Charles in Charge

A funny thing (well, not funny to me at the time ... but looking back) happened at basketball practice yesterday. Our team had problems with shooting percentage in our first game, and a fair amount of that was missed lay-ups. We shouldn't be missing as many lay-ups as we are, and some of it is due, I think, to a lack of concentration in practice. So, I told Dr. Kolar that we should have some incentive attached to some of the drills ... get some competitive juices going to help them focus.

Well, Dr. Kolar decided that we'd set a baseline for the # of made lay-ups in the full court dribbling lay-up drill on Tuesday, then the kids would need to beat it each time. Well, he explained what we would be doing and Charlie (his son) blurted out "Don't make any ... then it will be really easy to beat it next time!"

I quickly shut Charlie up and told him not to repeat those words again, or he'd be running for the rest of practice. Charlie is quite intelligent, obviously, although that thought wasn't all that helpful in the context of basketball practice. Fortunately, I don't think anyone heard what he said - or at least processed it ... so they weren't missing lay-ups on purpose. Unfortunately, we didn't make a whole lot of lay-ups (37) during the 5 minutes.

If you figure 10 seconds to go each way, which is pretty conservative, you get 6 opportunities per minute ... so 30 opportunities in 5 minutes. You have 4 balls in action at a time, so that's 120 total opportunities. So ... 37/120 ... that's not really all that good. I didn't actually count the number of attempts, I'll have to do that next time and report back. Hopefully, the number of makes will be more than 37 - although this is the 1st year on the 10 ft goal ... and I remember certain teammates of mine really struggling with lay-ups at that age.