It’s been five years since basketball was changed forever in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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In the 2012-13 season, the “Splash Brothers” term was born, as Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson led the Golden State Warriors back to the playoffs and Curry broke the NBA regular-season 3-point record. By now, Curry’s topped that mark three times over, the Warriors have been back to the playoffs every year and the Finals for three straight years.
Which is why it’s funny for St. Joseph Notre Dame (Alameda) High School girls head coach Shawn Hipol to think about how the Warriors are viewed by his team, compared to when he was growing up.
“They don’t know how bad the Warriors were 10 or 12 years ago,” Hipol said. “They just see what they see now.”
But the current Warriors are considered to be the start of the 3-point revolution, with teams everywhere shooting from deep more and more. And for Hipol, who’s in his fourth season leading St. Joseph Notre Dame, going from making 78 3-pointers in his first season to already making more than 200 this year before the playoffs has been key to his program’s ascension.
“If you do it at a high level, I think it’s extremely hard to guard, more so than having a dominant post player,” said Hipol. “If you get four or five kids out there that can dribble-drive and shoot and do those types of things, I think you’re extremely hard to guard, compared to having a 6-3 post player down on the block. We don’t get much size at St. Joe’s, being a smaller school, and it kind of fits to the type of kids we get at our school.”
But Hipol quickly points out that there’s a team that’s been shooting 3-pointers for much longer than the Warriors in the Bay Area. It’s why Pinewood (Los Altos Hills) School head coach Doc Scheppler had shirts made up that said, “We Don’t Play Like the Warriors, the Warriors Play Like Us.”
Scheppler remembers watching the 1986-87 Rick Pitino-led Providence Friars, who combined full-court pressure defense and Billy Donovan, Ernie Lewis and Delray Brooks each averaging more than two 3-pointers per game to make a run to the Final Four as a six seed.
“My whole deal, right then, was, ‘Okay, this is a fun way to play. This is cool,’” Scheppler said. “I think it’s just fun to play that style. We started shooting — not a lot of threes, but we started emphasizing that offensively. It worked out pretty well.”
Scheppler had been using it while coaching high school boys, but when his daughter Kacey was about to start high school, he got an offer to be her coach at Pinewood and brought the 3-point shooting over to the girls’ side.
It worked instantly, with Kacey making 395 shots from deep in her career (a state record at the time) and it has ever since, with the Panthers winning their league title in all but two years since Scheppler took over, as well as 13 section titles and six state championships.
“It’s now just becoming popular in the general basketball culture that this way of playing is fun to play,” Scheppler said.
Despite all of the success, the renowned shooting coach who’s been featured by Sports Illustrated still feels that people underestimate just how much work goes into shooting the way Pinewood does.
“When Mark Jackson says, ‘Steph Curry is ruining basketball,’ I think he meant that people don’t know the work it takes to be a great shooter.,” Scheppler said. “The discipline it takes to be a great shooter — to concentrate on perfect mechanics and getting a lot of repetitions in situations where you’re practicing all the shots you’re going to take and make when you play.”
The level of work needed is something Sami Field-Polisso understands better than almost anyone. Now in her first season as head coach at nearby Saint Francis (Mountain View) High School, Field-Polisso was a key part of Scheppler’s back-to-back state champions in 2005-06 and made 238 3-pointers in her high school career. She’s seen the impact at the middle school-level, and even some at the elementary school-level.
“Who doesn’t want to be Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, right? I think that’s impacted the game down to even NJB at third or fourth grade,” Field-Polisso said. “It seems like we skip to, ‘Alright, let’s work on your 3-pointer.’
“And even kids now , I’ll laugh when we start practice, we’ll start with a shot progression. And it’s like, ‘No, you’re not going to walk into the gym and start shooting threes. You’ve got to warm up your shot.’”
But with practice comes perfection, as Field-Polisso’s team will destroy the school record for 3-pointers in a season. Across the Bay, Hipol has found that, as kids learn the proper technique, they are becoming incredibly gifted shooters at a very young age.
“We see kids coming in that we see at our camp, or coming in to St. Joe’s, or just around playing youth basketball, the kids are more skilled shooting-wise that they ever were when I was playing,” Hipol said. “It’s a skillset that’s very appealing to the kids.”
As he typically has a smaller team than some of the other top teams in the Bay Area, Hipol stresses tempo as being an important part of running a 3-point shooting-based offense.
