Shooting a free throw is a science

Excluding Marcus Paige, Carolina has shot close to 50 percent from the charity stripe this season. That is bad enough to lose to undermanned teams like Belmont and Alabama-Birmingham between unforgettable wins over the best teams in the country. If you believe the head coach, the Heels' struggle at the line is the players' fault.

"I'm tired of talking about free throws," Williams said after last night's loss to Texas. "You've got to be tough enough to step up and make the dadgum thing or go play soccer."

I love Roy Williams, but I don't agree with his statement that making free throws is all about toughness. Making a free throw is mostly physical and only partly mental.

My authority on this subject is limited since I haven't shot a competitive free throw since my senior year of high school in 2002. But in my early high school days I took lessons from a private shooting coach, and shooting a free throw was one of the most important lessons I learned. I feel like I have to explain why I think the Heels stink at the stripe because nobody else seems to share my opinion.

To consistently make free throws, a player must minimize his movement. This can mean slightly different things to different players, but the basics are always the same. The shooter should slightly bend his knees with the ball near his midsection and pause. Then he should lift the ball to his shooting pocket, which is slightly above and in front of his forehead. Finally, the player should extend his knees and shooting arm.

This is a slight simplification. For instance, a player could struggle with slow rotation because he is palming the ball instead of correctly placing it on his fingertips. He might also have off-center rotation as a result of poor follow through or hand placement. But the striking thing to me is that some of Carolina's most talented players don't seem to demonstrate my aforementioned simplification.

I know our numbers stink, but you don't have to show me the number 59.6 for me to know that most of our players will miss half of their attempts. We have guys with shooting pockets near the backs of their heads. We have guys who appear to ball fake before they raise the ball to their shooting pocket. Sometimes I think I'm watching a friend play Just Dance 3 instead of watching a Tar Heel shoot a free throw.

As a passionate alumnus with little access to the team, I am left to wonder why our players look so inept at the line before the ball clangs off the back of the rim (if we're lucky). I can only guess that the coaching staff wants each player to shoot the ball in a way that is most comfortable to him. You can go to a middle school basketball game to understand why that philosophy doesn't work: shooting a free throw is a science, not an art. Very few players, even very few talented players, instinctively know how to shoot a basketball with optimal accuracy. Shooting a free throw is a skill that has to be taught and learned.

I'm sure the Heels shoot free throws at practice. But if some of them shoot free throws at practice with the same form they use in games, I think they are wasting their time.

In Roy's defense, only one of my team coaches ever offered any advice on my shooting form. The rest of them only had us shoot free throws in practice. Understanding the nuts and bolts of an effective stroke is something completely separate from coaching five players to operate on the court like the fingers on a hand. I know Williams loves and excels at the latter, but I wonder whether his players get effective instruction on the former.

They should.

Oh, Christmas tree

This morning my wife, Melissa, called me at home on her way to work.

"I saw a free artificial Christmas tree on the curb," she said. "Could you get it?"

"Sure," I replied. We had never had a Christmas tree. Living in our first home was a great reason to finally upgrade our Christmas.

"You should put it in your car," she continued. "We can figure out what to do with it later."

This seemed odd since I figured we would put the thing together in our house and put gifts underneath it. I said goodbye without asking for an explanation since I wanted to be the first to get to that free Christmas tree. Curbside merchandise does not last long in West Asheville.

I was in such a rush that I barely covered my boxers and T-shirt with a pair of blue jeans. I jogged to my car in the 22-degree chill, scraped a bit of ice off the driver's side of a completely frozen windshield and drove the half block to the location my wife had described.

Sitting next to a large Rubbermaid tub and on top of an enormous red bag overflowing with green branches was a pizza box with a handwritten message: Free 10-foot Christmas tree. Happy holidays.

Then I understood that the tree was much too large to fit in our person-sized house. Melissa's intention was lost on me, but I had no time to think since my brain was approaching a freezing temperature. Besides, we would figure it out later.

