Zone Defense is Terrible for Youth Basketball

A coach sent me an email last week that said this (summarized):“Hi. This week we’re playing against a team that runs a tight 2-3 zone all game. They have much taller players than we do and they barely ever leave the key on defense. What should we do?”
Do you want to know what my reply was?
“Pray that your team makes outside shots.”
Obviously, that wasn’t my whole reply, but it was the overall thought of the email I sent back in response.
I wrote a post on how to beat a 2-3 zone defense not too long ago, but admittedly, a lot of the strategies require that the defense is stepping out and respecting the outside shot (I’ll talk about this a lot throughout the article).
If the defense plays close to the ring at all times and doesn’t challenge the shot (like most youth teams do), these strategies become incredibly hard to implement.
So I decided to create this post that shares with you why zone defense is effective in youth basketball, why coaches use it, how it’s hurting the game, and also to answer any arguments that coaches in favor of zone defense have.
I’ll mostly be referring to the 2-3 zone defense for this article since that is by far the most popular zone to play at a youth basketball level.