The Sound of Shooting

My thought of the day today is a detail that always stands out to me when watching people shoot a basketball. It's my opinion that if you know you are going to shoot the ball before you catch it, your footwork should finish at the exact time that the ball hits your hands. If you catch the ball and have to take another step, or a little hop, that's all time for the defense to recover. There is no way that you can take that extra step and shoot it quicker than if your feet were ready when the ball got there.

To illustrate that point, the way I've been trying to get the explain it is that the sound of your feet hitting the floor (with legs loaded) and the sound of the ball hitting your hands should be one and the same. This little detail is something that is often overlooked in everyday practice situations, but when you play up against a better opponent, is one of several things that becomes obvious.

That footwork is such an indicator of the 'tightness' of your game for lack of a better word. It's a measure of how efficiently you move, and how you minimize your oponents' recovery time. Any time you play at the next level (or for us, play against a guys team) so many little efficiency indicators become exposed. Things like how hard you pass the ball, can you use fakes to increase your separation, is your footwork tight enough to not let a defender recover, are you dropping the ball to your shot pocket when you're going to catch and shoot. That being said, it's such a challenge to work on these habits every day, and get athletes to understand the efficiency necessary to transition to the highest levels of the game.

That leads very naturally into a future post that I intend to write, called creating a picture. I think one of the biggest challenges we have as coaches is that our athletes simply do not watch the game of basketball as much as we do, nor do they watch it the same way. Most coaches have a very clear picture in their heads of what the game should look like, and we are all trying to describe that picture to our athletes, many of whom have never seen it. Imagine trying to describe with words how beautifull a particular painting is to someone who has never seen it? If you asked them to draw you a picture of what you just described, how close do you think it would be? How can athletes see the beauty of the game if they don't get a chance to watch it enough? One of the most effective things we can do is watch the game with our athletes and just point out the subtleties of what makes the game so great at the highest levels.

Just to remind myself, another future post I do will be on the difference between getting athletes to perform skills, and getting them to understand skills. Every kid in Canada can "do" a crossover, but very few actually understand how to use one.

Again, feel free to comment on the page or email. I would love for one of these posts to generate some discussion.

tyler.slipp@gmail.com