Marble Falls basketball adds NOAH to the program
Graphic courtesy of Noah Basketball
The Marble Falls High School girls and boys basketball programs welcomed a new member – Noah backboard.
The system, which has been in existence for at least a decade, helps players with one specific area, assistant athletic director and boys head coach John Berkman said.
“Their big thing is to help players develop their shooting better by getting data points on their arc and on the arc of their shot and on the consistency of the depth in which the ball lands inside the rim,” he said. “They’ve studied millions of shots, and they’ve come up with a formula of a certain degree arc, a certain depth in the rim that is what they consider the perfect shot.”
Here’s how it works.
One Noah machine is installed on each of the main goals and has a censor that looks like a camera behind the glass backboards with a wire. Two or more players can be shooting at the same time on the same basket and the software has an unlimited number of athletes whose shooting can be tracked. Typically one player stands to one side of the bucket and another stands on the opposite side. A manager or coach opens the software on the tablet and tells Noah which player is shooting from which side.
Once the shooting session ends, players and coaches can pull up the Noah results on an electronic tablet or cell phone
“So they know what they need to adjust,” Berkman said. “The idea is that if you shoot on the Noah machine, it can give you instant feedback on how deep your shot landed in the rim, how much of an arc that your shot was. That way you can adjust it immediately, and it’s not just based on misses or makes. While it does track makes and misses, it is about player development and getting players to understand what it feels like to shoot at a certain angle, arc percentage or an arc degree.”
While coaches study their players as they’re shooting, Noah provides an invaluable second set of eyes, the coach said.
“When it comes down to getting precise about things, we can’t always see down to the two or three degrees that it takes when somebody barely misses a shot,” he said. “It’s because they were just barely too high or just barely too low. If we can give them that instant feedback in practice for where they can start to build that muscle memory of how it feels to shoot it the correct way, that’s where I really think it helps us a ton. Plus a kid can go down to the goal where the Noah machines are installed, and we can have them shoot a hundred shots, and then you can really dial in.”
The system was purchased by the Marble Falls Athletic Booster Club and was installed about a month ago.
More than 20 NBA teams and several college programs use the system in their practice facilities. Noah has been around for around a decade.
“The fact that we can track it and keep track of it throughout the year, the fact that they can see that data instantly and a coach also doesn’t have to be standing right there next to him, we can have an iPad sitting on a chair next to him, we can have a manager standing next to him, a coach can be there helping them with that,” Berkman said. “It’s a great tool for our programs, boys and girls.”
Graphic courtesy of Noah Basketball