I quickly loaded the Rubbermaid tub into the trunk of the car. I couldn't lift the red bag because of both its girth and weight, so I grabbed bunches of branches and chucked them into the backseat of my Toyota Corolla. I'd neglected to bring gloves on this half-block journey, so the combination of the cold and the prickly branches quickly numbed my hands. A few minutes later, the remaining branches had overtaken the backseat and console. I tossed the few ornaments into the passenger seat and carefully drove back to our driveway with no rear view.

The sign said 10 ft. I packed it in my car anyway, I proudly wrote to Melissa.

No. Put it back :), she replied.

I had never been so delighted to see an emoticon. Melissa followed up with a phone call to say that yes, she had seen the sign, but no, she did not read the most important part of it. She apologized, but she didn't need to. I got a blog post out of it.

Please get in touch with me before my afternoon trip to Goodwill if you are a department-store owner or giant looking to decorate for the holiday season.

Winnie

On Oct. 27 my wife, Melissa, and I adopted Winnie, a 4-year-old yellow Labrador. Melissa had grown up with a Labrador that lived to be 17 years old, an extremely long life for the breed. I, in contrast, had never had a pet in my life. I went from being a boy who desperately wanted a dog to a man with no particular affinity to any dog or the idea of getting one. In hindsight, it was a sad regression.

Weeks earlier Melissa found an advertisement for Winnie on Petfinder, so we went to the rescue shelter that was vetting her prospective new families. An employee told us that Winnie's adoption was already pending. A little heartbroken, we looked at the other dogs in the shelter.

"I don't think our dog is here," she said. She was right. We went home and told our families the bad news about Winnie, and everyone was sad that somebody swooped in before us. Even though the shelter had taught me that meeting a dog was the most important factor in adopting, Winnie's Petfinder ad had hooked me. I wanted Winnie, and so did Melissa.

Winnie's advertisement resurfaced a couple weeks later. The pending adoption had fallen through because Winnie "couldn't go on a walk without a leash." Our standards were lower and lawful.

We met Winnie for the first time in a play yard at the shelter, and we loved her. We also hit it off with Winnie's owner, who was a great mom to Winnie and her eight-year-old boy. Winnie's family had recently split and could no longer give her the time and attention she needed. We set the adoption date for a week later so the family could say goodbye. We left excited but slightly nervous. We felt too lucky.

We set up another meeting in the middle of the week to demonstrate our commitment and to see our new girl again. As we were all about to leave because of the chilly weather, I realized I had left behind my flying disc. When I ran back to grab it, Winnie ran by my side. I kept running after I grabbed it to see if she would continue to follow me, and she did. I was proud of that moment. Winnie knew I was her friend.

Winnie's adoption day went as expected. We signed a few papers. Winnie's first mom held off her tears until she got in her car to drive away. Winnie initially refused to get a treat we had laid in our car. She patiently sat on the gravel as she tried to work things out in her furrowed head, so we sat with her for awhile. She eventually got in the car. I sat in the back seat near a quiet Winnie while Melissa drove us home.

The days that followed introduced us to everything about Winnie that we couldn't gather in our two previous meetings. She was a 60-pound lap dog if we sat on the floor. She knew how to sit, wait, and lie on her stomach. She destroyed indestructible toys and once ate a foot-long bone in 30 minutes, but she had a perfect sense of what was hers to chew and what was ours to leave alone. She preferred grumbling to barking when she needed something. She was shy if we touched her on the top of her head but affectionate if we rubbed under her neck or on her stomach. She was so frightened of our neighbor's stone pig that we had to change our walking route. We accidentally discovered that she knew the word "cat" when she looked out all the windows of our house like a helpless guard watching a prison break.

