Try out some of these basketball inspired games and activities with your young people. All you need is a basketball (or two) and a hoop to play, whether you have 3, 10 or 20 young people these games will be a great addition to your programme.

1. Knock Out

Play this game with two or more players, you will also need two basketballs. The players form two lines in front of the basketball hoop. The first two players shoot to score, the first to score knocks out the other player. The player who got the basket runs to the back of their team and the player that has been knocked out sits to one side. The two teams continue to battle it out with the winning team the first to knock out all their opponents. If you have more young people you could play this with more than two teams and or use another basket, but all teams still compete against each other.

2. Golf

Bringing together the object of the game of golf with basketball, the idea of this game is to try and get the shot into the basket in the lowest number of attempts from different set positions. Play 6, 9 or 18 ‘holes’, by marking something on the floor for each ‘hole’. The first player starts from the first position and takes their shot, if they miss they take their next shot from where they grab the rebound. The score for that ‘hole’ is the number of shots it took the player to get the ball into the basket. The lowest score wins.

3. 21

The idea of the game is to get 21 points. Decide who is going to start with the ball by a flip of a coin or similar, they stand at the designated free throw line and take their shot. If they get the ball in they score 2 points and return to the free throw line to take their next shot, they can keep doing this to add up their points. Once they miss the player to grab the ball on the rebound then takes a shot, if they get it in they score 2 points and go to the free throw line to take another shot until they miss, then the next player and so on. Once an order of players has been established, once you get round to the first person again, play should continue in order. Once a player gets to 18 points, they then have to go for a 3 pointer to win, that should be from a longer distance as agreed before the start of play. There are variations of this game where you can put the ball into free play after a rebound and allow whoever gets the ball to continue in play. You could also allow 3 pointer shots throughout the game where the shot is taken from a certain distance.

4. Numbers in Play

On a variation of the full game, split the young people into two teams and number each team from 1 upwards. Teams start by standing on opposite sides of the hall and the game starts when player numbers are called out, enabling you to start with anything from 1 on 1 to 4 on 4. During the game you can call numbers to come off the court and then call out numbers to go on the court, again continually varying the number of players on the pitch. This could work well where you do not want to split young people into more than two teams, but have too many young people for all to play at the same time.