Where games are lost
Everyone trains the jump. Almost nobody trains the landing.
A basketball player jumps and lands somewhere between sixty and a hundred and fifty times in a game, and then does it again two days later. The jump is the part everyone wants to improve. The landing is the part that decides whether they're still playing in March.
Knee injuries in this sport cluster around deceleration and landing mechanics — stopping, cutting, coming down off balance. Those are trainable. They are also boring to train, which is why most programs skip them in favor of another set of box jumps.
So a meaningful share of every basketball session here goes to how an athlete stops and how they absorb landing. The vertical improves as a by-product of getting stronger, which is how it actually improves anyway.
The half nobody trains
Jump and landing, side by side
The basketball year
Two seasons stacked on top of each other
High school ball is winter. Club is spring and summer. For a serious player those overlap into something close to continuous competition, and the training has to account for that rather than pretend there's a tidy off-season.
The real building window, such as it is. Heaviest loading, single-leg strength, and the unglamorous eccentric work that makes landings survivable. Nine programmed blocks.
A dedicated four-week peaking block into the school season. Volume drops, power and repeat-sprint capacity come up, and conditioning starts looking like the game — short, repeated, with incomplete recovery.
Sixteen in-season blocks — the longest in-season stretch of any sport we program, because the season genuinely is that long. Short, low-volume, protective. Enough to hold strength, never enough to compete with practice.
Why single leg
The sport happens on one foot
What the work looks like
Single leg, single leg, single leg
Basketball happens on one leg. Players take off one-footed, land one-footed, cut off the outside leg and decelerate off whichever leg happens to be down. Training built entirely on two-legged squats prepares an athlete for a version of the sport that doesn't exist.
So the program leans hard on single-leg strength, lateral work, and controlled deceleration — plus ankle and hip work that keeps the knee out of positions it shouldn't be in. Roughly a third of the movements in this program are specific to it rather than borrowed from the flagship sports.
Athletes train in grade-band groups alongside every other sport. What changes is exercise selection, volume and conditioning — not the room.
Worth saying plainly
Girls' basketball and knee injuries
Female athletes tear ACLs at markedly higher rates than male athletes in the same sports, and basketball is one of the two sports where it happens most.
That difference is not destiny. A good share of it comes down to landing mechanics, hamstring strength relative to quadriceps, and how an athlete decelerates — all of which respond to training. Structured neuromuscular programs have been shown to meaningfully reduce that risk, and the components of them are already the components of good athletic development.
We are not selling injury prevention as a guarantee, because nobody can. What we can say is that landing, deceleration and posterior-chain strength are in every session by design rather than as an add-on — and for a girls' basketball player that is the part of training that matters most.
Getting started
Which group to join
Grouped by grade. Pricing and full detail on the programs page.
Grades 2–5 · Speed & Movement
Landing and body control taught early, before anyone jumps for height. Sprint mechanics, coordination, balance. No loading.
Grades 6–8 · Performance
Growth years, and for basketball players often the years a body grows faster than the coordination controlling it. Movement taught under light load, three sessions weekly maximum.
Grade 9–12 · Elite
The full season arc above, real loading, and in-season programming that survives a five-month schedule.
Common questions
Before you call
Will this add to her vertical?
Over an off-season block, usually yes — but through strength, not through jumping more. Vertical jump is largely a force production problem. Athletes who chase it with endless plyometrics tend to get sore rather than springy.
He plays club and school. Is training too much?
It can be. Tell us the real weekly schedule and we'll build around it — in-season work here is deliberately small. If the honest answer is that he needs rest rather than another session, we'll say that.
Do you do skills work — shooting, handles?
No. This is the physical side. Keep your skills coach; we make the athlete stronger, faster and more durable underneath the skill they're building.
She's tall and gangly and keeps getting hurt. Is that fixable?
Often, yes. Rapid growth outpaces coordination and leaves an athlete moving a body they haven't calibrated yet. Deliberate movement work is exactly the answer to it, and the middle-school years are the right time.
What does the first session cost?
Nothing. Call with your athlete's grade and we'll place them in the right group this week. No commitment attached.
Come and watch a session.
The first one is free. Tell us the grade and what their week already looks like, and we'll put them somewhere sensible rather than somewhere convenient.