Inclusive basketball training for players with intellectual disability

Objectives: To evaluate sport-specific basketball skills before and after 8 months of integrated and non-integrated basketball practice of participants with intellectual disability; in relation to the competitive basketball level and the degree of intellectual disability. Design: Pre-test/training/post-test design. Methods: Forty-one adult male players with intellectual disability were randomly divided into 21 athletes playing in the Integrated Basketball group together with 10 athletes without intellectual disability, and 20 athletes playing in the Non-integrated Basketball group. All players were assessed through pre and post basketball skill tests for assessing four levels of ability of increasing difficulty (levels I, II, III, and IV), each one characterized by the fundamental skills of the basketball game: ball handling, passing, receiving, and shooting. The athlete's global score based on the total score of all levels of ability was calculated for each player. Results: Passing, receiving, shooting, ball handling, global, level I, and level II scores improved after the intervention independently by integrated basketball or non-integrated basketball. Post-pre (Delta) scores in ball handling, receiving, passing, shooting, global, level I, and level II showed that the athletes in the Integrated Basketball group improved significantly more than athletes in the Non-integrated Basketball group. Ball handling, receiving, passing, shooting, global, level I, level II, and level III scores were negatively correlated with intellectual disability level. Conclusions: Athletes with intellectual disability who performed both integrated basketball and non-integrated basketball improved significantly their basketball skills after an 8-month training. However, the athletes training in the Integrated Basketball group obtained the best scores. (c) 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Sports Medicine Australia. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).