I was all set to write a blog post on an entirely different topic today.  An interview with an orthopedic expert I’ve been waiting to share, but then I read something in Sunday’s paper that got me on a different mindset.

On Saturday, OSU played a basketball game against some team willing to get crushed and receive a nice paycheck.  Shannon Scott, a starting guard on the team, made a high number of three pointers in the game.  Last year he was the worst shooter on the team out of the players that logged serious minutes.

Scott told Coach Matta he took 400 shots one day and then said, “I’ve never done that before.”

What?  You’re a junior at a high level division one basketball program, a team that made it to the Final Four two years ago, a game away from the Final Four last year, and not once have you taken 400 shots in one day??

No wonder you are such a horrible shot.

Now Matta is making him take 100 three point shots each day when practice ends.  As a Buckeye fan, I hope it pays off for him.  As a sport performance coach, I think it is an indictment of today’s athlete and really not knowing what hard work is.

We hear stories of Jerry Rice’s work ethic and the grueling workouts he puts his body through.  Then Michael Jordan and how great a practice player he was.  I naturally assume that if these are some of the greatest athletes to ever play their respective sports and they’re putting in all this work, then the other guys who aren’t as great are putting in that much more work just to be respectable.

Obviously not.

Being a great athlete will only get you so far.  Maybe you will be tough at the high school level, then fizzle in college.   I’ve worked with a few athletes that I felt were really resting on their high school accolades and not addressing the areas that were weaknesses.  Because they were so much better than their competition, they were basically ignoring flaws in their game.

It caught up to them in college and their careers just didn’t turn out the way they anticipated.  Who knows what would have happened if they had worked a lot harder on their flaws while dominating at the high school level.  Maybe they would have been more equipped to handle the collegiate game.  Maybe not.  We’ll never know.

I’ve also seen athletes excel in college and not work out in the pros.  There are a slew of basketball players in Columbus that play professionally overseas.  Rightly or wrongly, they feel their game is good enough that they can play pickup ball in the offseason alone and walk into training camp and play well during the season.  They don’t feel, or rather have accepted, that their skill set won’t make the pros so it isn’t worth putting in all that extra work to improve their game when they know overseas ball is all the higher they will be.

Maybe they’re right and maybe they’re wrong, but wouldn’t you want to continue to better yourself to find out?

When I was in seventh grade, my dad made a notebook filled with daily basketball drills to do each day.  When I completed a drill, I would check it off and move to the next drill.  Do this daily and I would be a better ball player he said.

I just didn’t get it.

I did it sometimes, but it seemed lying on my couch watching tv was more important than shooting hoops in the middle of the day underneath the hot sun.  Consequently, I was a decent basketball player, a nice shot, but couldn’t dribble to save my life or really take the ball to the hole.  Maybe if I had done more of those things during the summer, those flaws in my game would have been strengths.

It’s not rocket science.

Most young athletes have aspirations of reaching high levels, yet don’t understand what to do to get there.  I think it is simple.  You aren’t great by any means as an athlete yet.  Do what you need to do to get better at the requisite skill set of your sport.

Do you need to take 50 swings in the batting cage or off a tee daily?  Do you need to do dribble drills all the time?  Do you need to improve your speed and lateral quickness? Do you need to juggle a soccer ball daily?

Identify the needed skills.  Assess your abilities with all of them.  Improve your weaknesses and enhance your strengths.  What are you doing on a daily basis to make yourself a better athlete for your sport?  If you can give a quality answer to that question, then maybe you are putting some work in your quest to be a great athlete.