Time

Everyone has different advantages in any sport. Some people are more athletic while others are more intelegent. There is one thing that everyone has the same ammount of: TIME. Everyone has the 24 hours in a day, seven days a week, and 52 weeks a year. The thing that gives someone else the advatage with time is how they use it. If you use your time wisely, and practice, you can gain a huge advantage over anyone else that might have a different advantage over you.

Sacrificing

A lot of athletes that could have gone big didn't because they didn't feel like sacrificing the short term things for the long term things. We all have a choice to make; whether we want to sacrifice the little things to gain the big things, or whether we want to have fun right now and not work hard to have even more fun in the future. While I was at Point Guard College the president, Mano Watsa, told us a very good story that really helped me. Here is the story:
Imagine if you parents or someone else told you that you could either get a dollar to spend every day for 1 whole week, or you could wait until the end of the week and get $20. Of course through the week, you might be out of money and can't spend it on anything, but at the end of the week, you'll be excited to get that twenty dollars. Are you willing to make that sacrifice and get the big gains in the end?

"I don't feel like it"

Have you ever said that. I know I have and I'm guessing that almost every if not every athlete has said this. I have recently realized that I never feel like going outside and practicing in the hot weather we have been having, but if I go outside anyway and practice, i start to get motivated and i want to keep going. Very seldom do I feel motivated to practice in hot weather before I actually go and do it. Feelings come after action most of the time.

Finding Help

I recently wrote a blog post called surrounding yourself with motivation. I have gotten the question, "What if no one near me loves the game like I do?" I struggled a lot with this question. I think I have finally found an answer. A person that can motivate us doesn't necessarily have to live near us. We can find motivation from people around the world. I am a member of a site called Three Point Academy. We just recently brought in our 400th member of the site. That's 400 people that can motivate you. I am good friends with a few of the members and with the founder of Three Point Academy even thought they live no where near me. The point is that motivation doesn't have to come from people that live near you.

Time Wasters

One thing that almost every athlete (including me) have trouble with is time wasters. What is a time waster. It's something that you do when you could be improving. Instead of being on facebook or twitter, we could be using that time to be looking up tips on the Internet or reading a book. Instead of sitting watching our favorite TV show, we could be watching (and studying) game film. There are many things we could do to instead of using a time waster.
Of course there is time for relaxing and watching your favorite TV show or being on Facebook, but we can't do that all of the time or else we won't get much better. There is a time to relax and a time to work hard.
Even good things can turn into time wasters. I am a member of three Point Academy first online basketball academy. www.threepointacademy.com. It's awesome because you can participate in a lot of things and learn a lot, but if i am on it for five hours a day, those five hours could have been used to practice shooting.

Why?

Why do I work so hard every day? Why do i eat the right foods and go to sleep early. Why do I work hard while my friends are going to the movies? Why do I show up early for practice and stay after? Is it all really worth it?

These are just some of the questions that athletes ask themselves over and over again. The answer to these questions comes from only one person and that person is ourselves. No one else knows why we are working hard. No one except ourselves can keep us motivated. We have to look within ourselves to find the answers to these questions. That is the only way to know why we do what we do!

The idea for this post came from one of my fellow Three Point Academy members, Drew Bidlen.

Surround youreself with Motivation

Surrounding ourselves with a good group of friends that love to play the game like you do will greatly improve your game. The opposite will happen if we surround yourself with friends that do not love the game and will not work at it. We all need to have a group of friends that can motivate us to keep going when things go tough and will go with us. Everyone knows that it's easier to do something if someone is doing it with you, but if someone is not doing it with you, it'll be a lot harder to keep working instead of hanging around with them. Surrounding ourselves with people who love the game is vital if we want to become better.

The Man Behind the Scenes

If someone would ask us about the creation of basketball, what is the first name that would come to our mind? James Naismith, the creator of basketball... Right? Well there is also someone else who played a very important roll behind the scenes. His name is Luther Gulick. Gulick was the superintendent of Physical Education at the college where Naismith was Studying to become a Physical education teacher. Luther Gulick is who encouraged Nasimith to create a new game for the college students. There was a sport for every season except for Winter so Gulick told Naismith to make one for Winter. After this meeting with Gulick, James Naismith crated the 13 rules of basketball.
My point is that even though Luther isn't known nearly as well as Nasmith is, he played a big roll in the creation of basketball. The same can happen in the game of basketball. A player that plays behind the star can make a huge difference in a game whether he is on the bench cheering his team on or on the court hustling for loose balls and giving good passes.

