How to track your basketball shooting progress
If you shot 8/20 last week and 11/20 this week, you have not improved. You have three extra makes, which is well inside what randomness produces on its own.
Shooting is the most measurable skill in basketball and the most commonly mismeasured, because percentage looks like a fact and at low volume it behaves like a coin flip. Here's how to build a shooting test that actually detects improvement.
The two things that make shooting data useless
1. Small samples swing enormously
This is the whole problem. Over 20 attempts, a single hot or cold stretch of three shots moves your percentage by 15 points. A genuine improvement in shooting ability might be 3–5 percentage points over a couple of months. The noise is three to five times larger than the signal.
Rough guide to how much your percentage bounces purely by chance, for a true 40% shooter:
| Attempts | Typical swing from luck alone | Usable? |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | ±11 points | No |
| 50 | ±7 points | Barely |
| 100 | ±5 points | Yes, weekly |
| 400 (a month of 100s) | ±2.5 points | Yes — this detects real change |
The practical consequence: never judge a single session. One session is a data point, not a verdict. You need roughly a month of them aggregated before a 3-point improvement is distinguishable from luck.
2. Overall shooting percentage mixes things that aren't comparable
A session of layups, floaters, midranges and threes produces one blended number that means nothing. Shoot more layups and your percentage rises while your jumper rots. You have to split by spot, or you're measuring your shot selection instead of your shooting.
The test: five spots, 20 shots each
The protocol
- Pick five fixed spots and mark them. Tape, chalk, a crack in the floor — anything repeatable. Corner, wing, top of the key, opposite wing, opposite corner is a clean set. Same five, forever.
- 20 shots per spot, in the same order = 100 attempts. Takes about 15 minutes.
- Record makes per spot, not a single total. Five numbers.
- Same ball, same hoop, same rough time of day. Outdoor wind and a different rim height are different tests.
- Rebound the same way every time. Self-rebounding adds fatigue that a passer doesn't. Whichever you pick, keep it constant.
- Test before your main workout, not after.
Also worth tracking separately: tired shots
Game shots are taken tired, and fresh-shooting percentage overstates what you'll do in the fourth quarter. If you want that number, run a second identical 100 immediately after conditioning — but log it as its own exercise. Never blend fresh and fatigued into one average, or you'll never know which one moved.
The math
Then compare four-week blocks. Not sessions. Not weeks. Blocks.
The rule
With ~400 attempts per four-week block, a 3-point change is around the edge of meaningful and 5 points is solid. Below 3 points, you're reading noise.
If that feels discouraging, invert it: it means the guy who "lost his shot this week" almost certainly didn't. One bad session is statistically invisible. Knowing that is worth more than any drill.
The number almost nobody tracks: makes-to-misses by spot
Percentage compresses everything into 0–100 and makes small changes look small. A ratio stretches the same information out and makes movement easier to see on a graph:
That's one extra make — a 5-point percentage change, but a 29% jump in the ratio. Same underlying fact, far more visible trend line. Useful when you're trying to see whether a slow grind is actually moving.
What good progress looks like on paper
| Block | Corner | Wing | Top | Overall | Read |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1–4 | 42% | 36% | 38% | 39% | Baseline |
| Weeks 5–8 | 44% | 35% | 39% | 40% | +1 point — noise |
| Weeks 9–12 | 48% | 36% | 43% | 44% | +5 overall. Real — but look at the wing. |
The wing hasn't moved in twelve weeks. That's the entire argument for splitting by spot: the blended number says "shooting is improving," and the split says "your shooting is improving everywhere except the one spot you should be working on." You cannot see that in a single percentage.
Mistakes that hide progress
- Judging single sessions. The most common and most costly. Aggregate or don't bother.
- Shooting until you feel good, then stopping. This guarantees every session ends on a hot streak and makes your data systematically optimistic. Fixed attempts, not fixed feelings.
- Not marking your spots. Drifting two feet closer over a month is a free percentage boost that isn't real.
- Only logging good days. Log everything.
- Changing the test. A new spot set means a new baseline and a discarded history.
How I do this now
This is the exact problem I built Athlete Craft for. Tracking this properly means logging makes and attempts per spot and then doing the math across a month — which in practice means a spreadsheet you stop updating by week three.
Every workout app wants reps and weight. In Athlete Craft you build a preset with the inputs you need — for shooting that's makes + misses — and type your own exercise names, so "corner 3s" and "wing 3s" are separate tracked exercises with separate graphs. A View can divide makes by misses and show the average per interval, so the four-week-block comparison above builds itself while you just log sets.