“When I walk down the street, people will say, ‘There goes Roy Hobbs…the best there ever was.’”
Roy Hobbs, The Natural
When I was thirteen years old, my mother took me to see a movie called The Natural, starring Robert Redford.
Redford played Roy Hobbs, a baseball player who dreamed of becoming the greatest who ever lived.
Something about that story stuck with me.
At the time, my brother was a star basketball player on his high school team. I can remember lying in bed at night imagining myself becoming even better than he was.
I dreamed about becoming the greatest basketball player in East Troy history.
In my mind, I could see everything.
I could see myself making shots.
Grabbing rebounds.
Playing great defense.
I could almost hear the crowd cheering.
Those dreams were incredibly real to a thirteen-year-old boy.
Looking back, I realize that was the beginning of my lifelong love affair with basketball.
There was just one problem.
I had a dream.
I didn’t have a plan.
I didn’t yet understand how to take something I could imagine in my head and turn it into a series of goals that might help me get there.
Years later, when I became a basketball dad, that became one of the lessons I wanted to teach my daughters.
Let Them Dream Big
Children should be allowed to dream.
And I mean really dream.
When children are young, their world is still filled with possibilities. They haven’t yet accumulated all the reasons adults give themselves for why something can’t happen.
That’s a wonderful thing.
As parents, I believe we should be very careful about becoming the first people to place limits on those dreams.
If your daughter tells you she wants to play college basketball someday, let her dream about it.
If she tells you she wants to play in the WNBA, let her imagine it.
If she wants to become the best player in her school, her conference, or the state, why should Mom or Dad be the person who immediately explains all the reasons it probably won’t happen?
There will be plenty of people in life willing to tell our children what they can’t do.
I don’t think we need to volunteer for that job.
But I’ve also learned something important over the years:
The dream needs to belong to the child.
We can encourage it.
We can support it.
We can help our children understand what pursuing it might require.
But we shouldn’t decide what their dream is for them.
That’s an important distinction.
Dreaming in the Driveway
When my youngest daughter was in second grade, she played in one of her first games with referees.
I was ridiculously excited.
Her team won 26–2.
Grace scored 24 points.
I remember watching that little girl run around the court and thinking:
I might have something special here.
Being the basketball-crazy father that I was, I immediately started dreaming.
And I didn’t exactly dream small.
I told her she was going to become the greatest basketball player in the history of her high school.
I told her she might play at Connecticut someday.
I talked about the WNBA.
Looking back, I probably got a little carried away.
But I remember those conversations fondly.
Grace and I would go outside as the sun was setting and shoot baskets together. We would talk about basketball, life, and what the future might look like.
Those evenings remain some of my favorite memories as her father.
There was something magical about standing in a driveway with a little girl who believed almost anything was possible.
But I usually added something else to those conversations.
I told her that dreams come with a price.
The Dream Is Free. The Work Is Not.
Dreaming about being a great basketball player is easy.
Becoming one is much harder.
I wanted my daughters to understand that accomplishing anything meaningful usually requires sacrifice.
There might be parties they couldn’t attend.
Sleepovers they might miss.
Trips to a Brewers game or the zoo that occasionally had to wait.
There would be days when their friends were relaxing while they were in the driveway shooting.
There would be practices when they were tired.
There would be days when they didn’t feel like working.
That’s where the dream becomes important.
A dream gives the work a purpose.
But a dream by itself isn’t enough.
Eventually, a young player has to answer a much more important question:
What am I willing to do today to move a little closer to it?
That’s where goals come in.
Goals: The Pathway From Dream to Reality
Your child’s dream might be enormous.
Maybe she wants to play Division I basketball.
Maybe she wants to make varsity as a sophomore.
Maybe she simply wants to become good enough to make her middle-school team.
The size of the dream isn’t the important part.
What matters is that it matters to her.
Once a child decides there is something she genuinely wants to pursue, parents can help break that distant dream into smaller, achievable goals.
Basketball is particularly good for this because so many skills can be measured and practiced individually.
For my daughters, I usually divided basketball development into three areas:
shooting, ball handling, and physical development.
