How to prepare for a basketball game

With the high school and college basketball seasons winding down, here are a few things to focus on to get the most out of your last few reps of the year

Now that we are fully in the heart of the basketball season, I thought it’d be a good time to discuss basketball play-by-play. Over the next three weeks, we’ll attack the following topics:

• How to prepare for a basketball game broadcast

• How to perform the different segments within a basketball broadcast, like:

  • Pregame

  • Lead up to tipoff

  • First half

  • Second half

  • Final 5 minutes of the game

  • Postgame

• How to handle calling a video stream or TV broadcast differently than a radio/audio one

• How to engineer a radio basketball game yourself

For today, we’ll dive into the prep process for basketball. While I've put together the 36-point checklist for football games, we haven't really discussed in great detail the process of preparing for a basketball broadcast. Of course, we have gotten through our spotting board tutorials covering women’s basketball and men’s basketball, and I do take my spotting board prep seriously. Maybe too seriously at times. But the reason I've spent the last five years honing this process and learning how to automate it is because I never quite know going into a game precisely which data point I'm going to want to use in a given moment. Even the best game notes in the world can't help you when you're in the middle of calling play-by-play. In a fast paced sport like basketball, you simply don't have time to look most things up. So it helps to know ahead of time what kind of information to prepare. And while I will mention spotting boards as a part of this, there’s so much more in our spotting board tutorials that I’d advise checking out. As for here, I’ll just say why I think certain things should be on your boards.