When addressing the finer points of shooting, it goes without saying that a basketball player can always find improvement when it comes to firing one up from the perimeter, baseline or lane.
Be it jump shots or set shots, the fundamentals are all the same when it comes to getting one’s feet set, finding the correct release point and following through, capped by making “the goose’s neck.”
“We decided with our four-day camp that we wanted to dedicate one full day to working on our shooting skills and we needed to start with the young, young girls,” said Great Bend High School head girls’ basketball coach Carrie Minton on Thursday morning during the final day of the Lady Panthers basketball camps. “We needed to work on form shooting, and we needed to carry it all the way through.
“We even spent one full day with form shooting, the proper shooting technique, with our high school girls. We spent all day on Monday with all three levels — grade school girls (entering grades fifth and sixth), middle school girls (entering seventh and eighth grades) and the high school-age girls.”
Besides shooting drills, Minton and her coaching staff also implemented dribble drills, ball-handling drills and defensive drills, to name just a few.
But this story is about shooting.
“With all age groups, we started from the very basics to footwork to getting the ball up into the shooting window, keeping the elbow in and following through,” Minton said. “We’ve focused on that at the very beginning.
 “With the older girls, we started working on range, using proper technique. There’s always been a bad habit of girls, because of strength, to compensate to get the shot up, to get the ball out to the side, kind of like a shot put, or where they sling-shot it up.”