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The Importance of the Fundamentals

By Aim High Hoops

In our last blog posting about our experience at the FastPitch competition, we talked about the importance of young basketball players establishing correct habits early on in the learning process.  Making a 3-point shot with defense on you, when the score is close, and in the final moments of a game is tough enough to do with GOOD mechanics developed correctly over years and years. Trying to change poor mechanics that are already engrained in a player’s memory is a difficult challenge for both the mind and the body. 

With our training videos, Pure Shooter’s Report Card, and our Aim High Hoops shooting clinics, we provide a crystal clear picture for players who want to become great shooters, and we plan on offering equally beneficial resources for dribbling and advanced shooting techniques, thus giving players all they need to maximize their individual offensive basketball potential.

If you are still skeptical about the idea of an hour of mechanics drills every day, listen to what the greatest player ever to play basketball, Michael Jordan said: “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down first and the level of everything you do will rise.”

Jordan was known for practicing, practicing, and then practicing some more, to keep his fundamentals at the highest level possible at all times. Only in those circumstances, he believed, could he reach his maximum potential as a basketball player.  His career illustrates that “at his best” was the only acceptable level for Jordan, but the only reason he was able to get there and stay there was because he laid a very strong foundation in the fundamentals of the game at a very early age.

Our mission at Aim High Hoops is to help players learn both basic and advanced basketball fundamentals, using high-quality resources and customer service. We look forward to helping players of all ages and skill levels reach their highest levels possible and stay there.

Stay in touch!

Billy Lewis & Jonathan Schneiderman

Aim High Hoops, Inc.

www.AimHighHoopsOnline.com

FastPitch

By Aim High Hoops

Last Tuesday, we participated in the business competition known as “FastPitch”. The format was for entrepreneurs to present both their product or service and their business model, all in three minutes. A 3-person panel of judges had three additional minutes to ask follow-up questions or make additional comments. 

While we didn’t win any prize money, preparing for the FastPitch presentation allowed us to think about our reasons for creating Aim High Hoops, and about what we wanted to provide to basketball players, parents and coaches.  We were able to discuss our mission—“Helping players learn both basic and advanced basketball fundamentals, using high-quality professional resources and customer service” —and how the mission is obviously the foundation around which everything we do is centered.

We discussed our first training video, “Pure Shooting”, which we look to have for sale by the end of the summer.  We feel that a competitive advantage is in the presentation format.  Many successful athletes do not become successful coaches, because they know how to “do what they do” but not “explain what they do”, because their athletic talents always came naturally and without them having to think about it.  As teachers, we know how to break content down into understandable, logically-ordered pieces so that the audience understands the connection between everything.  In this case, our students are the training video viewers and the lesson is about becoming a Pure Shooter.

We also went into depth about the Pure Shooter’s Report Card, our shooting analysis that will allow us to connect to players across the country with individual lessons, right from their own backyards. We wrote a little about the Report Card back in an April 2010 blog and will continue to share developments.

The third product/service we offer, and have not yet blogged about, are our Aim High Hoops Shooting & Ball-handling clinics.  Our purpose with those is not to cram as many players in the gym as we can, but rather, keep the player to coach ratio at 8:1, ensuring individual attention for each player.  The first clinic program coincides with our first training video on the mechanics of shooting and how to become a “Pure Shooter”.  We will have the DVD and Report Card for sale on site.

We are extremely confident that what we offer will help players who want to become great shooters become great shooters.  The reason for the optimism is because the basketball experience that the Aim High Hoops team brings in, combined with the products we offer, gives a very clear picture of how to build the proper fundamental foundation for becoming a great basketball player.  Obviously, it is up to the players to actually “build” that foundation of skills.  The important thing to remember is: Players that learn the correct habits early on just continue on the fastest path to basketball excellence, while players who learn poor habits have a lot to “unlearn” before being able to reach their potentials, a much longer process.

Billy Lewis & Jonathan Schneiderman

Aim High Hoops, Inc.

www.AimHighHoopsOnline.com

Kobe

By Aim High Hoops

12-time NBA All-Star. 4-time NBA champion. 2-time scoring champion. Regular season and NBA Finals Most Valuable Player. Olympic Champion.

Kobe Bryant is arguably the best player in the NBA, and will certainly be a Hall of Fame inductee when his playing days are over.  His accomplishments are spectacular; his will to win unshakable.

We recently posted an article on our “Pure Shooting” training video, where we present our ideas on the correct way to shoot a basketball.  This training video will be ready for purchase later this summer.  One of our themes is that “it is never too early or too late to become a pure shooter”.

Kobe Bryant is not only a pure shooter, but also one of the most prolific scorers in the history of the game.  He holds the regular season record for 3-point shots made in a half (8) and a game (12). 

In a recent Sports Illustrated article titled “Kobe’s Final Challenge”, a subtitle could easily have been “it’s never too late to become a more pure shooter”.  The article goes into detail about adjustments Kobe made to his shooting mechanics during the 2009-2010 season on the advice of assistant coach and former NBA player Chuck Person.  It would have been very easy for Kobe, one of the best players ever to play the game, and one of the best shooters in the league, to ignore Chuck Person’s advice and continue shooting the same way. Instead, he listened, processed the information, and worked hard to do a very difficult thing: train his shooting muscles to do something different than what he was used, in game situations, without having to think about it.  Kobe’s work has paid off; his shooting has become more consistent, and NBA defenses are paying the price!

Kobe, in trying to become more “pure”, was working to make his shooting mechanics even more reliable and consistent.  In our “Pure Shooting” training video, the goal is to help basketball players develop and strengthen the correct shooting mechanics, in order to shoot the ball the same way every time in game situations, where there is no time to think about the mechanics. This is only possible, as we explain in the video, by “knowing” how to shoot, and then “doing” it (shooting the correct way) a lot.  The bottom line: there is no substitute for the correct shooting mechanics, and players who continue to strive to become as “pure” of shooters as possible will always have a spot on the basketball court.

Billy Lewis & Jonathan Schneiderman

Aim High Hoops, Inc.

www.AimHighHoopsOnline.com

Pure Shooting Video

By Aim High Hoops

We at Aim High Hoops completed a big step for our company the first weekend of May. We filmed professional video footage for our first training video, entitled “Pure Shooting”.  By our count, we logged 30 hours on set, all to capture 7 hours of video, which will be condensed down to roughly 1 hour when all is said and done! This process of outlining a script all started in August 2009, and in between then and May, we filmed “Pure Shooting” 5 times on our own in order to watch our ideas on screen, reflect on the good and bad that we saw, and then finally modify the script to communicate our vision as clearly as possible.

A lot of great people were involved in the film process, without which we wouldn’t have been able to make this training video. Rogue Lens (roguelens@gmail.com) is the company responsible for filming the footage and putting together a final, professional product.  We had a variety of demonstrators ranging from  3rd graders to the collegiate and post-collegiate levels. Courtney Weibel and Devan Bawinkel were our featured demonstrators; Courtney will complete her senior season for Marquette University in 2010-11 and as a senior in high school broke the national record for career 3-point shots made, while Devan finished up his college career with the University of Iowa this year after scoring 2,000 points in high school. 

We look to have the video ready for sale by the end of the summer, and we strongly believe we’ve created something that can help shooters of all ages and experience levels reach their full potentials by learning how to shoot the ball “pure” every single time, thus strongly increasing the chance of the ball going into the hoop. There is ALWAYS room for a pure shooter on the court, and like we say in the video: “it is never too early or too late to become a pure shooter!”

Billy Lewis & Jonathan Schneiderman

Aim High Hoops, Inc.

www.AimHighHoopsOnline.com