Coaching Basketball 
For One Play?

www.FreeThrowTrainer.com

by Coach Al Heystek, inventor of the the Made in the USA, "Nothin' But Net" FREE THROW TRAINER.  www.FREETHROWTRAINER.com

Why is it important for coaches to focus on the fundamentals, one play at a time in practice? Coaching Basketball for one play is about having an edge on opponents and winning more games.

In promoting the 2012 Playoff Schedule, the NFL ran an ad about how one play can make all the difference in a game. This is, of course, obvious for coaches of all sports and it is certainly true in Coaching Basketball - how one steal, one loose ball, one block, one pass, one rebound, one put back can make the crucial difference between winning and losing.

Any one play can be the tipping point between a win, or a loss.

However, there is one play in Basketball that is omitted from the above list; one play that perhaps more than any other makes coaching Basketball so heart wrenching and contributes so often to the agony of defeat. It is very painful to miss the winning free throw in the last seconds of a game. 

This epidemic of failure in free throw shooting is chronicled in the NY Times article March 2009, entitled “For Free Throws, 50 years of Practice is no Help.” John Branch writes that field goal percentages have improved, but not free throw shooting. The experts say that the Pros miss on average 25% of the time, college players about 31or 32% of the time and high school players about 35% of the time. If you are a Basketball Coach, or a player, that is a lot of lost points.

The NY Times article states that approximately 20% of all points scored in a NCAA or NBA game come from the Free Throw line and that two-thirds of a winning team’s points in the last minute of play come from free throws. Yet, apparently there’s no real correlation between free throw percentages and winning percentages, which may be why so many folks don’t emphasize this one play when coaching Basketball.

Let’s look at the example the article gives about free throw shooting and coaching Basketball. They state that in the 2008 NCAA men’s final Memphis was 38-2 even though their annual free throw percentage was only 61% - translating into about 10 misses per game. They won a lot of games without a high free throw percentage. But in the game that mattered most, Memphis lost the national championship missing 4 of 5 free throws in the final 72 seconds against Kansas, which made a late 3pt. shot to tie the
game and then won in overtime. 

Coaching Basketball and focusing on all the fundamentals and especially the “one play” of shooting free throws can give your team an edge, an edge I’m sure the Coach of Memphis wishes he had in that championship game.

Coach Al Heystek
Contact me at www.FREETHROWTRAINER.com
Heystek & Atwood, LLC
The FREE THROW TRAINER is Patent Pending