Basketball Passing - Hand Positioning

Arthur Jackson: Hi, I am Arthur Jackson from One on One Basketball. Today we are talking about passing the basketball and we are working on the chest pass. Specifically right now we are going to talk about hand placement and ball placement. Very important when you are throwing a chest pass that you want your hands on both sides of the ball so that they are equally spread with our thumbs behind the ball. A lot of times with younger kids you will see they will rely too much on one hand and they will rotate their hands over so that their hand is either in the middle or on the side and they are relying too much on that side. We want to have our hands on both sides with our thumbs behind the ball so that we can extend it through and be equally distributed with both hands. Next we want to make sure that we have our elbows behind the ball. That's where we are going to get our power, we don't want our elbows sticking out to the side. We want our elbows back so that when we extend, we can extend with our arms and get our elbows behind for momentum. Again a lot of times you will see kids will drop the ball down low and they are going to loose power this way, they will also expose the ball to the defense and make it harder to get your fingers and follow through. If they bring the ball up then it becomes a wrist motion and instead of pushing through the ball they flick the wrist and again we loose power on the target in getting the ball to the target. So make sure that your hands are on the both sides of the ball with your thumbs behind it, that you are not letting the ball go to either side. The ball wants to be straight back to the middle to our chest. We want to have it directly in the middle that way we can make sure that we are using both hands and when we follow through, we are going to follow through equally with both sides of the thumb and next we are going to talk about our actual motion in throwing the chest pass in basketball.