Part 3 of our interview with Accelerate Basketball
This is our final part of our interview with Accelerate Basketball, an end to an unbelievably interesting interview, I hope you have enjoyed reading this little series as much as I enjoyed the interview. In this piece we talk about the opportunities for Kids training camps at Accelerate Basketball, special ball handling drills and the draft workout process.
James Plowright- JP Brandon Payne- BP Blake Bloeringer-BB
JP: To kind of touch a little off the NBA stuff, I was wonder if you wanted to talk a little bit about your kids camps.
BP: Sure, and I’m going to let Blake here talk about our kids camps, because he’s just as involved as I am and involved in our youth workouts.
BB: Alright James, do you have any questions, anything specific?
JP: These basketball academy’s are becoming more and more frequent, a lot of NBA players are hosting them now. Is Steph Curry hosting one for you?
BB: Yes, we coordinated that and hosted that, and it was very successful.
JP: Is it targeted to everyone? Or to targeting particular people who are particularly skilled, or are you just trying to get more people playing basketball?
BB: No its targeted to everyone, we even extended the age range down to our five year olds, breaking it up into 2 different sessions, and that way we could offer to those age groups because he does have a wide range of a fanbase, there are a lot of young kids who follow him and there’s people that have followed him all the way from Davidson from his performances in college all the way up to now being out in the west coast he’s increased that fanbase. We have a lot of young kids who wear his jerseys or his t-shirts in our facility even while he’s playing during the season. So we wanted to make sure we offered that to an extended age range and to as many people as possible.
BP: But James we are a year round training facility, and we handle players from all over the country to come here and train, and we’re looking to get into the international market [to get players] to come here and train, and the kids who go through our workouts in our youth programs they’re going through the exact same type of workouts that our pros do. It is paired down a little bit because the difficulity level that we do with Stephen is much much higher than what we can do with most. But the pace and the concept and the order of operations in how we put together our workouts is the exact same. So youth players are going through the same thing that Stephen Curry, Anthony Morrow, Antwan Jamison, Seth Curry; they’re getting the same experience. We’ve have players from all over the United States and we’ve had some International players. We want to help as many players as we possibly can. We’re looking into some other things that could extend our reach so our players can get ahold of some of our drills and can use Accelerate Basketball training program to help further their skills and further themselves an a athlete. Every month we have several hundred kids come through our program and we see the benefits of them getting better on a daily basis.
JP: One of the things you mentioned ball handing quite a few times and players come across the country to use your facilities. Could you touch more on that?
BP: Well our philosophy is pretty simple on this, the one thing that every single player on the floor has to do is handle the basketball. Ballhandling doesn’t mean your just handling the ball. Everything you do with the ball to us is ballhanding. We feel that every player on the floor has to improve their ballhandling to be effective. We have worked extremely hard to come up as many challenging ball handling drills using different technologies, different types of tools, incorporating strength into it. Ball handling when it boils down to it is really neuromuscular efficiency so we have to find different ways to challenge our players from a neuromuscular standpoint while their dribbling the ball so they can be as efficient with the ball as possible. In the NBA, you don’t have time to have a wasted dribble, you cannot take one extra dribble because that open shot becomes a contested shot, that open player becomes a covered player if you take that one extra dribble, and a lot of that is being able to process information and be able to make the ball move quickly just by being able to have your brain send signals to your hands quicker.
JP: I want you to get the phone number of Bismack Biyombo.
BP: Its funny because we were just talking about Biz this morning, but yeah I know Bismack has been in Charlotte working real hard with the new coaching staff so I hope you’ll see the benefits of that.
JP: I hope so too. And you know 5-on-5 I know sometimes the NBA doesn’t allow that, do you ever get scrimmages going on at Accelerate?
BP: You know, really in the offseason when these guys have played 82 games and sometimes even more than that with the teams that are good enough to go to the playoffs we try to limit as much as we can what we can “uncontrolled contact” and what uncontrolled contact is are things that can happen in 3-on-3 or 5-on-5 situation. The only contact I really like our guys to take in our workouts is contact from us using pads. We have padded mats, and big body pads, things like that. Here we’re actually controlling the contact. I do think they need to get some head to head work in prior to training camp, but you have to remember most of these guys go back to their city about three weeks prior to training camp and they’re in their facilities, they’re with their teammates, and that gives them ample opportunity to go up and down the floor, head to head before training camp. So some of these guys still play in pro-am leagues, which is a popular thing to do in the summer time, but when your body is your asset that’s worth millions of dollars, you want to make sure you’re taking all precautions while at the same time trying to get better in the offseason.
JP: In terms of the draft process, do you have many [players] come in pre-draft to get ready for individual workouts? How involved are you in that?
BP: That’s something that we would like to get more into, we tried a year ago and it was not as successful as I wanted it to be, and a lot of that had to do with just took the wrong guys. A big part of helping a player get better is you have to have players that of a like mindset of the trainers. If the trainer wants you to be better than you want to be, its not going to be a good working relationship, and I think that’s one thing we didn’t do a good job of last year; we didn’t do a good job of interviewing and finding out a lot about each player before we took them, so we took a year off from the pre-draft [involvement] this year and we’re going to get back heavy into that next year now that I think we have better handle on what type of kid we want to have in the program, and who we want to bring in and who we want to represent our name, and we who think we can help get better and make a difference before they go to the combine.
Related:
Interview with Accelerate Basketball – Part 1
Interview with Accelerate Basketball – Part 2
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