6 Ways to Improve as a Shooter in Basketball
Becoming a reliable shooter takes more than extra reps. These six methods — grounded in what elite coaches teach — give you a clear path from building your foundation to making shots when the game is on the line.
1. Build Form Before Chasing Volume
Most players start their shooting workouts by pulling up at the three-point line. That is backwards. Form built without the ball — and then progressed slowly to the basket — is what separates players who groove a repeatable shot from players who just groove a bad habit at high volume.
The sequence that top coaches use is simple. Start with no ball: find a balanced stance, dominant foot just slightly forward, knees soft. From there, work the "pizza waiter" mechanic — shooting hand flat under the ball like you're carrying a tray, elbow stacked under your hand and directly over your knee. Then add the ball, shoot to a wall to focus on the hand position without worrying about a miss, and only move to a basket once each piece is clean.
Jay Hernandez, one of the most recognized skill development coaches in the country, opens every workout with "Quarters" — a one-handed form shooting drill, starting close to the basket, progressing outward. The logic is identical to what Jay Wright taught at Villanova: his first two drills every practice were the Set Lift (elbow under, lift, full follow-through, no rim contact) and the Bradley Drill (ball as high as possible, release on the way up). Both coaches, years apart, arrived at the same starting point — form before volume, every single session.
The follow-through is the last checkpoint. Arm fully extended, fingers pointing down at the rim, wrist relaxed. Hold it until the ball hits the floor. Players who rush the follow-through are players who never know why their shot is off.
The Youth On-Ramp
For younger players, the "cookie jar" cue works well alongside "pizza waiter." The release hand finishes high and hangs above the basket like you're reaching into a cookie jar on a shelf. These two images — one for the grip, one for the finish — give young shooters something concrete to self-check without a coach standing over them.
2. Make Every Rep Competitive
Shooting without a scoreboard is practice theater. You show up, you put up shots, you feel like you worked — but nothing competes for your attention the way a game does. The fix is simple: every shooting block needs a winner, a clock, or a record to beat.
Shaka Smart's Texas drill bank is one of the best examples of this principle applied systematically. His team tracked explicit records for drills like the 3-Minute Shooting challenge (the program record was 157 makes), the Evans drill (record 219), and Beat the Pro — a head-to-head format where every miss by the shooter counts as two points for the imaginary opponent. The records were posted. Players competed against them. That is a shooting culture, not a shooting workout.
The John Beilein standard at Michigan was 7 makes out of 10 shots in 30 seconds, coming off a down screen and flare screen sequence. All three players in the group ran if the standard wasn't hit — the screeners included. The consequence turned a drill into a shared accountability moment, which is exactly what competition does in games.
Jay Wright's Villanova standard was 6 makes out of 10 in 30 seconds. Both coaches landed in the same range independently. That convergence tells you something: a 60-70% make rate at game speed, off movement, is the competitive threshold that serious programs set. Below that, the shot isn't ready.
The most dangerous person is the one who is continually improving — make every rep a contest against a timer, a partner, or your own record so the pressure of competition becomes familiar.
— Shooting Development Principles, Basketball Vault
You don't need a full team to make this work. A timer on your phone and a personal record on paper turn solo workouts into competitive sessions. Set a goal (makes in two minutes from the elbow), write your number down, and try to beat it next time. The record board is the tool; the culture follows.
3. Train Game Shots at Game Speed
Standing under the basket catching clean passes and shooting with no pressure is not basketball. The catch, the footwork before the catch, and the decision that precedes the shot — those are basketball. Your shooting reps need to include all three.
Larry Brown's SMU program built every shooting drill around a realistic offensive action before the pull. Zipper cuts, baseline drives, drag screens, ball screens — every drill had a movement that put the player in a realistic position before the catch. Players were always responding to a read (how the defense played the screen, the angle of the closeout) before pulling the trigger. That is the standard: earn the shot with an action, never spot up cold.
Kevin Eastman's framework — "game shots, game spots, game speed" — makes the principle portable. Before designing any drill, ask three questions: Is this a shot the player actually takes in games? Is this from a spot on the floor they actually shoot from? And is the tempo matching what games demand? If the answer to any of those is no, the drill needs to change.
Mix Block and Movement Shooting
Block shooting — shooting from the same spot repeatedly — has its place. It is how you build feel for a specific range or work a mechanical fix in isolation. But it should not be the majority of your reps. Shaka Smart's rule captures the balance well: "Can't shoot the same spot twice — must move." Mix block work early in a session when you're grooving form, then shift to movement shooting (off the catch from a cut, off a screen, after a dribble) so the body learns to replicate the motion under realistic conditions.
4. Diagnose and Fix Your Misses
Most players and coaches respond to a missed shot with a vague cue — "bend your knees," "follow through," "be confident." Dr. Hal Wissel's diagnostic framework is far more useful: identify the specific error pattern first, trace it to its mechanical root, then prescribe the correction drill that targets that root. Repeating the wrong generic cue just cements the problem.
Here are the most common miss patterns and what actually causes them:
Short shots: The release point is too low. The ball leaves the hand before full arm extension. The fix is the high-extension finish — hold the follow-through with the arm fully extended, fingers pointing down at the rim, until the ball lands. Don't let the elbow drop early.
