Author's Note: Today you are going to be reading a creative piece. I decided to write this because I was inspired by her talent with a basketball. Make sure to pay attention to how they work to get better.
Congratulations Mackenzie Schill, you have just have been accepted
to the WNBA, read a sheet of paper from the Tulsa Shock. When she opened this
letter she was so happy that she fainted, in other words gravity pulled her
down to the ground. When Mackenzie came to, she knew that she was going to
really have to work her butt of to play.
It was her first day playing with Tulsa Shock. She felt like she
had to use a lot of speed in order to keep up with the other players. They did
a lot of drills involving momentum, after a while of those drills they got into
shooting. A lot of taller stronger people aren’t as good at shooting as guards,
you could tell because the taller people had to force the ball to get the ball
to the hoop. Now Mackenzie is a guard so shooting was one of her specialties.
After they worked on their shooting skills, they helped the
centers work on their moves. They had little girls guard the big girls so that
if they had a mismatch they would have the advantage. The posts also practiced
going up against girls that were the same size as each other, so that they
could improve their moves and be able to beat anyone under the hoop.
For the next part of the girls practice they worked on
acceleration. They had to learn how to speed up and beat their defender down
the court. They practiced this by doing suicides. Suicides are sprints running
from the baseline to the free-throw line back to the baseline to the half-court
line back to the baseline then down to the opposite free-throw line back to the
baseline, then to the other baseline and back. This helped with acceleration
because you have to work on stopping and then starting up and regaining your
speed.
Since the girls were already working so hard, their coach decided
to make them push them a little bit harder. The team was pretty fast with their
feet, but their coach wanted to make them even better. She wanted to make them
do defensive slides, which are where you slide from one lane line to the other
and you go for as long as your coach tells you to. It kills your legs, after
you do them for about a minute, your legs start burning. I can relate, since I
have had to do them a lot in my career.
The coach finally decided to lighten up on the girls since they
were working really hard. Their coach wanted them to do free-throws while their
legs were tired, so it would prepare them for tough games. After shooting about
20 free-throws each practice was over. Mackenzie knew that she was going to
have to work her butt off for the rest of the season, seeing as this was her
first practice. She knew that it would get harder as the season went on.
