Objective
Build and test game-specific anaerobic conditioning through repeated maximal sideline-to-sideline sprints with hard decelerations and line touches, holding effort as fatigue sets in.
Setup
Area
Full width of the court, sideline to sideline
Players
Whole team, running together or in waves
Equipment
a stopwatch, the court's sidelines as the touch lines
Duration
About 60–75 seconds per rep, with rest between
How it works
- 1
Set the count
One 'crossing' is a single sprint from one sideline to the other. Seventeen crossings make one rep: start on a sideline, and each time you reach the far sideline, touch it with a hand or foot and immediately push off back the other way.
- 2
Start on the whistle
On the coach's start, sprint the full width, plant, touch the line, and drive straight back. There is no jogging phase — every crossing is a maximal sprint with a hard decelerate-and-change-direction at each sideline.
- 3
Hit the time standard
The classic target is 17 crossings in about 60 seconds, though many coaches set the standard by position or age — bigs may get a few extra seconds, guards fewer. Missing the time means the rep is repeated after the rest interval.
- 4
Recover and repeat
Rest a set interval — often a walk-back or 60–90 seconds — then run the next rep. Sets of two to four 17s build the base; a single timed 17 is often used on its own purely as a fitness test.
- 5
Finish through the line
Coaches watch the final two crossings closely: decelerating early or slapping the line lazily is where players cheat the drill. The rep only counts if the effort and the line touches hold all the way through the seventeenth.
Coaching points
Touch the line every crossing with a hand or foot; cutting the turn short shortens the whole drill and trains the habit of cheating conditioning.
Stay low into each turn and plant hard to change direction — standing tall to decelerate wastes time and hammers the knees.
Pump the arms and drive the first three steps out of every turn; the accelerations, not the top speed, are what the drill is really training.
Pace is not the goal, effort is — hold near-maximal on every crossing and let the clock, not a comfortable rhythm, set the standard.
Variations
22s down the length
Swap width for length and run baseline to baseline for a set number of lengths — fewer turns but longer sprints, shifting the emphasis from change-of-direction to straight-line endurance.
Position-based standards
Set different time targets for guards, wings and bigs so each player is pushed to a realistic game-speed standard rather than one blanket number for the whole roster.
Ladder 17s
Run a descending ladder — a 17, then a 15, then a 13 — with matching rest, so athletes learn to hold pace even as fatigue accumulates across the set.
Build it in Coach Board
Diagram the 17s on a Coach Board full court by marking the two sidelines as the touch lines and animating a player token shuttling across and back with a small counter for each crossing, so the team can see exactly what seventeen crossings and the line-touch rule look like before they line up. Share the board with the time standards written as tags so each player knows the target for their position.
Open Coach Board