Shooting: Count Makes, Not Just Attempts
I’ve always liked shooting goals because progress is easy to measure.
One summer, my daughter’s school team had a 10,000-shot challenge.
I liked the concept, but I began thinking about it differently.
Instead of setting a goal based only on how many shots a player takes, why not track how many she makes?
Taking 500 shots sounds productive.
Making 500 requires something more.
It forces the player to remain in the gym until the job is completed.
One shooting workout I used with my daughter looked like this:
- 35 catch-and-shoot three-pointers
- 35 dribble step-back three-pointers
- 35 pump-fake pull-ups into a mid-range shot
- 10 wing-to-elbow mid-range makes from the right side
- 10 elbow-to-elbow mid-range makes
- 10 elbow-to-wing mid-range makes from the left side
- 20 dribble-drive pull-ups from six to eight feet
- 10 post-move drop steps from each side
- 10 turnaround post moves from each side
- 10 middle hook shots from each side
- 10 baseline hook shots from each side
- 10 up-and-under post moves from each side
- 100 made free throws
The workout represents roughly 395 made baskets.
Complete something similar 26 times over the course of a summer and a player has made more than 10,000 shots.
But the number itself isn’t really the lesson.
The lesson is learning to take a huge goal and break it into something manageable.
Ten thousand makes sounds overwhelming.
One workout today doesn’t.
That’s goal setting.
Ball Handling: Fifteen Minutes Adds Up
I approached ball handling the same way.
Over the years, I developed several workouts with my daughters, including stationary ball-handling drills, six-cone drills, and full-court dribbling exercises.
We couldn’t always complete everything.
Life gets in the way.
School gets busy.
Families have commitments.
Players get tired.
But most days, finding 15 minutes was possible.
That became the goal.
Not perfection.
Not an enormous workout every night.
Just consistent work.
Fifteen minutes today.
Another 15 tomorrow.
Then another.
Those small pieces of work accumulate.
A player doesn’t suddenly wake up one morning with great ball-handling skills. She develops them through hundreds of ordinary days when she picked up a basketball and spent a few minutes getting better.
Physical Development
The third area we focused on was physical development.
As my daughters became older, we began setting goals involving conditioning, strength, mobility, and core work.
The exact routine isn’t important for the point of this article.
What matters is the process.
Identify an area that needs improvement.
Decide what progress would look like.
Create a realistic plan.
Track it.
Then keep showing up.
That formula applies to much more than basketball.
Big Dreams Are Built With Small Goals
When I think back to that thirteen-year-old boy lying in bed after watching The Natural, I remember exactly how the dream felt.
It felt enormous.
It felt possible.
It felt real.
What I didn’t understand was how many ordinary days stand between a dream and its pursuit.
That’s something athletics can teach our children beautifully.
Dreaming big and setting goals are not opposites.
They need each other.
The dream tells you where you want to go.
The goals tell you what to do today.
As parents, I believe we can help with both.
We can give our children permission to believe that something extraordinary might be possible.
Then we can help them understand that extraordinary accomplishments are usually built through very ordinary actions repeated over and over again.
One workout.
One practice.
One made shot.
One difficult day when they choose to keep going.
But we also have to remember something I’ve learned through my own mistakes as a basketball dad:
It has to remain their dream.
Our job isn’t to decide the destination.
Our job is to help them understand the road.
And someday, whether that road leads to varsity basketball, a college scholarship, a completely different sport, a career, or something neither parent nor child can imagine today, the lesson will remain.
Dream big.
Set a goal.
Make a plan.
Do today’s work.
Then get up tomorrow and do it again.
Because long after the basketball stops bouncing, knowing how to turn a dream into action may be one of the greatest lessons sports can give our children.
I especially like the direction of that ending because it connects Article 7 with some of the lessons you’ve written about in your other pieces. Early in your life as a basketball dad, you were telling your daughter how big the dream could be. Later, you learned that there is an equally important responsibility: making sure it remains her dream rather than yours.
That little bit of hindsight makes the article considerably more powerful. It lets you keep the enthusiasm of the dad shooting baskets with his second-grade daughter at sunset while allowing the older, more experienced basketball parent to add what he has learned since then.