Playing With Small Hands

I have relatively small hands which makes it difficult for me to maintain control of the ball when shooting.  Do you have any tips for helping players who have this problem?

Wilson Montague

Dear Wilson, 

With the way I coach it, the size of the hands is not that important.  You are not powering, guiding or stabilizing the shot with those smaller muscles.  I feel the job of the shooting hand is simply to cradle the ball and deliver it exactly in the line intended by the arm motion.  (I remember when I was practicing so much in my backyard in Minnesota when I was 14 and 15 years old that I could shoot well even in Winter with cotton gloves on.  The gloves were needed to keep my hands from getting the ball warm and then wet when it landed touched any snow.)

You need to have the fingers and thumb of the shooting hand spread wide apart to give you as stable a cradle for the ball as possible, and a little finger pad pressure helps to secure the ball more in the fingers.  As you go to shoot, the hand just keeps the ball cradled as long as it can and then relaxes totally and flops forward, completing the action.  It is critical that the hand be facing exactly in-line with the target the entire time, from the setting of the ball to the end of the release.  With a pushing action, the arm does all the Release work, powered by the legs and the middle body.