“I think tempo is so important when you’re practicing and when you’re trying to play fast,” Hipol said. “Shooting is a rhythm skillset, and you have to have that rhythm at a certain pace to be able to get a clean shot. Tempo is extremely big, and my kids will hear about it constantly at my practices.”
Scheppler and Field-Polisso agree, with Scheppler noting that the analytics revolution at the NBA-level has shown the value in the efficiency of the 3-point shot. Field-Polisso learned from Scheppler that it really can be a simple math problem.
“Just thinking about when I start a game, do I want to go up 4-0 or 6-0? For me, it’s a no-brainer,” Field-Polisso said. “If we’re playing against a team that doesn’t shoot too many threes and is going inside, if I go up 6-0, that’s three possessions that I’m ahead. It’s the new norm, but for Doc, this has been his norm forever.”
But that doesn’t mean everyone believes in chucking up as many shots from deep as possible. For Sue Phillips, a math teacher and the head coach of the nation’s top high school girls basketball team at Archbishop Mitty (San Jose) High School, the analytics don’t necessarily tell her to shoot endless 3-pointers, it shows her the value in scoring more points than her team has possessions.
“You have to shoot at a certain percentage where that trade-off is acceptable,” Phillips said. “We monitor how much we’re doing that, and we do it based on our offensive efficiency. If we’ve scored two possessions in a row, then the green light’s on. We can basically look to attack any way we want, because we have a possession to play with, in essence.”
Even with six state championships and numerous players at high-level Division I programs, this may be the best Mitty team yet, with Every ranking in the nation having the Monarchs at No. 1. Phillips says her team has seen just about every defense a team could throw at them, but her team’s focus on tempo and offensive balance — midrange, free throws and points in the paint to go with 3-pointers — have been the key to their success.
“We try to score on the first 10 seconds of a possession, so even on a made basket, we’re trying to push the tempo to take advantage of 3-on-3, 4-on-4 situations and move the ball up the floor to utilize our skillsets and athleticism in that open space,” Phillips said. “We actually try to manage our 3-point attempts so that it’s just a percentage of what we do.
“I have found that our consistency to win games is predicated on our ability to defend and on our offensive balance, so we can score a myriad of ways and not live and die by the 3-point game.”
Scheppler’s seen this, too, and has adjusted his gameplan over the years to be focused on shooting 3-pointers and layups or floaters inside, focusing on a half-second rule that he heard Spurs coach Greg Popovich use.
“I used to teach a heck of a lot of triple-threat footwork,” Scheppler said. “The thing I realized the last five or six years is that people have a big-time advantage when they catch the ball with a defensive player closing out on them. They can catch-and-shoot, or if the close-out is really fast, they can attack that close-out with a catch-and-drive. Everything that I design, in terms of offensive sets, is based around getting one of my players into that type of scenario.”
While Scheppler doesn’t have a player taller than 6’1 on his team this year, Field-Polisso is finding that post players who can develop a consistent outside shot are hot commodities at the college level.
“ understand that the versatility to not only be able to, one, be blessed with height, but to be able to play inside and to add to your game the ability to step outside and knock down a three? That is so valuable, and you see so many college coaches these days looking for that versatility,” Field-Polisso said.
Phillips concurs, adding, “We pride ourselves in developing versatility. We try to develop basketball players, not just positions.”
Hipol mentioned positionless basketball as well, something many people credit the Warriors with kicking into overdrive across all of basketball. Between that and “The Splash Brothers,” Golden State has flipped basketball upside down.
But, to a coach in the Bay Area, the absolute biggest benefit this current Warriors team brings to them isn’t the 3-point shooting. It’s the selflessness that permeates everything the Warriors do.
“My girls will go home after practice, watch the game, and the next day in practice, they’re talking about it,” Hipol said. “They’re talking about Klay Thompson having 25 in a quarter on just catch-and-shoot threes. ‘Did you see him catch-and-shoot? He doesn’t even have to dribble.’ That helps me emphasize passing.
“‘Why doesn’t he have to dribble? Because the passing’s so good. It’s right in his pocket, and that helps him.’ It’s not just Klay Thompson, it’s Steph Curry who made the pass as well. If it’s a bad pass, Klay Thompson never gets that shot off. It perpetuates other things, as well.”