ABSTRACT
Playing basketball successfully requires many skills, such as dribbling and passing (either stationary or while running), jumping and rebounding, and defending. One of the most important skills is shooting as this is the only way to actually score points. The long-distance jump shot, and most notably the three-point shot, have become more and more important over the last few decades. Achieving a jump shot in basketball is an amazing accomplishment. Unlike in other far-aiming tasks (e.g. rifle shooting, pistol shooting, basketball free throw shooting, billiards) the body is in full motion and the distance to the target is never exactly the same from one shot to the next. The player is required to display multi-dimensional attention, simultaneously computing data on fast-moving fellow players and opponents as well as variables unique to each shot, before releasing an accurate shot (Oudejans et al., 2002; Oudejans et al., 2005; Ripoll et al., 1986). Even more so, this difficult task has to be done in a very short time-window, following from the simple fact that the jump provides only limited time to make the shot before a traveling violation is made. How do expert shooters do that? When and for how long should a player look at the rim for an optimal shot? And the main question in this chapter: How can a player be trained to do this?
