Basketball Shooting Drills

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Introducing pressure into your basketball shooting drills is one of the best ways to ensure your success in practice transfers over into game situations. There are a lot of practice superstars out there who are great shooters when there’s no one in the gym to guard them but these players bring no value to their team in a game situation and that’s when it really counts.

There are three (3) benefits to applying defensive pressure to the shooter.

1. Improves Focus and Concentration
2. Improves Speed of Release
3. Good for the Offence AND Defense 

Improves Focus and Concentration

First it better simulates a game situation. If you’re used to shooting wide open jumpers in practice, its very distracting to have a defender with a hand in your face or rushing out to defend you in a game; even if they are’nt going to actually block your shot. With defensive pressure applied to you in a drill, you can practice focusing on the shot and zoning the defender out. This concentration is crucial to making shots.

Improves Speed of Release

Along with improving your focus and concentration, it will also encourage your or your players to practice at game speed. The best incentive I know to improve a shooters speed of release is to have a few of her shots blocked, challenged or swatted into the bleachers. You don’t want to be on the end of a big block or want more shots per game, get your shot off faster! So many players take practice shots with no sense of urgency and then when they get to a game situation, they can’t get their shot off. Adding pressure in practice will speed up the release. Now, a quick warning is that if you’re just learning a skill, take your time to get the fundamentals right before you start trying to do it faster.

Good for the Offence AND Defense

Not only is this drill beneficial for the shooter, it’s great for the defender, too! Often times when shooting drills are running in practice there is a missed opportunity to get some defensive work. Why not have the shooter rotate to the defender after they take their shot? If not, you’re missing an easy opportunity or “low hanging fruit” to get some defensive work in. If you teach your players how you want them to guard shooters in practice, you’ll save a lot of grief from fouling shooters or not closing out properly in games. 

So now that we’ve talked about the why, let’s talk about the how. Adding defensive pressure is all about trying to change the shot, not block it. A hand in the face is more than enough to contest and change a shot. The best ways to add pressure are to have the defender in their defensive stance with a hand to challenge the shot, again, not block it. In fact, this is sound advice for game situations, too. A shot block attempt more often results in a foul rather than block. Consider this, Dwight Howard (who currently leads the league in blocked shots averages 3.6 fouls per game and only 2.7 blocks! So what makes you think you’re attempts will be any better? I’ll take a shot changer over a shot blocker any day. In addition to this, a shot changer is in better position to box out and rebound than a shot blocker.

Finally, another way to introduce defensive pressure to a shooter is to have the defender close out on the shooter. Have the defender rush out towards the shooter and work on getting into good defensive position with a hand up as quickly as possible without being susceptible to a shot fake or drive. So, add that defender whenever possible into your basketball shooting drills and while your players might not thank you in practice, they will in the game.

 

 

Technorati Tags: basketball drill, basketball exercises, basketball shooting drill, youth basketball drill

Technorati Tags: basketball drill, basketball exercises, basketball shooting drill, youth basketball drill

A great youth basketball drill to begin practice with, get the team warmed up and get the team working together is the 3-Man Weave. One reason I especially enjoy the weave is because it allows a team to monitor its progress. Without fail, upon teaching and practicing this basketball drill for the first time there be a few confused players and even more dropped balls and missed passes. However, once you run it through a few times for a few days, the progress is astounding! Players who were running aimlessly before are now well coordinated in harmonic motion. It’s beautiful to watch.
 
Here are the individual and team skills that the weave will improve,

• passing on the move
• coordination and timing
• footwork
• team communication
• team chemistry

 
How it works.
 

• The mantra for this drill is to “follow your pass”.
• Start with three players on the base line with the ball in the middle.
• Middle player pass to his/her right and follows their pass to the right.
• Player on the right (who now has the ball) passes the player on the left and follows their pass.
• Player on the left (who now has the ball) passes to the player in the middle, who is now on the right and follows their pass.
• Repeat until you make it down the floor and score a lay-up.

 See video demonstration

 Some points to remember are,

• Walk through the drill to begin with
• Say the person name before you pass to them (also a great way for a new team to learn names)
• Above all, always remember to follow your pass.

 
Once you perfect the basic three man weave, there are many different variations and other youth basketball drills that build on the original. Some of these include moving it up to a 4- or 5-man weave, a half-court version  to run during warm- up before a game and a five-man weave on the way down and a 3 on 2 break on the way back.
 
So I encourage you to give this one a go. You will be frustrated with it the first time and amazed at the progress after a few cycles.

