Basketball Coloring Pages

Basketball is played everywhere a hoop can be screwed to a wall, and these basketball coloring pages go to all of those places: the gym, the playground, the driveway, a bedroom door, and a street court at dusk.

The action comes first. A player rises for a layup, another hangs from the rim after a slam dunk with the net still swinging, one shoots a free throw in front of empty stands, one pulls up for a jump shot over a defender, one dribbles low past a defender at the sideline, one throws a behind-the-back pass, and one grabs a rebound above two others. Two players leap for the tip-off while the referee tosses the ball, the referee blows his whistle with an arm raised, and a ball drops through the net seen from above.

Then the team around the game: a coach crouching with a play board in front of his players, a team huddle with every hand joined in the middle, five players lined up in front of the bleachers, seven watching from the bench, a tired player wiping his forehead with a towel, one lacing a sneaker in the locker room, one stretching against a wall, one walking across an empty court with the ball under his arm, one spinning the ball on a finger and one sitting on it. The places: an outdoor hoop by a chain-link fence, a driveway hoop over the garage, a hoop on a brick wall with snow on the backboard, a playground court, a school gym with cones, and a mini hoop on a bedroom door with a little boy shooting at it. The equipment gets its own pages: the ball on the court floor, a hoop and net from below, a pair of high-top sneakers, a gym bag, a rack of balls and cones, and the scorer's table with its shot clock and horn. A decorative basketball in a ring of stars and a basketball mandala finish the set.

A peach basket and thirteen rules

Basketball is one of the few sports with a known inventor and a known day. In December 1891, a teacher named James Naismith, working at a school in Springfield, Massachusetts, needed an indoor game to keep his students busy through the winter. He nailed two peach baskets to the balcony of the gym, wrote thirteen rules, and gave the students a soccer ball. The baskets still had their bottoms, so someone had to climb up and fetch the ball after every score. The open net came later; the name stayed.

The page of the hoop seen from below makes a good start for that story: color it, then draw a peach basket in its place on the back of the page.

Colors for the court

A basketball is orange with black seams, and the pebbled surface looks best with a darker orange in small circles on one side for shadow. A wooden court is a warm honey or light brown, colored in long strokes along the floorboards, with the painted lines in white, red or blue. The key, the painted rectangle under the hoop, is often a different color from the rest of the floor.

The jerseys on these pages are plain on purpose, so the team is up to the child: their own school's colors, a favorite team's, or two made-up teams that face each other on the tip-off page.

Hoops for little hands, packed benches for older ones

The collection runs evenly from simple to busy. The quickest pages keep one object or one player large on the page, the ball, a hoop, a mandala, and suit a child of four or five. Quick to color, above the grid, starts with:

• Basketball on the court
• Driveway hoop over the garage
• Basketball mandala

The densest are the ones full of repeated shapes, a whole team in a row, a rack of balls, a crowded bench, and they suit an older player with fine pencils. Lots of detail opens on:

• Player sitting on a basketball
• Rack of basketballs and cones
• Team lined up on the court

Learning the court by coloring it

The playground court page is a map, and every line on it means something. The big circle in the middle is where the tip-off happens. The painted rectangle under each hoop is the key, where attackers can only stand for three seconds. The curved line around it is the three-point line: a shot from behind it scores three, from inside it two. And the short line at the top of the key is the free throw line, fifteen feet from the basket. Color each zone a different shade and label it on the side, and a child who watches a game afterward will follow it much better.

A season on paper

For a young player, the pages make a season. Color one after each practice or game: the sneakers after the first practice, the free throw after a game with a foul shot, the huddle after a win, the tired player on the bench after a hard one. Pinned in a row on the wall with the date on each, they become a record of the season that a child actually made. At the end, the ball in the ring of stars is the trophy page, with the team's name written in the middle.

Printing for the team

Each page is a free 300 dpi PDF on A4. Print A4 at full size, and on US Letter pick "fit to page", which makes the drawing about six percent smaller without losing the ball. Where to find that setting is in the printing guide. Use Add to pack to print a page for every player on the roster in one go. The football coloring pages and soccer coloring pages cover the other seasons, and the sports coloring pages gather them all.