Temporary Inconvenience vs. Permanent Improvement

I often I want to express a thought regarding a particular subject to the team here on the blog, but more-often than not I find myself in a sort of “writer’s block mentality” as I sit at the keyboard. I have difficulty expressing the thought in the way that I want to beyond the first sentence. No matter how hard I try and fight through it, the words just don’t seem to convey the message that I want to send. So I tend to give up and tell myself that I’ll just do it later. That mindset may work for writing, but it definitely won’t work for improving your basketball skills.

In basketball, there is only one way to improve your physical skills and that is to accept the “temporary inconvenience” of practicing over and over again until the skill becomes a natural habit, like riding a bike…being able to do it without thinking about it.

Although Sheff already leads the team in most of the offensive categories, she has been sacrificing her time and energy over the past few weeks to learn to alter her shooting mechanics in order to be able to shoot against a bigger defender and to learn to shoot coming off of a screen. In addition, she’s also learning some new ball handling methods to help her come off the dribble a little quicker against a defender. This has certainly been a temporary inconvenience, but one that will pay huge dividends for her once the season starts. I’ve already seen a major improvement in her shooting & ball handling ability and she’s only been practicing it for two or three weeks.

With summer quickly approaching, there will be plenty of time to sleep late, work on your tan at the beach or watch endless hours of TV. But once the summer is over, we will once again be squeezing-in homework, soccer & volleyball practices and who knows what else before the basketball season starts.

However, once we start our practices it will be too late to gain any noticeable improvement in your skills before our first game. Sheff has already made the choice of temporary inconvenience that will result in permanent improvement.

What will you spend the summer working on? We are the sum of our choices.