Plymouth Hoops School Goes High-Tech

It's one thing to have a coach tell a basketball player to put more arc on their jump shot.

It's quite another to have a computerized voice tell that same player that the shot they just launched was six degrees higher than optimal.

Meet Noah, a tracking system that allows players and coaches to measure progress toward perfection: launching every shot at a 45-degree angle, “landing” 11 inches behind the front of the rim.

Brian Ammann, director of the Minnesota School of Basketball, is such a big proponent of Noah that he not only installed the system in both of his school's locations — in Apple Valley and Plymouth — about four years ago, but is also a sales rep for the company.

“I've sold it to eight or 10 teams,” he said. “The Minnetonka girls have it, the Lakeville North girls have one, the Macalester men, the Shakopee girls.”

A typical Noah session involves a lone shooter putting up 25 shots. Noah tracks the arc, as well as how “deep” in the rim each shot winds up. After the session, the shooter can view a summary on a computer screen. Each shot is represented by an arc, color coded by where it hit the hoop: dark blue for short shots and dark red for long shots. So a shot chart that looks like a rainbow — broad and multi-colored— means the shooter has some work to do, while a “perfect” shot chart would consist of one green line at 45 degrees.

Sessions are graded based on consistency of shots, on a scale consisting of four levels in each of five categories. Builder I is the lowest rung on the ladder, and Master IV is the nearly unattainable top rank. According to the Noah website, no one has yet attained a Master IV grade.

Ammann said he's had just one shooter — one of the school's instructors — reach master level in his gyms. That instructor was former Faribault High School star Mitch Ohnstad, who scored more than 2,800 points in his high school career and went on to play college basketball at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo and the University of Minnesota.

“One of my instructors got to Master One, but only one in 5,000 (shooters) can get to Master One,” Ammann said.

The average NBA player scores Expert III, while the typical high school player is several notches lower on the scale, at Maker III.

Madison Guebert earned a spot on the Minnesota School of Basketball's “wall of fame” by achieving Expert III. Guebert and her twin brother Drew will both be freshmen at Eastview this fall, and have been using the system for about three years.

“When I first started, (my arc) was 41 to 53, and now mine's like 43 to 47,” Madison said.

Her brother had a little more work to do.

“When I first started I was all over the place,” Drew said. “(My range) was 39 to 55. Now it's 45 to 49, so it's more of a consistent range.”

Drew said it was “kind of weird” having a compute voice calling out the angle of every shot, but both twins say more of their shots are going in as a result.

“At the beginning I was making nine or 10 (out of 25) and now it's 20 out of 25.”

Ammann admits its impossible to quantify exactly how much credit should go to Noah for a shooter's improvement. But anecdotally, there is loads of evidence that it does help.

“We've got a girl from Shakopee who, when she started was (shooting) 60 degrees, and after 10 sessions we got her down to 47,” Ammann said. “She went from 8 of 25 free throws to 20 out of 25. That's an example of how much easier it is.”

In that regard, Noah flies in the face of traditional wisdom, which says the higher the angle, the better the chance of making the shot.

When you shoot with a high, high arc, you do have a bigger target, but it's a lot harder to control your shot, Ammann said.