Ask a College Basketball Coach

[Ship Ship McGipp]

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Take your best three-point shooter. His 3pt% is probably in the 30s or 40s.

What is his percentage during practice (unguarded)?

I've seen other threads in Sporting Events saying that a good 3 point shooter should make > 60% in practice. Some even say > 80%. That seems too high to me.

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nah, not unguarded, 60 to 75 is not unreasonable at all. guarded in practice by the B team or scrimmaging probably 45 or 50.

3 point shooting is very good, everyone wants to do it, but there are still very few pure shooters around.

[Casper05]

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How prevalent is sports gambling among college athletes? How closely do you believe that coaches monitor this issue?

[/ QUOTE ]I don't think its very prevalent at all, but it is virtually impossible to monitor due to the relative ease/anonymity (sp?) one can gamble online.

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I think you are very wrong on this. They may not be betting on their own games, but gambling on NFL or NBA I would expect to be very common. I started gambling while I was a college athlete, and certainly wasn't the only one on my team.

Ken

[/ QUOTE ]I can believe that for sure...like I said, its something that is incredibly hard to oversee and is definitely not a priority to most coaches

[Casper05]

[ QUOTE ]
Take your best three-point shooter. His 3pt% is probably in the 30s or 40s.

What is his percentage during practice (unguarded)?

I've seen other threads in Sporting Events saying that a good 3 point shooter should make > 60% in practice. Some even say > 80%. That seems too high to me.

[/ QUOTE ]I would say about 60% in practice would be really high. People always remember the time they made 8 in a row, conveniently forgetting that 2 practices ago they were 1 for 10. No way in hell is anybody consistently shooting 80% from 3-pt range. Playing against the scout team, I dont know how to say for sure- 50% would be really good.

We are keeping stats during all of our practices this year, so bump this question towards the middle of the season and I'll give you the numbers.

[PaulSF415]

How many miles do your players run per day, and how many shots at minimum do you like them to take (from 3, midrange, and in the paint)?

[Assani Fisher]

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Casper,

What kind of ball does your team use for practice? Games?

Why the hell is the NBA ball so hard?

[/ QUOTE ]We use Nike 2004 balls for our games/practices. Not all the schools in our conference use this ball, so we also have 2 of each of what they use to use before our games with them.

I've never touched an NBA ball [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

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Really? When I played, our entire conference used the same ball and then the entire conference switched one year. Because of that, I always thought that it was a "conference wide" decision.

[Assani Fisher]

Great thread. One thing I've always wondered about is this....

Warning: Some bragging in this post, but I'm trying to explain why I can't understand how people can't do what I can do so its kinda necessary.

I wrestled and played football in HS. Didn't get into basketball very late(probably about 16 years old), and I literally incorrectly shot the ball with 2 hands until I was 16 or so. Despite all of that, I picked up shooting really quickly for some reason. Now I'm not a great athlete in the run fast/jump high aspect, but I do have good coordination and balance and can usually pick up good form in sports fairly quickly.

Anyway, my question is what exactly is so hard about shooting for some people? Two years after learning to shoot, I made near 95% of 500 free throws during a free throw drive fund(I was 100% for my college career, but the sample size was small)....so to me, it really doesn't make sense to see a guy like Bruce Bowen, who is obviously a much better athlete than me, not be able to shoot free throws.

With big men, I would guess that the big hands and extreme height would hinder them. But what gives with the NBA level guards that just can't shoot? Is it lack of practice or is there some innate skill that is missing there? I have to think that the coaches are making sure they're shooting a ton during the offseason, yet I just don't see improvement.

[shaftman11]

I don't know if you will answer this, but has your team every made the big dance? And when was the last time they went dancing?

[jgunnip]

Great thread.

What are some of your favorite coaching resources? Both free and pay. blogs/books/videos etc. I recently came across http://coachingbetterbball.blogspot.com/ and love it. I'm a big X's and O's guy. I was a decent player in HS and played a very small school and helped out with the JV and Varsity my first year in college while living at home. I played three sports in hs but basketball was by far my favorite to practice and have always seen myself as a coach in the future.

What is your preferred style of play offensively and defensively and what types of styles have you played and coached with? What are you favorites? What would your ideal style of play be. fast/slow tempo? Would you want to press?

I'm most familiar with a flex style offense since that's what I grew up playing and always liked M2M defenses better than zones, however I played mostly in zones since my teams were generally less talented than our opponents. I love watching college games and figuring out what teams are doing. Sometimes I'll even try to diagram set plays and such that I like. [img]/images/graemlins/crazy.gif[/img]

Good luck this season and in your quest to make the dance. I look forward to following this thread throughout the season! Will ask more questions in the future.

[Redgrape]

What's more important: Raw talent, work ethic, or intelligence?

[Casper05]

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How many miles do your players run per day, and how many shots at minimum do you like them to take (from 3, midrange, and in the paint)?

[/ QUOTE ]They dont do cardio in the sense of "miles per day" during the season. They get their running in during practice via drills, scrimmages, and sprints.

We don't put a hard limit on the number of shots they have to shoot...they get a lot up during our practices and most of them come early or stay late to get more up.