We fell more in love with her as weeks went by. We even loved her when she whined at 4 a.m. to protest her closed crate. She was patient with us while we learned to make her crate more comfortable and open and to trust her to be about the house while we were away. We were patient with her after she ate four whole bananas, a sock and a sponge. (The bananas and the sponge exited the front end, but the sock shot out of her rear like a cannonball. We are now much more responsible about putting things away.) The three of us negotiated these understandings until we felt like a family that naturally got along.

On the Thursday morning before Thanksgiving, Winnie was not waiting outside our bedroom door as usual. I walked to the front room and found her on her daybed. She slowly followed me back to the kitchen to watch me pour her breakfast, but she didn't eat much of it. A minute later, she laid on the floor and began to tremble.

Melissa and I took her to the vet. By midday we heard the bad news: Winnie had a 105-degree fever and, much worse, a dangerously low white-blood-cell count. She needed to be hospitalized at an internal medicine inpatient facility that couldn't admit her until 9:30 the next morning. We took her home that night expecting her fever to hover around an improved 103 degrees, but she began to tremble again. We followed the vet's instructions, wrapping her in cold towels and pointing a fan at her. It didn't help. She quickly became unresponsive.

Melissa and I agreed that our job was to keep her alive for ten more hours so she could get the hospital care she needed. We carried, drove and carried her again to the nearby emergency room. Her fever had climbed to 106 before they gave her fluids and determined she had no digestive obstruction. We were relieved to have her somewhere safe overnight.

Melissa took her to the hospital the next morning and told me that Winnie seemed more spirited. We both knew the intravenous fluids had only temporarily revived her, so her outcome was still uncertain. The various veterinarians we had seen led us to believe that Winnie was suffering from a viral infection or cancer. The hospital allowed visitors for an hour each morning, so we planned to see Winnie on Saturday and Sunday. We didn't think beyond Sunday because the doctor told Melissa that Winnie needed to improve within 48 hours to make it.

I was necessarily optimistic until that Friday night. I didn't want to be in our house because every part of it reminded me of her. We hated looking at her unattended things, but we also couldn't bear the thought of putting them away. Winnie had followed us everywhere we walked, so the simple act of moving from one room to another reminded us that our girl was missing. We watched a sitcom on Netflix, but I could not pay attention to anything.

I sent a text message to my family: She is in the best place she can be. She deserves to meet everyone.

Saturday morning we heard our first piece of good news: Winnie's white blood cells had increased in number. The doctor said she wasn't "out of the woods," but she was going in the right direction. Winnie was happy to see us but quickly became lethargic, so we got a lot of kisses on Saturday morning. We left feeling better.

Winnie giving me a kiss

Sunday brought more good news. Winnie's white blood cells had returned to a normal level. The pattern of fluctuation in her blood counts allowed the doctors to eliminate cancer as a possibility. The new tentative diagnosis was either a viral infection or a rare bone marrow-suppression reaction to Panacur, a parasite medication she had taken weeks earlier for the first time.

Winnie at the hospital

Sunday morning Winnie seemed to be back to normal. She wanted to play for our whole visit. We joked that we should ask the doctors to knock back her white blood cells so we could get all the affection we had received the day before. I was told to return the following afternoon to bring Winnie home, and I did.

We hosted Thanksgiving for family and friends three days later. Winnie was the miracle of the season and received probably more attention than she was ready for. She got some new toys, a new winter jacket and some tasty things to nibble, but she still insisted on sneaking some green bean casserole. That's my girl.

Today we returned to the stone pig for the first time in a month. She wasn't scared anymore. I wasn't surprised.

Winnie befriends her old rival

We are thankful for our growing family this holiday season. Our girl came home.

Introduction

If Illinois is among the states with a feverish high school basketball culture, then the Waukegan High School gymnasium is the shrine of American high school basketball. It is an old, free-standing hotbox of noise with permanent rows of benches on all four sides of the court. Before each game, the lights extinguish to blackness except for one spotlight on ROTC students presenting the colors for a stirring vocal rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner. In this community a high school basketball game was and remains a ritual of respect. Luckily, the Dawghouse was consistently home to the third and fourth rounds of the IHSA playoffs so that players and fans from neighboring communities could experience the magic. I was one of them.

