`Awakening' leads
to shooting clinics
By LEIGN ANN TIPTON, STAFF WRITER
(812) 464-7505 or ltipton@evansville.net
(Article from Evansville Courier & Press, June 29, 2001)
Tom Nordland could drill
jump shots and free throws
when he was a basketball
player for Roosevelt High
School in Minneapolis, Minn.
The team's offense was built
around his shooting as a
senior, and he averaged 27
points a game in leading the
basketball squad to a 28-0
season and a state
championship - the second
one for Roosevelt in Nordland's
high school career.
Thirty-three years later, in 1990, a graying
Nordland decided to shoot a few
baskets during a lunch break from his job at a computer company
in
California.
"After about 10 minutes of warming
up, I started to sink everything," said
Nordland, who was then 50 years old. "I thought, what did
I know 33 years
ago to allow this to happen?"
Nordland started watching shooters, reading
books on shooting and watching
how-to videos. What he noticed was that the coaching focused on
where feet
should be pointed, on "flicking" the wrist and releasing
the ball at the top of
the jump.
"That has very little to do with shooting,"
said Nordland, who will hold a
shooting camp consisting of two four-hour sessions at Evansville's
Memorial
High School on July 6. "Control over the flight of the basketball
- that's
everything. Most coaches spend too much time on the fundamentals
and too
little time on the flight of the ball."
Nordland's method of teaching shooting is
just the opposite. He doesn't fret
over players not being "squared up" to the basket. He
wants them to have a
high arch and use big muscles, like the legs and back, to push
the ball upward
and into the basket. The "wrist flick," according to
Nordland, uses the smaller
and less effective muscles of the fingers and wrist. Nordland
had learned those
things physically as a high school athlete. He said it showed
most in his
consistency - he hit 19 of 20 free throws in the state championship
game, a
record that still stands almost 44 years later.
"I figured something out in my youth
with hundreds of hours of practice
about how to control the flight of the ball and be repeatable,
even under
pressure," Nordland said. "I could do it then, but I
couldn't coach it. Eleven
years ago I had an awakening, a reloading of what I did in high
school."
The result has taken Nordland around the
country, teaching his method to
preschoolers and pros and everyone in between. He writes numerous
articles
on shooting and has a "Swish" shooting video available
for purchase.
One of Nordland's most prominent pupils
is former Indiana Pacers forward
Dale Davis, whose free throw shooting improved from 46.5 percent
to 68.5
percent after working with Nordland for two seasons. Davis is
now with the
Portland Trailblazers. Nordland has also worked with Adam Keefe,
forward
for the Golden State Warriors and formerly with the Utah Jazz,
and with
Mark Madsen, a Stanford All American and the first round pick
of the Los
Angeles Lakers in the 2000 NBA Draft.
A friend of Dave Hayden's informed the Memorial
High School boys'
basketball coach of Nordland's novel way of thinking about shooting.
Hayden
listened and absorbed.
"The technique makes a lot of sense,"
Hayden said. "You learn to shoot
with a lot of consistency and repeatability the way he teaches
it."
Hayden had some questions about the style,
and Nordland talked him through
them over the phone.
"Here I am, on the phone with my arm
up like I was going to shoot, going
through all the theatrics," Hayden said. "Tom was explaining
it, and
explaining it well."
Published: Friday, June 29, 2001 in the
Evansville Courier & Press
(c) Copyright 2001 Evansville Courier & Press
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As an aside, here is a testimonial Coach Hayden gave me a few months after my visit to Evansville:
"Tom, Here's a pretty good story for
you. We were playing some 3 on 3 in Ashland, Oregon several weeks
ago and, while we shot around for one of the games, I hit five
shots in a row with my eyes closed from about 15 feet. Then, when
we started the game, I immediately got open for a jumper at the
free throw line. I received the ball, sighted on the basket, SHUT
MY EYES, and let it fly--- swish!
"My sons, brother, and brother-in-law saw me shut my eyes
and stood in disbelief as the ball swished through the net. That
kind of shoots the theory of where to sight on the basket as you
shoot!"
-- D. Hayden, Evansville, Ind. (High school coach)