Me to We

After a game have you ever had the first thoughts; "I did pretty good today."? We all do this but it needs to change. We need to start thinking about how good the team did before we think about ourselves. After a game we need to know that our teammates did good.

During a game have you ever made a good shot and thought; "That was a pretty good shot."? No one ever thinks of the pass leading up to that shot. We need to learn how to celebrate not only your success, but your teammates success. Your teammates are more important than yourself. I can't stress this enough.

Practice Mindset

This blog is based on a section I read. The author is unknown. Every time you take the floor, you should practice with the technique, intensity, toughness, and togetherness of a state championship! Without hard work at practice, you can't possibly think that your team can win a championship or even have a winning record if your competition works hard. When you walk into the gym your mindset should be to improve for the good of the team. Every drill you do should be done with hustle and intensity. Your hard work should be contagious throughout the team. Think of the court as a classroom. In class, you should expect to learn something every day. You should practice as if your career depends on it... because it does.

Leader or Follower?

Which one are you? Neither one of them are bad. In fact, good players should have a little bit of both in them. If a team is full of only leaders, there is noone to follow.
"When your leading and noone is following, youre just taking a nice walk." Unknown
The same goes for a team who doesn't have any leaders. A team needs to have a balanced leader to follower ratio.
Leading isn't just ordering people around either. To be a leader you need to be open to your teammates opinions and do what is best for the team. Good leaders might even let someone else take over for a time just for the good of the team.
Following isn't just listening to orders. To be a good follower you need to be a part of your team and know when you need to step up or take a back seat.

The Extra Mile

Average players do what the have to do to get by. Great Players go the extra mile to stand out among everybody else. What does going the extra mile mean? It means to do something that noone else will do. It means to make 100 freethrows after your workout. It means to keep going when noone else would be able to. Many athletes that would have made it to the college level or even to the proffesional level didn't because they didn't go that extra mile every day. The were good players but never reached their full potential. Instead they would work until they were tired and then go and rest for the day. To be great you need to go past your tiredness. You need to keep going when your sore and don't think you can go on. As Kobe Bryant said "It's a challenge. Nobody ever said that it was going to be easy."

Shoot for that 1%

When you go to court or a weight room or a classroom to get educated, always expect to do this one thing. Gain 1% from that training or class. If you gain 1% every day, in a year, you'll be over three times as good as you were to start. To gain that 1%, you'll need to make sure you are focusing, and hustling. It'll be a challenge to gain 1% every day but it isn't impossible, and when you know that you gained that 1% for your day, you will feel great.

Fast Food Results

Fast food results are results that come fast that you won't have to work for at all. Chances are that you won't find many of those in your lifetime. Not many if any things will come quick and easy. If you want to shoot 90% from the free-throw line, you cant just expect to take 5 shots and immediately start shooting 90%. If you want to increase your vertical and speed, you cant just do five minutes of jump rope. To get results that you are looking for, you will need to work hard all of the time for them. To get a higher viertical, you'll need to have a whole workout that you will day every day or every other day. If you want to shoot better, you need to go outside whenever you can and start taking shots from everywhere.

What' Next?

The question everyone should ask themselves after a bad performance is "What's next?". After shooting 0 for 6 you should ask yourself "What am i going to do next to do better?". When shooting free-throws, always think of the shot your about to take, not the ones you've already made or missed. Those don't matter right now. What matters is that you are going to make the next one. If your caught up on missed shots, you'll lose confidence and probably miss the next one, and the next one. If you think about the shots your going to make, your confidence will go up and you will shoot better. I have a lot of trouble with this. I always look at percentages and not the shots i will be taking next.

One more Minute

After every workout I spend 1 more minute working on something I need to improve on to be better. I have been working on shooting from the elbows. I get about 10 shots off if I hustle. I do that seven times a week and it adds up to seventy more shots. It has been improving my ability to shoot from the elbows. It is amazing how much more you can improve just by taking one extra minute to work on something. Make sure you leave knowing that you just improved in that one minute.