The status of the Dawghouse is absolute, but questioning Illinois basketball seems fair since neighboring Indiana has garnered most of the attention with the classic 1986 film Hoosiers.

When I was only 2, America learned that rural Indiana basketball fans drove in headlight-illuminated caravans through cornfields to wherever the local school was playing that Friday night. The coaches won enough or faced town-hall meetings regarding their employment. The gyms were small but loud even minutes before the tip. And every farm household, of course, hung a basketball hoop on a barn or silo. They didn’t need to pour concrete around the goal since frequent play killed the grass and compressed the dirt into a suitable half court.

High school basketball wasn’t like that for me. My backyard court was concrete, and the hoop was attached to a pole that served no agrarian purpose. My suburban alma mater’s following rose and fell with the performance of the team. I played for winning freshman and sophomore teams while the varsity team struggled to win and attract enough of a crowd to fill half the gymnasium. By the time I was old and barely good enough to play varsity myself, we were competing for conference championships and earning the top seed for the Illinois High School Association playoffs, the original March Madness. The gym was bursting at the seams, and it had almost nothing to do with me.

The most important thing to know about my high school basketball career is that it was unlikely to have happened. In my college and adult years, I discovered my natural preference for games that did not involve breaking a sweat. Poker, backgammon and chess have occupied my attention since I left Libertyville High School in 2002. My coaches would be sad to know that their game did not stick with me, but four years of play ain’t bad for a beer-brewing chess player. Competitive basketball is a grueling, body wearing thing. At times I needed physical therapy to put shoes on my feet.

What has stuck with me is the spirit of competition, the thrilling feeling of giving my best effort and being met in the middle with an equal effort working against me. That experience triggers something great in us no matter what the medium might be. In my lazy man games, I win some and lose some. In more organized competition, the end result is always disappointment with the exception of one champion.

My top-seeded basketball team never made it to the Dawghouse. An eight seed outplayed us for it. You might think it would kill me to replay our final game and opportunity in my head, but it doesn’t. I cried in our empty bleachers in the same spot I watched games as a kid until a cheerleading friend consoled me onto my feet. I walked away from playing the game forever without regrets.

I knew I was lucky to have played basketball for Libertyville. I think I did it because I witnessed a 17-year-old redhead try to hit what could be the Dagger in the Dawghouse in March 1994. Eight years later I walked into my varsity locker room and found my teammates watching the game on a fuzzy television screen. Many of them, like me, were basketball players because of that moment in time. I sat on the bench in front of our lockers and felt like I was 10 years old again, wanting to have faith in a basketball floating through the air. Back in 1994 it seemed that nothing else mattered. In a way, nothing else did.

I'll never forget that. I even have the tape of that. I watch it every once in awhile. That was unbelievable. Oh, my gosh. And against Libertyville, which is my alma mater. That was the most memorable game. 

~Jim Ackley, 1930-2012, scorekeeper for Mundelein High School boys basketball for 50 years, when asked weeks before his passing which game he remembered the best

The Pancake Batters try to get cooking

The Chapel Hill News published a much abridged copy of this post on May 29, 2013.

In a late winter morning my phone buzzed with an ominous reminder: Don’t forget to register for the Chapel Hill softball league.

I love softball, but my team’s inaugural 2012 season was filled with errors, injuries, 14 losses and only two wins. We were bad enough that The Chapel Hill News published a series of columns in which I described the stooges who were George’s Pitches and the Pancake Batters. My phone was laughing at me.

Later that same day I ran into our catcher Ben and told him about my reminder.

“I know what we need this season,” he said. I expected him to say hitting, fielding, athleticism, awareness or some daunting combination of these, but he didn’t. “We need new uniforms.”

