Hoop dreams: How a coach’s vision for a high-tech basketball gym is inspiring kids to aim for the perfect shot
Anyone who has ever played basketball knows that special feeling when the ball leaves your hand and it just seems … perfect. With the comforting swish as confirmation when the ball passes through the hoop, ballers from six-year-olds to Steph Curry are in a constant chase for that often-ephemeral sense of the ideal shot.
But what if, using data from more than 600 million shots, there was a formula for basketball perfection? Shoot 360 believes there is, and thanks to technology from Microsoft, it has built a robust franchise model that uses cutting-edge tech with elite coaching to help athletes of all skill levels and ages improve their game.
“It’s like a real-life video game that’s benefiting you,” 15-year-old Kian Zarrindej says while practicing at the Beaverton, Oregon Shoot 360 facility, where he has been training for seven years.
Ironically, it was a video game – and more specifically, a frustration around one – that launched Shoot 360 in the first place.
Craig Moody had a long career in sports that saw him spend time as a high school and college coach and an athletic director at the college level. Training and development were hallmarks of his coaching style, and he tried to impress those lessons on his own children as they played basketball. But to his chagrin, they were much more interested in firing up NBA 2K than firing shots at the local park.
“My oldest son was upstairs playing video games at our house with some of his teammates,” Moody recalls. “It was a beautiful day outside, and I said, ‘Why don’t you guys go out and play on the court?’ They said, no, we’d rather play video games. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s incredible.’ So I walked out and I looked at my wife and said, ‘If we could build a gym like a video game, I think we’d have something special.’”
Moody noodled on his idea and in 2011, began creating the framework for what would be Shoot 360, renting a warehouse in an office park in Beaverton and using his building experience to start crafting elements of a basketball training facility. In 2012, Shoot 360 officially opened its doors, in a low-tech version that’s a far cry from today’s experience.
“Back then we had a little ticker tape that came off the [shooting] machine,” Moody says. “We would take that into the office and everybody put theirs in a basket, put their name on it, and that night we would go in and put it on an Excel spreadsheet, and then e-mail their results from there. So, it was very labor intensive and not very high tech.”
Still, Moody knew he was onto something. His kids began texting him while at school, asking if they could go to Shoot 360 to practice. He opened another facility in Oregon the next year. The third opened in Los Angeles in 2016 and a fourth launched in Indiana in 2017.
“We paused to get the technology built up with what our vision was,” Moody says. “When you open a technology business in sports that hasn’t been done before, there’s no roadmap. Some things take longer because there’s not really a consultant out there or someone who has the experience that can tell you what the pitfalls are or which way to go. You really have to navigate it based on your own experience.”
Hoops 2.0
Walking into a Shoot 360 location today is like a fever dream for hoops fanatics and tech enthusiasts. Lining one entire wall of the original Beaverton facility are rows of giant screens, segmented into individual pods where athletes can log in and begin working on skill drills that include firing basketballs at asteroid-like targets or highlighted numbers to mimic pinpoint passing.
Trainees can also go through ball-handling drills, led by a virtual trainer, that help with body position, ball speed and control with either hand. Each drill results in users earning points that Shoot 360 tracks and stores in its database. Users can monitor their progress in a mobile app. Increases in XP (experience points in gamer lingo) result in harder challenges but a rise on the virtual leaderboard, which connects users from Shoot 360 locations around the world.
On the other side of the facility are half-court basketball setups, with hoops that are connected to Shoot 360’s Splash Zone technology. Players fire shots that are tracked by motion sensor cameras (in the old days, Shoot 360 used Microsoft Kinect cameras) and screens provide instant feedback on the shot’s arc (ranging from low to high), depth (short to long) and alignment (left to right). Players can compete in real-time contests against opponents from Shoot 360 facilities anywhere, with the rankings updating instantly.
From those hundreds of millions of shots, Shoot 360 has calculated the probability of making a shot at 98 percent if you hit these three targets on the Splash Meter: a 45-degree arc, an 11-inch depth and a 0-degree alignment (aka dead center). It’s the daily goal of everyone who steps into a facility, from Beaverton to Atlanta to Taipei.
“It’s a great feeling, because it’s really rare,” says 14-year-old Jessie Zhang. “I’m always like, ‘Yay, I finally got it!’”
“We need to get that on a T-shirt: 45, 11, 0,” adds Shoot 360 coach Jackson Wimberly.
With massive amounts of data flowing through the system each day, Shoot 360 relies on a full stack of Microsoft products, including Microsoft Azure, Azure SQL Database and Microsoft Intune to help keep things in order.
“There was a pivotal moment where we just said, ‘Okay, we’ve got Unity [game engine] running all of our front end for our workout stations, our database is all housed in Azure, our services are all housed in Azure, and these are all across the globe,’” says Kirk Hendricks, vice president and solutions architect for Shoot 360. “We needed a platform that would not only meet the tech stack we have built, but also scale globally. So that’s really how it migrated to having a full stack of Microsoft products.”