Shots that miss wide (left or right): The guide hand — the off hand — is pushing across the ball at release. The thumb is the culprit. Run one-handed form shots until the ball tracks straight, and consciously keep the guide-hand thumb up and away from the release path.
Flat arc (line drive): The wrist is not fully flexed through the ball, and the elbow is not finishing above eye level. Pick a point on the gym ceiling above the front of the rim and aim the arc there. Players who train the arc immediately gain 4-6 inches of loft — and loft creates margin.
Inconsistent timing: The player is rushing — releasing before the natural peak of the jump. The cue is "Sight-Set-Shoot": establish the target, pause at the set-point with the ball above the shooting shoulder, then release on the way up. Three distinct beats, not one blurred motion.
Side spin: The shooting hand is cocked to the side at the set-point. Check elbow alignment — at the set-point the shooting elbow must be directly under the ball and over the shooting knee before the wrist snaps.
Work backward through the chain when a player misses consistently: arc angle, then hand position, then elbow alignment, then balance and foot placement. The root cause is rarely what the player thinks it is.
5. Develop the Pull-Up, Not Just the Catch-and-Shoot
The player who can take one or two dribbles off the dribble and pull up around the free throw line is as hard to guard as the catch-and-shoot specialist — and they're far rarer. Coaches tend to develop catch-and-shoot players because that is easier to train and measure. But the pull-up and the hesitation are, in the words of shooting coaches who've studied the game at every level, "lost arts."
Rick Pitino put a useful number on the cost of skipping this: his Louisville teams shot 22% on challenged shots, while the NBA baseline for contested shots is around 42%. His practice rule was direct — if a shot would be challenged, pass it back and restart the action. No exceptions. The implication is clear: the pull-up in the mid-range, taken at the right moment before the defense closes, is a higher-percentage look than forcing a contested three. But it only works if you've trained it.
The practical work here is simple. Add pull-up reps to every shooting session. A dribble or two off a stationary start, a hesitation step to create space, then the shot. Work it from both sides of the lane, from the elbow, and from the wing. The footwork on the pull-up — staying balanced through the gather — determines whether the form carries over from your stationary catch-and-shoot work.
Pair Shooting with Ball Handling
Shots come off the dribble. Build the handling that creates them — game-speed stationary ball-handling, full-court sequences, the pull-back crossover for separation. A player whose dribble breaks down under pressure never gets to a clean shooting pocket. Finishing on straight-line drives is part of the same package: "4 dribbles, 4 trips" finishing drills build the comfort with live-ball situations that lets a shooter stay aggressive off the bounce.
When you add pull-up reps to practice, start from a live dribble — not a catch. Walk the player through the gather step slowly, confirm the footwork is clean before adding speed, and make sure the follow-through holds even when they're going at full pace. Form breaks down on the pull-up before it breaks down anywhere else.
6. Shoot Free Throws Tired and on a Count
Free throws shot at the start of practice — fresh, unhurried, no stakes — are nearly useless as game preparation. Free throws in games happen when you are exhausted, after a hard foul, with the crowd making noise and the score tight. If you only train them fresh, you have not trained them at all.
The right way to bake free throws into a workout is to attach them to the end of a hard block — after a scored movement drill, after a full-court conditioning sequence, after a live 1-on-1 game. Shoot them on a count: ten shots, record the makes, move on. Over time, track the percentage under fatigue and compare it to your fresh percentage. The gap tells you exactly how much work remains.
Pitino ran this discipline at Louisville: free throws after live 1-on-1 games, when players were tired, with tracked percentages. The mechanical anchor he used was straightforward — ball and head over the free throw line, projecting the ball toward the rim. The head position is something most coaches never teach, but it matters: if your head drifts back on the release, the shot tends to go long or short rather than true.
Tom Billeter's Purdue Drill captures the fatigue element in a team context: make four three-pointers in a minute, with a rebounder and passer, sprinting baseline to half-court between shots. "Shooter runs for each point below four" — the consequence layer. That is free throw training in spirit, applied to the three-ball. The mechanism is the same: scored reps, consequence for missing, shot under physical stress.
Build the habit now. Every time you end a shooting session, shoot ten free throws and write down the number. Do not shoot them as a cool-down or a formality. Get your heart rate up first, then shoot, then count. That is the only version that transfers to games.
- Form before volume: Start every session with one-handed form shots close to the basket — elbow under the ball, full extension, hold the follow-through until the ball lands.
- Put a record on the board: Choose one named drill (Star, Around the Horn, 3-Minute), set a starting benchmark, and compete against it every session — write the number down.
- Earn the shot with a move: No spotting up cold. Build every drill around a realistic action first — a cut, a screen catch, a one-to-two dribble pull-up — before the release.
- Fix misses with a root cause: When a player misses consistently, trace back to arc angle → hand position → elbow alignment → foot balance before prescribing any correction drill.
- Shoot free throws at the end, not the beginning: Attach free throw reps to the hardest block of the workout so they are always shot under fatigue, and count every make.
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