play games for a couple of hours a day.

Compared to the twelve hours of practice he would normally put in during the off-season, the NBA season was a joke! And toward the end of the season, when the rest of the NBA players were starting to get tired, worn out, injured or just plain tired of playing, Bird was still fresh. He knew the hard work was yet to come, next off-season!

Bird was one of the best players in the history of the game. I don’t know if that story is true or apocryphal, but it doesn’t matter. The moral of the story is the same either way. The hard work is in the practice. After that you just have to show up and play! And the games are just plain fun.