As the franchise continues to expand yet still needs to retain a level of connectivity with each other through the interactive gaming platform, cloud space and security are two critical components of Shoot 360’s growth.
“You have over half a billion shots, just shots alone, and then all the passes that we have captured in there,” Hendricks says. “So we’ve got to have something that can scale to a very, very large size. We also have to have something that can be redundant. When you get to five locations, that’s one thing, but then you’re at 50, so you have to have the horsepower, you have to have the data, the underlying data structures that are going to be able to support that level of data, and it has to be fast, instantaneous.”
With new games starting every 30 minutes and athletes expecting to get the latest updates on their shooting and passing statistics, Hendricks says it’s critical that Shoot 360’s systems are always updated and configured correctly, which is why it migrated to Microsoft Intune to manage the organization’s devices and apps.
“There’s no way we can physically like log into every computer and deploy everything,” he says. “You can’t have a person trying to push a button to launch a new game. So Intune now manages everything. That was a huge game-changer for us, all the way from the initial PC installs to when an athlete checks in at the counter.”
The next step for the Shoot 360 tech team is how to utilize AI to enhance workouts and help create predictive workouts or strategies to help users improve their games.
Expanding the bench
The Shoot 360 model has proven to be extremely popular and transferable, with nearly 70 locations online today. The franchise has attracted several major investors from the NBA and WNBA ranks, including Seattle Storm legend Sue Bird, Seattle native Jamal Crawford and current and former pro players like Brianna Stewart and Zaza Pachulia.
The brand is winning fans globally, too. There are Shoot 360 outposts in Japan, Georgia and Taiwan, with the potential of many more to come given basketball’s immense popularity throughout Europe and Asia.
“If you had looked at it 10 or 20 years ago, you would have said, basketball’s pretty much a U.S. sport, right, from a dominant standpoint? Not anymore,” Moody says. “The sport is growing and we look at it like building a global community. So we want that connection worldwide.”
Another way Moody wants to provide more opportunities for ballers is by connecting with fitness centers to create a different type of Shoot 360 location. It recently opened a new gym inside LA Fitness in Hillsboro, Oregon, upgrading the previous court into a high-tech location that both kids and adults are using for training purposes.
“I never thought this was something for me, but coming here with the tech and the people, I learned that there’s a lot that I can fix pretty quickly in this environment where you can put up a lot of shots and the tech will give you really good feedback,” says 22-year-old Ali Shakibafar, who is a daily visitor at the Hillsboro location.
“Within a couple of weeks, I made progress that I hadn’t made in a couple of years. That was very important. I don’t think I could have done it without everything that’s in here.”
A human league
Even with all the bells and whistles, what Moody and the Shoot 360 founders believe sets them apart from the competition is the coaching aspect. Many of Shoot 360’s coaches are former players who still have a passion for the sport and enjoy adding to the experience by bringing a personal touch to the technology.
“I like to preach 1% growth a day. Growth is growth,” Wimberly says. “I had one kid who came in here and couldn’t shoot. And so we were not preaching too much tech because we were just teaching him how to shoot. Then he’s learning how to shoot. He comes in next week, now he’s using the tech. Now he’s saying, ‘Hey, coach, Why is my shot red over here?’ So I explain that to him, break it down. Now he understands. Then I’m seeing him get better. It’s just like, wow. I believe it works. I’m seeing it too in real time. So it’s amazing.”
Shoot 360 has had some real-life success stories come from their training, including top WNBA draft pick Cameron Brink and former Washington State guard Isaac Bonton. But Moody is just as excited about the trainee who makes their high school varsity team or the youngster who wants to come to training every week.
It’s not lost on Moody that in his quest to get his kids off video games and onto the court he’s created a gamified version of basketball that isn’t too far off from XBOX. But the shots don’t lie – the target audience is responding to this new way to play and practice.
“You meet kids where they’re at, right?” Moody says. “Video games and social media are a big part of their lives. And so, do you fight it or do you figure out a way to be creative with it and make it really positive? The old idea of just to grind, it’s not really relevant today. Kids will work hard, but they want immediate feedback. Like, that’s the world today. They expect that, right? And they want to have fun.”
As 9-year-old Henry Schlotthauer fires up shots at the Beaverton Shoot 360, he’s not paying close attention to the screens or monitoring every score on the leaderboard. He’s simply having fun playing basketball under the watchful eye of coach and GM Sara Schwanke.
“I’ve been going here every day and learning new skills and getting better,” Henry says. “I’m going to keep playing basketball.”
Top photo: Jessie Zhang practices a ball-handling drill at Shoot 360 in Beaverton, Oregon. (Photos by Dan DeLong for Microsoft)
Elliott Smith writes about AI and innovation at Microsoft, from how the Premier League is transforming its online presence to why AI may play a major role in saving the Amazon rainforest. Previously, Smith worked as a sports reporter in Washington, D.C., Washington state and Texas, covering high schools to the pros. You can contact him on LinkedIn.