Technorati Tags: A great youth basketball drill to begin practice with, get the team warmed up and get the team working together is the 3-Man Weave.

In my earlier post I talked about the importance of breaking shooting down into smaller steps. Today, I’m going to talk about the first steps, in gripping the ball or the position your hands need to before you bring the ball to your shooting pocket and then bringing the ball to your shooting “pocket” (i.e. the point from which you release the ball). While this may seem like an straight-forward topic, it’s essential to develop good mechanics as they will lay the foundation for the rest of your shot. This is also the biggest factor in your speed of release. If you’re shot takes too long to get off then it will give your defender time to get back into position and you no longer have a chance to shoot, regardless of how accurate you are.

Your hands should be positioned as shown in Figure 1. It’s important to start from this position because from here you can shoot, pass or dribble; the “triple threat”. If you start with your hands in shooting position like in Figure 2, then it’s difficult to throw a hard chest-pass and putting the ball on the floor to dribble is an awkward motion. Also, you only need to grip the ball with your fingers tips and, when dribbling, with your palm slightly. This holds true with you shot and with dribbling. Even though it’s a drill, you need to practice like it’s game.  As you raise the ball to your pocket, your shooting hand (for most people, their right) should rotate behind the ball with your elbow in-line with the basket and sitting underneath the ball. The line from your elbow to your wrist should not be completely vertical but it should be tucked comfortably in to your body, as in Figure 3. Your off-shooting hand helps to raise the ball but only serves as a holder for your shooting hand. You should feel it “slide” to a position on the side of the ball. Again, it’s function is to support the shooting hand. It will provide no force in actually shooting the ball. When we look at shooting on the move, we’ll add a variation with shooting hand “sliding” into position, but for now, focus on using your left hand to help raise the ball and then stabilize your pocket.

Figure 1 – Good Hand Positioning

Figure 2 – Awkward to Dribble

Figure 3 – Shooting Pocket

A great basketball shooting drill to start with is probably the simplest and most straight forward. Practice bringing the ball to your pocket with out actually shooting. An important note is to remember to raise the ball to your pocket. Whether it be at your chest, chin or above your head. Drop the ball, pick it up and do it again. Do three sets of 20 reps (3 x 20). This motion needs to become second nature and the speed of your release is largely determined by how quickly you can get the ball from your hip into your shooting pocket. Once you’ve mastered this skill, releasing the ball is the easy part since you have a stable platform to do it from.

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The process of shooting a basketball happens in a second or two and, yet, is a complex, compound movement. To understand the components of a healthy shot, we need to break the movement down into simpler sub-components that can be analyzed and understood in isolation. We’ll then use basketball shooting drills to perfect these simplified movements.
 
The shooting process itself can be broken down to three (3) smaller steps,
1.      Gripping the ball/hand positioning,
2.      Raising the ball to the shooting “pocket” (point of shot release) and
3.      Releasing the shot from the pocket.
Many people only consider the “stroke” of shooting (Step 3), which is really just tip of the iceberg. Step 3, or the release, is built on the foundation of Step 1 and Step 2, which consist of getting the ball to ready position, the shooting pocket.
 
Furthermore, the many types of shots that are utilized in a game for a balanced attack can be classified into three fundamental categories with shooting
1.      Stationary (standing still)
2.      off the pass
3.      off the dribble.
That’s it. There are niche shots (think finger rolls, hook shoots, running floaters) but all shots in a game fall into one of these three categories.
 
Becoming a smooth shooter begins with targeting and practicing basketball shooting drills that perfect these skills first in isolation and then in harmony. Start with the simple. Bringing the ball from the waist into the shooting pocket and repeating until it’s comfortable and 2nd nature and then eventually progress to compound movement drills like shooting on the move and focusing on footwork and rhythm. It’s essential to perfect the smaller skills and processes before the complex because any efficient complex process is only a function of its smaller, simpler ones.
 
Some of the biggest and common mistakes to avoid practicing shooting drills are,

• shooting too far away from the basket
• “pushing” the shot with two hands
• not using enough legs for power

These pitfalls will develop bad habits and mechanics that are difficult to correct later. Practice is perfect is

not quite accurate. The truth is perfect practice makes perfect. Repetition with poor fundamentals does more harm than good. It’s worse than not practicing at all since additional practice is needed just to unlearn these bad habits. This is yet another reason to perfect Step 1 and then move to Step 2 before working on Step 1, 2 and 3.

Figure 1 – Ray Allen of the Celtics lets one fly