ARCANUM – Arcanum’s youth boys basketball camp drew 39 boys in the fourth through sixth grades for a four-day camp this week in Arcanum.
The attendance was up slightly from last year’s camp, which was the first Marcus Bixler led as the Trojans’ varsity boys basketball coach.
“It’s a great turnout,” Bixler said. “For us to have 39 boys interested in spending the time, I’m real pleased.”
Bixler led the camp along with his high school basketball players. The week was split into a pair of two-day minicamps with Monday and Tuesday focused on ball handling and Wednesday and Thursday focused on shooting.
“We’re just kind of focusing in on some of the offensive fundamentals, making sure we’re good there and they have a plan kind of moving forward so they’ve got something to take with them after this week’s over that they can be working on,” Bixler said.
The youth were put through the same drills the high school players go through. The camp stressed fundamentals and taught the boys drills they could continue to do after the week ended.
“We focus on a lot of different things,” Bixler said. “We’ll do some two-ball stuff. We do some crossover-combo stuff. We do some movement stuff, some full-court stuff. We work on some of the ball-handling explosion. And then the shooting we just spend time really working on form shooting. We do a lot of one-handed stuff, especially with our younger guys, just so they get the feel of what it’s like to have everything in line and everything looking like that because we know at a young age sometimes they like to spring the ball and do everything they can to get it up there.”
Bixler saw a lot of growth from the campers throughout the week and saw a tremendous amount of progress from last year’s camp.
“I even talked with our older kids that had been to camp last year how much better we are as a whole this year,” the Trojans’ coach said. “Kids that are doing some footwork things the correct way that were in youth basketball this winter; the footwork’s been good. Ball handling has improved tremendously over the course of a year. So it’s definitely going in the right direction.”
