Ep 362 Good Shot, Great Shot, No Shot: Teaching Shot Selection at the Youth Level

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Coach Bill and Coach Collins tackle a question straight from the Coaching Youth Hoops Facebook group: how do you teach shot selection to young players when every kid wants to jack up threes and every parent in the stands is yelling "shoot it"?

The answer is a three word vocabulary any third grader can learn: great shot, good shot, no shot. Coach Bill breaks down how he uses it live in scrimmages, why the follow up question matters more than the label itself, and how the same shot can be a great shot for one player and a no shot for another.

The first question almost every kid gets after a game is "how many points did you score?" Nobody asks how many stops they made or how good their defense was. That single question shapes how young players behave with the ball. Basketball is a team sport, and shot selection is where team play either shows up or disappears.

Coach Bill's youth level definition of a great shot has three parts a player can self assess in a fraction of a second:

You are on balance

There is no hand in your face

The shot is inside your range, meaning a distance where you make a decent percentage

A wide open layup is the purest great shot at the third, fourth, and fifth grade level. Get those layups in.

A good shot might be a mid range look with no hand in your face. A no shot is the one where you cannot even hit the rim from that spot, most often a three point heave.