Don't Limit Yourself

Recently I attended Point Guard College. An athlete there really admired Rajon Rondo. He wore his headband like Rajon, he made every one of his moves off ove Rondo, his camp nickname was Rondo. To himself, he was setting a goal. In my opinion, he was limiting himself. He wanted to be as good as Rondo. As soon as he reached that point, he would be happy with himself. I think that if you aspire to be just like someone, you are limiting yourself to be as good as them. You might be able to get better than them but you want to be as good as them so your fine at where you are. I aspire to be like Chris Paul, but I'm not going to stop training when I get there. I am going to work even harder to get better than Chris Paul.

Quality over Quantity

I've talked to many people who say that they train for 10 hours a day every day or six hours without stopping. In fact I used to say that myself. I just recently read a book called The Art of a Beautiful Game. One of the chapters are called Training: Preparing like pros (and Feeling their Pain). It's about the author going to a training camp where the two trainers trains everyone as if they were NBA players. The trainers said in an interview with the author that they believe in Quality over Quantity. They said that if you are working hard enough, you cant go six hours straight. Now when I go to the courts to train or to the gym to lift weights, I ask myself, "How hard am I willing to work today? Will I work Hard for an hour or will i work at a 50% level and train for six hours?"

mañana actitud

Manana actitud, in English, tomorrow attitude is what a lot of people can relate to. Tomorrow attitude is when someone thinks of something and says "I'll do it tomorrow." Tomorrow comes and you don't get to it so you say "I'll do it tomorrow." Long story short, tomorrow never comes and you never improve. I have this problem a lot and I am currently trying to improve on that aspect. I always tell myself to do something tomorrow but i never get around to doing it. Imagine if everyone in the world had the manana actitud. Doctors would never get around to see doing a heart transplant. Teachers would never go to the school. NBA players would never practice. Now, imagine if everyone had an Ahora mismo or right now attitude. A huge difference,right? Why don't we have an Ahora Mismo attitude instead of a Manana attitude. It's a simple answer that almost everyone uses. "I don't feel like it." I have commited to never saying those words again because it'll only hurt my game.

Self-Blame

Last season our team was 11-2 in the regular season. We had the best defense in the league and we were sure that we could win a championship. Our first game of the tournament was against a team that beat our rivals by 13 points. We knew it would be hard to beat them but we thought we could. When we went onto the court, we tried our best but our shots were off. Long story short... we lost by 1 point. After the game I was blaming everyone on the team. Our shooting guard wasn't scoring points. Our center had butter fingers the whole game and couldn't grab a rebound. Our coach called a time out when we had an open lay-up. In fact the only players on our team that i wasn't blaming was the people that sat on the bench the whole game, and myself. A few days later i found a video about Chris Paul. His firsts words on the video were "When going into a locker room after a loss, the first thing I think about is What could i have done better." Now, I hadn't known much about Chris Paul then because i had never seen the Hornets play. That night, the Hornets were playing the Cavaliers so i decided to watch. I immediately noticed how much harder Chris Paul was working than everyone in the gym. Even when he was on the bench he was cheering on his team. The next day something told me to watch the video again. I watched it and then it hit me. I had always blamed everyone except myself. That night I made a list of what I could have done better to make our team win instead of what the others could have done better. I let my man score five points on me. I missed a wide open shot. Many things that i could have done, i didn't. Now every time after a loss, I always think about what i could have done better instead of what could my team have done better.

Mow Around Obstacles

A couple of weeks ago, as i was mowing the lawn, i came to a spot with a lot of rocks and stumps. Usually i would just turn around there and let my Dad get it later. So i turned around and as i was mowing i began to think... "that's exactly what i do when training for basketball. Every time i hit an obstacle i stop and just go the other way." I turned the lawn mower around and mowed around the stumps and rocks and made it a lot easier for my dad. It may have taken a little bit more time on my part but my dad didn't have to do it. Now i have made a commitment to go through obstacles in my way when training and playing basketball.

Welcome

Hello, welcome to my blog. This is where i will write random thoughts and experiences about basketball. Some of my posts will relate to you entirely while others may have no relation to you at all. The point of this blog is give thoughts to other athletes in general. even though i only play basketball, a lot of my thoughts will relate to other athletes that play football, soccer and maybe even golf. Thanks for reading and feel free to email me at bballer478@gmail.com.