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Back during the football season I met up with Parker Friedrichsen in the parking lot at a tailgate party and wanted to know one thing: how much had he been practicing his gorgeous shot in the offseason.
“Four hundred shots a day,” he told me.
It was all I needed to hear. Practice your craft constantly and you’ll improve. Muscle memory is a must if you want to stick long range bombs. In a similar way, typing blogs like this with the zealous mentality that today could be the last one you’ll ever get to type spawns spellbindingly penetrating insights and lifts people to believe in things they otherwise wouldn’t.
This is where we are.
I know, I know, I know. The Parking Lot has been struggling all season with his shot when it was expected he would lift his marksmanship to another level in his second season. It’s been a dismaying disappointment that he hasn’t been sticking Js as often as we all would have hoped. Only making 32 percent of his shots; 25 percent from 3.
A confidence problem, maybe, or he’s just not getting enough time to get his shot off so he’s rushing it up and that’s impairing his accuracy. We all have rough slides. I once missed 46 of 52 shots heaved up in an eighth grade city title game with lifetime legacies on the line.
But I guarantee you it wasn’t his technique causing the enormity of errant misfirings. This guy’s shooting motion is marvelous, as mellifluous as a Crash Adams melody.
You could bring Parking Lot – in fact I would recommend it – to any basketball coaching clinic in the world and have him shoot and tell everyone listening the way he shoots is the way everyone should: simple motion, no frills, as natural as milk, follow through. Reach for the peach; Caitlin Clark-esque.
I told you last Fall I expected him to hit big shots this season, and now is the time when he has to make them which he did better in yesterday’s game against Southern Methodist University than in any other contest all season. Parking Lot stuck five of seven from the Parking Lot (3 balls) en route to 18 points. His best game of the season when his team needed it most because if they lost yesterday Bracketology brainiac Joey LaBrackets hobnobbed that Wake had to win yesterday to get off the bubble and be one of the last four teams selected for the March Madness tournament.
reat shooters come alive sooner or later. It’s just a question of when. Slump they might, but it never lasts. Kind of like bloggers for The Real Demon Deacon Fan Page; they disappear and are forgotten then reappear opportunistically when a storyline makes them look well-connected and prescient.
Down the stretch of this season there’s really only one thing we all need to know regarding Wake’s chances of making the Madness which it hasn’t achieved – very notably – during the tenure of coach Steve Forces. The one thing is whether Parking Lot keeps dropping bombs from the parking lot.
If he does, they’re in. If he cools off, they’re out. My abdomen tells me this kid got revivified yesterday seeing his shots tickle the nets and that he’ll use that experience to keep it going, and he will be the main reason Wake makes the tournament, shocks and enthralls the nation, and elevates Wake Forest to the Final Four where we will all stand in the parking lot with Parking Lot talking about how many more he’ll hit from the parking lot to lift the Deacs to the national championship over the most arrogant jerk coach in the world, UConn’s Danny Hurley.
With the net draped around his neck, we’ll chat with Parking Lot in the parking lot. And he’ll mention it was my meeting with him in the parking lot last Fall that inspired him to keep shooting 400 bombs a day even when they weren’t going down because I told him his shot is exquisite. That meet-up was, he will confirm, all the confidence he ultimately needed.
“It was Sportface who got me in the right headspace,” he will say. “He told me he believed in me, that my shot reminded him of Caitlin Clark’s. Coming from him, that means everything.”
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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