Shooting in games, not just at training

The gap between training and Saturday

Nearly every parent who raises confidence with me describes the same thing. Their child shoots well in the driveway, shoots well at training, then gets to a Saturday morning game and won't put the ball up once. It looks like a different player wearing the same singlet, and it's genuinely confusing to watch from the sideline.

Nothing about the shot has changed. What has changed is the cost of missing. In the driveway a miss costs nothing and nobody sees it. In a game a miss happens in front of teammates, a coach, both sets of parents and whoever else is in the stadium, and for a lot of kids that price is simply too high to pay.

So they do the sensible thing. They pass it. Passing is safe, nobody gets blamed for a pass, and the decision becomes somebody else's problem. What looks like a lack of confidence is usually a child who has worked out exactly which option gets them criticised and which one doesn't.

What is actually going through their head

Ask a ten year old why they didn't shoot and you'll get a shrug. Ask them what they were thinking when they had the ball and you sometimes get the truth, and the truth is almost always one of three things. They didn't want to miss. They didn't believe they were allowed to shoot. Or they thought a better player wanted the ball.

The middle one surprises parents more than it should. Plenty of juniors have decided, entirely on their own, that shooting is for the good players and their job is to feed them. Nobody ever told them that. They worked it out from who shoots, who gets praised and who gets pulled off, and once a child believes it they won't shoot no matter how open they're.

What to stop saying

The most common thing said in the car on the way home is some version of you should have shot that. It's well meant and it makes the problem worse, because it puts another judgement on a moment the child already found stressful. Now missing is bad and not shooting is also bad, and the only safe option left is to stay away from the ball altogether.

Stop commenting on individual shots entirely, made or missed. If you must say something about shooting, say it about the decision and not the result. That was a good look, take it next time. Same message, no verdict on whether the ball went in, and the child can hear it without bracing for what comes next.

Here is the part parents don't enjoy hearing. If your child glances at you after every mistake, they're playing for you rather than for the game. That's not a character flaw, it's a learned habit, and it comes from feedback arriving too quickly and too often. The fastest way to break it's a few weeks of saying nothing at all.

Make the shot boring

Confidence isn't a feeling you can hand a child in a speech before tip off. It's the by product of having done something so many times that it stops registering as an event. A kid who has taken four hundred shots from the same spot doesn't feel brave taking one in a game, they feel almost nothing, and that flatness is exactly what you're after.

So pick one spot, not five. Pick the spot where they actually receive the ball in games, which is usually much closer to the ring than parents assume. Shoot from that one spot until it's unremarkable, then add a catch and a turn, then add someone closing out at them. The shot they take on Saturday should be a shot they've already taken a thousand times.

Give them a rule, not a suggestion

Telling a child to be confident asks them to produce a feeling on demand, which nobody can do. Giving them a rule asks them to follow an instruction, which is far easier when the heart rate is up. The rule I use is simple. If you're open, in your spot, and you caught it balanced, you shoot. No decision required, because the decision was made before the game.

Agree the rule together beforehand and then hold to it, including when they miss. If the first one misses and nothing unpleasant happens afterwards, the rule survives. If the first one misses and they get a look from the sideline, the rule is dead and so is the shooting for the rest of the season.

I've had kids take one ugly shot a game for three or four weeks before something loosens. It's slow going. It's also permanent once it lands, which is more than I can say for any talk given in a car park.

When it is not confidence at all

Occasionally a child isn't avoiding the shot, they simply never get the ball anywhere near it. Watch one full quarter and count how many times they touch it inside the arc, meaning closer in than the three point line. If the answer is once or twice, this is a role problem rather than a confidence problem, and no amount of driveway shooting will change the number.

That conversation belongs with the coach, and it goes better if you ask what they would like your child doing away from the ball rather than why your child isn't getting it. Coaches will answer the first question happily and get defensive about the second one, every time.