How One of NYC's Best Skills Trainers Drives His Players

by POINT 3 Alpha Mark Williams, Team Footprintz

There are no gimmicks involved in what we do at Team Footprintz.

We will not teach 30 ball tricks while you are jumping in the air on a trampoline. That’s not game related. Everything is based on 1) hard work and 2) repetition.

Hard Work vs. Work Hard

Every drill that we do requires a lot of hard work. We challenge the players, for example to make a certain amount of shots in a certain amount of time. Players need to get rid of the ball quickly.

Hard work is also about how often you work hard. We all now know what the 10,000-hour rule is. So if your goal is ‘ball is life,’ you need to be working seven days a week on your game!

We strive to have all our players come in every day of the week. It’s not cheap, but over the long haul if you believe in earning a college scholarship or playing professionally, it’s well worth the investment.

In all of our drills we have a defender, usually myself or our other top trainer Taliek Brown. We close out on their shots as if we were doing it in a game. So the lazy crossover that may work in the fifth grade won’t necessarily work in the eighth grade. As we are pro players, we want to apply more pressure on them than they would get in their own game.

Coming in seven days a week is not something we push on the player but something that they can drive themselves to do. We are available seven days a week.

Correct Reps vs. Bad Reps 

It’s boring doing the same thing 30 times. But that’s where the mastery comes in.

We will do a whole set on one dribble right pull-ups, then left, then to a double crossover. Whatever it is, we want to do it till the player is thinking: ‘why am I doing this again?’ Basically that means we are getting them to a point where they’ve already put in so much work that they are ready to execute the move in a game situation. 

We breakdown with the player on what they need to work on, then give them the correct form and attitude to do it. Only then do the reps come in.

(more to come next week from Team Footprintz!)