Improve Your Shooting Workouts with Coach Tony Miller & Jefferson Mason

This week Coach Mason got the chance to join Coach Tony Miller on his podcast, A Quick Timeout, in a special edition of "Coffee with Coaches." A Quick Timeout is a podcast show that features conversations with basketball coaches from around the country, focused on specific topics, designed to simply help #GrowTheGame.

This week Coach Mason and Coach Miller discuss and share tips for improving your players' skills this off season. To listen to the full conversation check out the video below!

Highlights

A Quick Timeout Podcast: How long should players work out in order to get optimal results?

Jefferson Mason: There’s a time when during a workout or practice where players will mentally turn off or their bodies will break down. You get beyond two hours for a practice session, and then you’re kind of pushing it. That situation is a little bit different from an individual training session. In practices, you’re not the main focus the entire time; your team is. But when you’re in an individual workout, keeping it within that 45 minute to hour range is a pretty good time frame for youth players. A lot of times towards the end of that training session, you’re working on skill development, they’re usually going to start getting frustrated.

As skills trainers and coaches, your goal is to help players understand what you want, but you’re never going to perfect a skill in one session. More than likely, a player is going to have to go off on their own, work on the skill on their own, then come back and get more feedback from you, the coach. So what I like to do is designate several things we’re going to focus on in a workout, give myself 15 to 20 minutes to thoroughly explain it, let the player go through the reps, make a few mistakes, and then we move on. Then I tell them, “Now it’s on you to go out on your own to perfect our skill.”



AQTO: A lot of players don’t always have access to a coach. How would advise that player on how to organize and plan their workout?

JM: Everyday you should have a different goal. One of the worst things to do is to go into a workout and not have a specific purpose. What that does is it holds players accountable. When you tell a player, “Shoot 6, 7, 8 shots,” that player is only working towards getting to that 8th shot. But when you tell players, “We’re going to make 4 or 6 or 7 shots,” you can see that mentally affects that player more because it’s holding them accountable to reach that goal while minimizing the overall number of reps.



AQTO: What makes the Dr. Dish so unique as a training device for players?

JM: There are a million shooting drills you can do with the Dr. Dish. But we’ve designed our machines to encompass all skill sets – agility, ball handling, conditioning, etc. Our machines are unique because they come with a cloud data base that holds over 200 drills – individual drills, small group drills, team drills from some of the best college coaches in the country. We’ve partnered with high level skills trainers along with the trainers we have at Dr. Dish. And within each of those drills, you’re going to get pro tips and teaching. So it’s the shooting machine plus everything that comes behind it.

We are so happy to have Coach Tony Miller as a part of our team! Be sure to check out other episodes from his podcast, A Quick Timeout as well as follow his twitter/social media account @tonywmiller.

Check out his Dr. Dish Basketball Drills here.