The holy trinity of hoops

By Clay Kallam
Publisher

Since we'd just won a state championship, the principal and athletic director were finally willing to acknowledge that maybe we knew something about basketball.

"We're going to redo the gym," they told us. "Is there anything you'd like?"

After regaining my upright position -- since previous communications about such projects generally began with "The boys coach decided the gym resurfacing will be next week so all your open gyms are cancelled" -- I managed to utter one sentence: "Put three-points line on the side courts."

Apparently, this didn't register. "What color would like the key painted?"

They were shocked when I didn't care. "How about the width of the sideline?" Again, I was unmoved.

Finally, I repeated myself, a bit more strongly than necessary. "I don't care what you do to the floor as long as there are three-point lines on every basket. You can paint the gym fuchsia with teal lining or put the principal's picture on the backboard -- just make sure that every basket has a three-point line."

They got the message, and we got the lines. We also got better from the three-point line. A lot better.

Of course, it didn't hurt that we have the girls shoot 50 threes a day during summer camp and take at least 10 minutes out of practice every day for three-pointers. And that's everybody: point guards, power forwards and centers.

It took some convincing the first year. The head coach had never been a great outside shooter and so he had an inbred reluctance to acknowledge the importance of the three-pointer. It seemed like cheating to him, since he had to work so hard inside to score. My inside game, on the other hand, had alternated between blown layups and blocked shots for years, and I had always loved the three.

The closer on the deal, though, was the shot charts from the NCAA men's tournament that year. They showed them on TV and you could see clearly there were two shots the best college teams wanted: layups or three-pointers. The direction of the game was clear, and so we went with the flood.

The first season was a bit of a struggle. Many girls were convinced they couldn't make threes and refused to take it seriously. The inside players were especially stubborn, but when our 6-2 center started to knock them down, they got a little more excited. It also hurt that only the two main baskets (out of the six total) had the three-point arc on the floor. It was guesswork, even though we laid down some tape, and the practice shots on the side courts simply didn't translate well to the real one.

But we persevered and the next summer, lightning struck. We were playing in a tournament at Lake Tahoe against a pretty good team, and one of those miraculous moments occurred. We hit 14 out of 16 threes to simply take over the game -- and everybody seemed to make one. By the game's end, forwards who struggled in practice were burying threes and the kids were going crazy. (The coaches were pretty happy too, I must report.)

Sadly, we've never come close to duplicating that performance again, but our second year of three-point commitment still paid off. In a crucial playoff game, our center got in foul trouble, giving the opposition's 6-3 center free rein inside. But three different players buried threes for us in a six-minute span and broke the other team's heart.

This year, we were totally committed to the three, up and down the lineup. Backup centers, who by now had shot thousands of three-pointers, were looking for a chance to make one in a game. We wound up shooting 35 percent as a team last season, with a sophomore guard hitting 45 percent -- including 60 percent in postseason. In the state title game, we were struggling until our 6-2 center dropped in three threes in the second quarter, and we won our second straight title.

The moral of this story is not, as you might expect, to have three-point lines painted on every court, though that's highly recommended. The real moral is that shooting three-pointers is like any other basketball skill: The more you do it, the better you get. Some players will never shoot threes well, but many more than you think can be a threat -- and remember, shooting 33 percent from three-point distance is like shooting 50-percent from two-point distance. And, more important, even a 25-percent three-point shooter is as good as a 38-percent shooter from 15 feet.

The tactical and psychological advantages of the three-pointer are by now so obvious that I don't really need to repeat them, but what's important is that those advantages are there for the taking for any team that wants to commit to long-distance shooting. It won't happen in the first year, necessarily, and the second year might be a bit of a struggle. But if you have seniors who have spent three years shooting 50 threes a day, you're going to have seniors who will be a consistent threat to make threes in games.

Nobody wants to rely on threes to win, for there are always games in which they just don't drop, but they give every team a puncher's chance to pull off an upset, or make up for some other disasters such as injuries or foul trouble.

And all it takes is commitment and practice -- though having arcs on every basket won't hurt.

9/5/96