Lacrosse - Shooting Skills

Andy Corno: Hi! My name is Andy Corno with Leader's Lacrosse Camps, Clinics and Private Lessons, here to show you the game of lacrosse.

Right now, we are going to show you how to shoot in lacrosse.

First and foremost, all your shooting motion is very similar to your passing motion in lacrosse. The biggest difference is what you're doing with your feet and the rest of your body. When you shoot, you want to make sure that your feet are angled sideways towards the goal. When we take our step, you want to make sure that your step is towards the goal, don't take a step away from the goal when you shoot.

As we work our way up our body, for a straight shooting motion, we want to make sure that our hips open up when we shoot. You don't generate much power, if you just step and fire at the net. Make sure that you step, open up your hips before your hands and arms and stick comes through, your lacrosse stick is going to be the last thing that comes through. Practice this motion on your own.

Feet sideways, stepping, opening up the hips, feet sideways, stepping, opening up the hips and keeping your lacrosse stick back behind your head. Again, sticks back behind our head, take a step open up our hips, keeping the stick back behind, arms away from our body. As we work more up our body, make sure that our arms are far and away and behind.

So, you can generate the most power off your shot by having your hands very far back. Also, how we hold the lacrosse stick, it's the same way as when we pass even maybe a little lower with our top hand. When we passed before, we had it just about in the middle, bring it down just a little bit when we shoot.

When you go to shoot in lacrosse, it's very important to have your arms out and back away from your body. You don't want to have your arms in, we call these alligator arms. Again, feet sideways, step, open up our hips, keeping our stick back. The last thing is a push, pull motion between our top hand and our bottom hand. Pulling down on that bottom hand, and pushing and snapping over on the top hand.

To help you with that top hand snap, which is the last thing that we do when we shoot, you can practice throwing and catching with one hand. This will help strengthen your top hand, just like that. Now, that we have gone from our feet, all the way to our hand, we are ready to take a few lacrosse shots.

You don't want to get enamored with shooting the lacrosse ball at the top part of the net. When you practice on your own, you want to shoot for low net and hips and practice taking bounce shots. Much better chance that the bounce shots are going to go in and shooting the lacrosse ball high and not near the top of the net.

Also, you want to make sure that you always practice lacrosse shooting overhand, to three quarters. That way, your shots are going to be accurate and on cage. Never practice shooting the ball side arm you will miss the cage every time. Just to demonstrate few shots, notice I finish with all my momentum going towards the cage, dragging my back foot along the ground, just like a golfer, finishing going towards the cage. Notice that my feet are sideways and set, and I am ready to receive the pass before I shoot, I don't have them square towards the cage, sideways sticks out, towards the goal. Those are the fundamentals for shooting in the game of lacrosse.