The Correlation

Recently, a number of my entries have been about basketball even though it's the summer time or it has been since June 21, three days ago. It's basketball camp time all across the USA which is where my topics come in. Every year since I don't know when, I've put on a free throw clinic for the camps I've worked, including the eleven I put on with my high school team in Tennessee. The first part of my presentation is a bit of advice on how coaches view players and how to better your chances of not getting cut; don't always be last in line, don't dribble or talk when the coach is speaking, being funny doesn't get you a uniform, etc. I also give some examples of great free throw shooters and poor ones. I talk about kids who have played for me and circumstances we saw on the free throw line. I mention Rick Barry who shot underhanded and was one of the great shooters of all time but no kid will shoot that way because they would be mocked. I talk about dropping rocks into Grandpa Chesshir's well and never missing. I always conclude with a teaching tool I learned from legendary coach Don Meyer on the six steps of shooting a free throw. Over the twenty years I've been here, I have done it at least one hundred times so a number of our long term campers could give it for me!

Every week of camp, I try to read some about free throws on the Internet just to keep from getting stale. This year, I read a New York Times article about free throw shooting over the years. Did you know that national free throw percentages in men's college basketball has remained unchanged since 1965 while almost every other stat or measurable score/time in sports has improved? Also, there is an across the board 10% drop off in players' free throw percentage between practice and games, undoubtedly do to fatigue and practice (and maybe shooting in a foreign gym as well). The one item which would surprise many fans from the article was that in 2009, only one team in the top twenty-five free throw percentage rankings also was ranked in the top twenty-five of the NCAA polls and that was North Carolina. The point was that there is no correlation, or at least very little, in being a great free throw shooting team and a winning on the court team. (The piece mentioned Memphis was 38-2 and lost in the 2008 NCAA finals despite being a horrible team from the line.) I discussed it with our boys' coach, Tyler Guidry. He thinks it's because the best teams have the elite athletes who play such good defense it makes it so difficult to score but these same players might not be the best free throw shooters. My thought, similar to Tyler's, is that the teams most likely to win at a high level are more likely to have excellent post players but many post players also shoot a very low free throw percentage. It's a discussion for another day but I do think a number of folks who casually follow college hoops would be shocked that good teams, at least from limited data, don't excel at the free throw stripe.

There have always been perceived correlations in our world including stories in the Bible. The Israelites believed you were rich because God loved you and poor because He didn't. The Pharisees were beloved by the common people and seen as right with God because they excelled  in fasting/giving/teaching/praying, which are all important in our walk. The problem was they wanted everyone to know that they were good at fasting/giving/teaching/praying- Jesus saved some of His harshest criticisms for these pillars of society. In one of His most powerful statements in the Gospels, Jesus speaks out in Matthew 7 against the perception that doing miracles alone will get one into heaven, despite what the folks in Jesus' teaching believed:
 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’
We're pretty big on correlation-speak in school. Study hard and you'll make good grades! It's good advice to hit the books but the outcomes don't always match the effort. Practice hard and you'll be a great player! Some of  the hardest working kids on the court I've ever coached struggled to compete due to physical limitations. We see Biblical characters rejoicing over the wrong things- Jesus told some missionaries to be glad their names are in heaven and not because demons submitted to them. We have to remember we are only righteous because of the blood of Jesus and not due to what the world perceives as righteous acts. Jesus says here in the Sermon on the Mount that obedience to the Father's will is paramount. I better make sure I know what that will is and then obey it. According to the Savior, that's a 100% correlation.

Applicable quote of the day:
The biggest thing is just routine. I think that's the biggest correlation between golfers and basketball players. 
Stephen Curry

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1
www.hawleybooks.com
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com