Who's In?

Man, I hate a slump. As a latecomer to basketball, I had a nice long exhilarating ride up the learning curve. It’s flattened out in recent years, and been pocked by frequent slumps, sometimes in overall play, but most markedly in shooting.

And this current slump is more like a kettlehole. The underlying geological weakness of my shot suddenly eroded away and the thin crust of earth that appeared solid gives out and there’s nothing there. And down in the bottom of the hole no apparent means to get out. It is really very dismal and discouraging.

I was just touring the Web a little to see if anyone had any particular advice on getting out of a slump (keep shooting, is all I’ve ever heard (but at this point that's getting embarrassing)). I had slumps in rowing, too, where for days I felt I couldn’t get my oar in the water sharply (the catch) or couldn’t synch my power drive with others’. I think I'd attribute it to overtraining, fatigue, or overthinking in rowing. Don’t know what the cause is in basketball. Didn’t find any answers online, either, though I did stumble across an amusing hoops site called Setshot: Basketball for the Aging and Infirm, about one guy's ongoing love of the game. And there’s a site for coaches (and by extrapolation, the self-coached) called The Coach’s Clipboard, that would be useful for someone inexperienced who’s impulsively volunteered (or been roped in) to coach their kids. But no silver bullet for shooting the shooting slump.

Probably I should be searching psychology websites for how to break out of it. What do you think?