6u Skills Clinic: SYC offers a Skills Clinic for boys and girls who turn 6 years old before October 1st of the current year. There are separate programs for boys and girls. The Skills Clinic emphasizes teaching individual skills and developing each child’s interest in and knowledge of the game. The Skills Clinic meets once per week on Saturdays starting in January and runs through early March, for a total of 10 weeks. Each player receives a basketball, SYC T-shirt and season-end commemorative award. 6u Skills Clinic includes sessions conducted by professional basketball trainers, as well as opportunities to participate in drills and scrimmages with each team’s volunteer coaches. Accordingly, getting a sufficient number of volunteers to work in this program is especially important.
7u Program: SYC offers a separate program for boys and girls who turn 7 years old before October 1st. There are separate programs for boys and girls. The 7u Program still emphasizes teaching individual skills and developing each child’s interest in and knowledge of the game, but builds to game play at different levels – 3 on 3, 4 on 4 and 5 on 5 – over the course of the program. No scores are kept in any of these games. The 7u Program, like the 6u Skills Clinic, meets once per week on Saturdays, but starts in December, running through early March, for a total of 13 weeks. Like the 6u Skills Clinic, each player receives a basketball and season-end commemorative award. The 7u Program participants also receive a reversible SYC jersey. The 7U Program also includes sessions conducted by professional basketball trainers, as well as opportunities to participate in drills and scrimmages with each team’s volunteer coaches and against other 7u Program “teams”. Accordingly, getting a sufficient number of volunteers to work in this program is especially important.
8u Program: SYC offers a separate program for boys and girls who turn 8 years old before October 1st. There are separate programs for boys and girls. The 8u Program, like the older house leagues, starts practice in December. Each team meets twice per week – once on a weeknight and once on Saturday – until school ends for the Christmas holidays. When school resumes in January, 8u Program teams will continue to meet twice per week, with a practice on a weeknight and a “game” on Saturday. The program will generally run until the first or second week of March. Although the 8u Program has “games” in a 5 on 5 format, coaches act as officials for the first half of the season and are expected to do as much instructing as they do officiating over the course of the game. In the second half of the season, the 8u league partners with SYC’s youth referee training program. Youth referees in training, with adult referee trainers acting as supervisors, are assigned to officiate 8u Saturday games. This partnering helps train youth officials and helps the 8u players get ready for the next season, when they will participate in games with officials. Whether coaches or referees officiate the game, no score is kept and no standings are maintained; this is a training league, not a competitive league, and the emphasis remains on teaching individual and team skills and developing each child’s interest in and knowledge of the game. Each player receives an SYC reversible jersey and season-end commemorative award. Each 8u Program team will get one session conducted by professional basketball trainers in December.
