this is going to be a random one; not technical at all.
i’m visiting family in western new york and they have a ymca in town with a great indoor basketball court. so i take advantage of that when i’m here.
i’ll just go to the gym, put in some headphones, and listen to music/podcasts/whatever i feel like and do different shooting drills and some running/sprinting. and today, like normal, i had lots of thoughts running through my mind.
i’ve done shooting drills a bunch in my life. they’re mostly an “around the world” style thing where i start on one side of the basket near the baseline, and work in a 180 degree arc around to the other side of the hoop on the baseline.
sometimes i take shots while stationary, and other times i toss the ball out and approach it as if i got a pass from a teammate and take a jump shot. but there was always something weird: if i was running to the right around the hoop and caught the ball, i would plant with my left foot, turn, jump, and shoot. and running to the left was the opposite: plant with my right foot, turn, jump, shoot.
and when i’d plant with my left foot, i would miss the jump shot the majority of the time. but when planting with my right foot, i would make it most of the time. same range, but very different outcomes.
i never really fully figured out why this was though. i didn’t have the body awareness or movement vocabulary to recognize or explain what i was doing wrong, and i don’t have a coach and i’m not recording myself… so i just never fully understood what was going on.
but i’ve been doing ballroom dance now for a few years.. and for some reason something just clicked today. ballroom dance increased my body awareness big time for things like where my head is in relation to my spine, where my weight is over my feet, and things like that. i realized that when i approached the ball from the left where i plant my left foot and then pivot, my head weight would shift over to my right foot almost like i was doing a weight transfer. and this had the effect of, when i jumped, not jumping perfectly up. i was jumping up and to the right because my weight was moving me in that direction. not only that, but the ball tends to roll off my ring and pinky fingers on my right hand.
when i appraoch the ball from the right and plant with my right foot, i noticed that my head weight and body weight remained perfectly over my right foot and i was actually jumping almost perfectly vertically. and the ball would end up correctly rolling off my index and middle finger.
coming at the ball from the left meant i would take a jump shot drifting to the right in mid air a little bit and my shots would almost always end up a bit too far right.
once i finally felt this, i was able to change up my shooting such that when i plant my left foot and pivot, i kept my head weight over that left foot and jumped ~perfectly vertically and started making more of those jump shots because i wasn’t drifting to the right in midair anymore.
kinda neat.
another learning: i spent the last 2 days doing shooting drills closer to the basket, and today i wanted to work on my 3-pointer. but i realized i had become so accustomed to shooting from 2-point range that my 3-pointers were falling short and mostly airballs at first. i needed to stop and figure out how to get that extra 1-2 inches in my shot so the ball would make it into the hoop.
i finally remembered the old school “reach up and into the cookie jar” and leave your arm there. when i shot with my arm fully vertically extended and used my wrist and counted to 3 before letting my hand down, i made almost every shot i took. but it was interesting trying to figure out how to get that extra little distance and power i needed to make those.
another learning from this week playing ball, and even watching some world cup games: you need to exercise your fundamentals when you’re tired. this probably applies to anything in life. if you subject your body or mind or to things that cause exhaustion, you make things harder on yourself. kinda like how, from what i’ve heard, navy seals or some elite warriors do a crazy drill where they’re either physically and mentally exhausted, or dunked in a tank of ice cold water. either way, they put their body and mind into a state that will surely degrade performance. then they perform a drill that requires maximum precision.
most people tend to crumble in this kind of state, and it’s understandable why. but you can actually train yourself to perform better in these kinds of conditions. and you should if you’re in a highly competitive field or sport.
if you watch the movie coach carter, the first thing he makes everyone do is run like crazy. if you’re in better shape than the other team, you can play harder defense, tire them out, and then create opportunities solely based on the difference in conditioning. they start to get tired, and even if you’re not better than them skill wise, you’ll get more opporunities to score just by being in better shape.
then you start to layer on better fundamentals, and you eventually run circles around your competition.
i had a coach my sophomore year of high school who came and did this kind of thing. he had us run like crazy and focus HARD on fundamentals. we definitely didn’t have the most skilled or talented players. but in practice and in games, if we missed layups, made a stupid turnover, or other equally silly self inflicted damage, he called it a “brick” and he noted it. at the end of a practice when we’re all tired, he would randomly pick players from the team to go up and shoot a free throw. we shot as many free throws as we had bricks, and we didn’t leave until we reset our bricks count to zero.
the chosen player would get 2 free throws. miss the first one, and it’s a suicide run. and we HAD to complete it in under 28 seconds; no matter how tired we were. if ONE person didn’t make it, we’d do it again. if the player made the first and missed the second, it was just a down and back cross-court sprint in under 10 seconds; same rule applies where if one person didn’t make it in time, we’d all run it again. oh, and if he catches you cheating and not touching the line or going all the way, everyone runs again. he was strict on the fundamentals. and if the player happened to make both free throws, great. 2 bricks knocked off the board.
some practices were great; we were tired but we’d nail our free throws and reset our brick balance to zero with no running. other days were brutal. we’d be in debt by like 8 bricks when we started practice. and then get even more. tired, feeling mentally weak, upset and frustrated… and player after player would miss free throws and we’d all suffer. but we also got in incredibly good shape. and you better believe that our free throw percentages in games, when we’re exhausted, 4th quarter, game on the line… it made a difference practicing those free throws at the end of practice. and our fundamentals improved.
one thing i forgot to mention: we could also rack up “saves” in addition to bricks. a save was when we made an amazing play or showed spirit or high effort. things like diving for a ball to save a play, a great defensive move, serious hustle to make create an offensive opportunity that otherwise wouldn’t have been available to us if we didn’t hustle hard. and we could rack those up in games and during practices.
and that year, the first year this coach joined, we had probably the best record ever for the JV team and made it way farther and beat teams we should have lost to. just because we worked so hard on fundamentals, minimizing mistakes, and getting in killer shape.
all that is to say, if you want to be a winner, you need to practice your craft. and you need to practice in ideal conditions, and in non-ideal conditions. and you need to work on your fundamentals. do it tired, do it well, keep your standards high.
i just realized i went on a rant i wasn’t intending on, but i’ll tie it back to shooting hoops today.
so the reason i even thought of this today was that i was drilling one shot after another, and i know the effect of runnig and tiring yourself out. so if i started making too many shots in a row, i’d do a few cross court sprints like a fast break layup exercising both my left hand and my right hand, then go back to shooting drills. and it forced me to focus hard on my form and ignore the fact that my body and mind were tired.
and watching the usa play against belgium this week, it really didn’t look good. idk if they were just tired or what, but belgium never seemed to lay off; they were constantly applying pressure, and it worked. to me it just seemed like they were in much better shape and much better at the fundamentals, and it paid off big time.
good rules for life and building a winning team.