Youth Basketball Shooting Tips: Follow-Through

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Sean Hobson and what we're talking about right now is the proper mechanics to making you a good shooter. We've talked about all the steps so far of getting in the proper shooting pocket, having your hands ready, having a good base, your feet shoulder width apart, we don't want you too close together, not too far apart. And then we talked about making the shot. When you actually make the shot, you don't want to come straight up or straight out. You want to go up. But the most important thing in making that shot work, is the follow-through. If you don't follow-through, you are not communicating to the basketball of where you want it to go. Its very important. If you leave your hand open, the basketball will continue to travel wherever it wants to because you didn't give it a destination point. If you follow-through with the basketball, what you're telling the basketball to do by spinning it, is to go up and come back down. Its very important for you to communicate to the ball and let it know where its supposed to come down. In fact, with the younger kids, we always call it waving it goodbye. You wave goodbye to the ball. You want it to go down. You don't leave the ball up because then it doesn't know where its supposed to go. So as Hunter finishes his shot, and this doesn't matter whether you're shooting a layup or a long-range shot or a mid-range shot, you always follow-through, even on your layups you want to follow-through so the ball will come down or it will continue to travel forward. This is what it looks like when you properly follow-through. Now the other important thing is, you saw that he didn't just follow-through and then let go, because a lot of times you'll see players they'll follow-through and they'll let go, and its almost like taking a string on the basketball and letting it go and then pulling it back. You're actually going to put some backspin on the ball and its not going to allow it to drop. So when you make the shot, hold your follow-through until the ball goes down. That's going to make you a more accurate shooter."