I quietly disagreed with his prioritization of last season’s $3 blank green shirts.

Within weeks, most of my teammates had recommitted to another season. We filled the open spots with a pitcher who promised to hit a few homers and bring along his uncle, a restaurateur who could go to the opposite field with power, and a nimble outfielder. On paper we looked much better.

As the season approached, I fired myself as manager because of our dismal first season and hired Ben. With his leadership, new uniforms were on their way along with a better, shorter name: the Pancake Batters.

We opened the season against Sutton’s FDH, one of 2012’s best teams. And you know what? We won.

Our veterans were elated, and our rookies said our expectations were too low. I could feel that same giddy confidence as when I saw that I was the youngest player by at least a decade at the 2012 preseason coaches meeting. How could we not win against much older men? How could we not keep on winning if we had upset Sutton’s on opening night?

I’ll tell you how. By losing many consecutive games.

In the next game we stormed back from a six-run deficit to tie newcomer Vinny’s in the last inning. I came to the plate with two outs and the winning run on third. I flew out to left-center field, and we lost in extra innings. Shortly after we lost another game in extra innings, and then we blew a five-run lead in the last inning while tempers flared.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, our most valuable player, our rookie pitcher, suddenly came down with a case of gout and missed a game.

“He said he would be back Monday,” Ben said, “but I think gout can put you out for life. We’ll see.”

Being the only other player willing to loft a softball from 50 feet away to men armed with metal bats, I proceeded to walk what seemed like a dozen hitters in three innings before Ben gave me the hook.

Our second baseman took over until he took a line drive to the sternum and went home. Ben had no choice but to put me, perhaps the worst option, back on the mound. I walked their lineup until the game ended by the mercy rule.

Before long we were 1-6 despite our pitcher’s return, so I figured it was time to write another column for The Chapel Hill News about being a loser.

They sent a photographer to shoot our rematch with Vinny’s, and our guys must have thought he was from Sports Illustrated because we put up nine runs in one inning. Minutes later an umpire ejected an opposing player after some sort of outburst.

Some guys just can’t handle losing to the Pancake Batters.

New uniforms at the spring game

I missed Carolina's spring game this weekend because I was out of town. The event did not produce much football news besides solid performances from freshman backup quarterback Mitch Trubisky, Ohio's top recruit, and early enrollee tailback Khris Francis.

The biggest news was the new uniform unveiling, which turned a football team of grown men into sugared up 5-year-old boys at Chuck E. Cheese's or, to be perhaps more accurate, 8-year-old girls at a Justin Bieber concert.

I wish I could get that excited about getting dressed for work in the morning. I do have some nice pants.

My reactions to Carolina's 2013 football schedule

Carolina released its 2013 football schedule today. Here are my immediate reactions.

• We will play at South Carolina to kick off the college football season on Thursday, Aug. 29. I forgot!
• No I didn't.
• I thought we might play Virginia Tech, Virginia and NC State this year, and I was right. I have a weirder feeling that we will beat them all.
• Again.
• Didn't the Big Ten ban FCS games? I wish the ACC would do that so we could beat South Carolina four times each year.
• Will the Tar Pit chant "not our rival" to Old Dominion?
• Nope. Again, schedule South Carolina many, many times.
• The Duke game moved back to Thanksgiving weekend, where it belongs this year more than ever.
• Carolina will play its second Thursday night home game in history against Miami. This time Charlie Brown won't play. No word on Lucy. Anyone who complained about parking for the Florida State game should get a free ticket to this game, go, have a great time and keep his mouth shut. Football is fun. Parking is always a hassle when you're having fun.
• Including two bye weeks in a schedule is disrespectful to fans. To protest, I will boycott college football. On the bye weeks.
• See you in Columbia.

This recent training video is courtesy of GoHeels.com. I like the Farmer Fred-like coach.