Fixing a junior's shooting form

The fault behind almost every bad junior shot

When a young player shoots from too far away, their body solves the problem the only way it can. The elbow flares out, the off hand comes around to push, and the whole thing launches from chest height like a shot put. Coaches call this a push shot, and once it's set it's genuinely hard to remove.

Here is the part most parents miss. That technique isn't a bad habit, it's a correct response to an impossible task. A nine year old asked to shoot a size six ball at a full height ring, just over three metres up, from the free throw line can't do it any other way. Their arms aren't strong enough, so they recruit the whole body and the form collapses.

Why you fix distance first

If you correct the elbow while the shot is still too far away, the shot simply won't reach. The child now has a technique that fails, which feels worse than the fault did, and they abandon it within a week. You've to remove the reason the fault exists before you remove the fault.

So move them in. Not a step in, properly in, until they're close enough that a clean one handed shot goes in comfortably. For a lot of eight and nine year olds that's a metre from the ring. It looks far too easy. That's the point: you're building the movement, not testing it.

What good actually looks like

Ball on the shooting hand, resting on the pads of the fingers with a gap you could slide a pencil through. The off hand sits on the side as a passenger and does nothing at all. Elbow roughly under the ball rather than out to the side. The shot finishes with the wrist relaxed and the fingers pointing down at the floor.

One cue does more than all of that combined: tell them to hold the finish until the ball lands. Most juniors snatch the hand away the instant the ball leaves, which pulls the shot offline. Holding the follow through forces every other part of the motion to behave, without you having to explain any of it.

The drill

Stand them close enough that they can make the shot one handed, with the off hand behind their back entirely. Ten shots. Every shot, they hold the follow through until the ball hits the floor. You count the makes out loud so they don't have to.

When they make eight out of ten, they take one step back and start again. When they miss more than half, they step back in. The step is the reward, which keeps them honest, and it means they're always working at the edge of what they can actually do rather than somewhere far past it.

Don't add the off hand back until the one handed shot is reliable at a few metres. When you do, the only instruction is that the off hand is a passenger. It goes on the ball, it comes off the ball, it never pushes.

How long this takes

Longer than you want. A shot that has been pushed for two years takes a couple of months of regular short sessions to overwrite, and the child will get worse before they get better because the new motion is slower and less familiar under pressure.

Expect them to revert completely in games for a while. That's normal and it's not a sign the work is failing. Game pressure pulls out the oldest habit every time, and the new one only becomes the default once it has more repetitions behind it than the old one did.