Girls Club seeing success with 3-on-3 hoops
Girls Club seeing success with 3-on-3 hoops
First season of half-court basketball a hit with players, parents
ralphhardin@gmail.com Call it playground ball or street ball or half-court, but whatever name you choose, the growing popularity of three-on-three basketball is undeniable. There’s even a professional league (Big3) featuring former NBA players.
So, with numbers down for the 2019 basketball season, the J.W. Rich Girls Club decided it was time to make the move and try three-on-three for the first time.
“I wanted to try it last year,” said Girls Club director Ladean Augenbaugh, “but everyone was skeptical. This year it just made sense.”
Augenbaugh said the number of girls playing basketball has just declined over the past few years.
“Our volleyball is strong,” she said, “but we just haven’t had the numbers in basketball. And so far, it’s going very well.”
Augenbaugh said they wanted to get everyone on board before the inaugural three-on-three season, so the Girls Club board got together and adopted a set of rules, met with parents and set out to put teams together.
“We pretty much went by the standard rules for three-onthree,” she said.
“The parents were a little concerned at first but they warmed up to it. And the players — they caught on just like that. It was very quick.”
For the uninitiated, three-onthree is played on just one half of the basketball court and both teams shoot at the same hoop.
On every change of possession after a shot, the ball has to be “taken out” — dribbled or passes back behind the three-point line.
“Your team misses a shot and you come down with the ball, you can shoot it right back up again,” explained Augenbaugh. “But if the other team gets it, they have to take it out and bring it back in. It’s just like playing at the playground.”
The game is to 21, which sounds like it would go quickly, but you only get one point for a basket (or two points for a basket behind the three-point line), so it’s still quite a task. And to give the girls a break, the game is played in two 10-minute halves.
“The first game, we went into overtime,” said Augenbaugh, “so that was pretty exciting. And you max out at 12 points in the first half. That’s designed to keep the games competitive but we haven’t really had any blow-outs yet, so it’s been fun and most of the games have been close.”
The three-on-three format also speeds up the action and gets more girls in the games.
“You know, I love fiveon- five, but what you end up with a lot of the time is you have one or two girls who handle the ball most of the time, and the other girls don’t really see a lot of action.
With this, there are only three girls on the court at a time and they all have to work together.
Switching players in and out (there are four or five players total on one team), they all get a chance to play and be a part of the game.”
The club has four teams playing 9-and-under and four teams playing in the 12-and-under division.
They play on Saturday mornings. As for whether three-on-three will be back next season?
“We’ll see,” said Augenbaugh. “We’ll see how the rest of this season goes and then we’ll look at our numbers next year and see, but I’ve been very happy with what we’ve seen so far.”
By Ralph Hardin
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