Youth Basketball Free Throws: Backspin

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Sean Hobson and when you're talking about shooting with the proper mechanics and becoming a good free throw shooter, one of the important things that we want to work on is having a good spin on the basketball. If you don't shoot it properly and you get the basketball to spin in an odd shape, a lot of times its going to miss and if it hits the front of the rim, it will shoot off to the right side or the left side. So what we want to talk about right now is getting the proper spin and the proper height on the ball. You cannot be a flat shooter. If you shoot the ball flat, what happens is you're giving a very minimal chance of that ball getting over the front of the rim. You don't want to shoot it at a low trajectory because its not going to get up over. The higher you shoot it, the more chance it has to drop into the basket. But if you're shooting it at an improper angle, you're going to hit the front of the rim more times than not. So what we want to work on right now is first of all, him getting the ball up in the air. So the first thing we want to do is shoot the ball up high in the air and hold your follow through. Good. If you work on that a lot, getting a ball up, what's going to happen is, when you shoot the ball in a game, its going become natural to you. Now obviously in practice you're usually going to shoot it higher than you normally would. And the most important thing we want top of that is when he shoots the ball up high, when he follows through, we want him to put a big spin on that ball so that it spins end over end and not around in an odd position. Alright, go ahead. Good, you could see right there that ball spun end over end; it went straight up and straight down in the same spot. It didn't travel to the right or to the left. If you can learn to shoot the ball high and have a good backspin on the ball, you're going to become an even better shooter."