basketball – Page 2 – Dr Nick Owen MBE PLUS

Day 14 of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: it depends how you count ’em.

Some ago I made a cultural exchange visit to Finland as part of the Culture for Cities and Regions project. Touring around the Helsinki region, our guides were charmingly equivocal about what looked pretty straight forward.

Whether it was golf courses in Espoo (7 or 8), municipalities in Helsinki (4 or 14) or lakes in Finland (187,888 plus or minus), it all depends, as it turns out, on how you counted them. Our hosts were relativistic tour guides par excellence and thought nothing of giving the figures a good interrogation as we drove up hill down dale and into a lake.

For phenomena which you might think are pretty unequivocal (when is a golf course not a golf course?), it turns out that there is a lot more to a thing than meets the eye.

Walking along the coastline of the Tooivo Kuulas park one morning you could see why. One moment the lake looks like an impressively large pond; the next it stretches way off into the distance and conjures up memories of Balaton Lake in Hungary; yet soon enough you find out that it’s not a lake at all but just another link in the supply chain to the Baltic Sea.

It struck me that the same case could be said for student attainment. How can a country’s education system said to be performing well? Through its ratings on the PISA scale? Numbers of students who graduate into work on completion of their undergraduate study? Aggregated ratings on a mental health scale of well being? Like the lakes in Finland, it depends on how you count them. My top PISA rating may be nothing more than a drop in your Baltic Sea when it comes to evaluating the relevance those ratings have on learners’ lives.

And when it comes to counting basketballs falling through hoops, the same principle clearly applies. Does one successful shot equate to a ball falling into the hoop and then falling all the way to the ground? Or could you count balls that fell partially through the hoop, only to inexplicably spin out upwards a short time later?

Whilst it’s temporarily startling that Espoo has a disputed number of golf courses in its territory, it is comforting to think that if we can’t count golf courses with confidence, we can confidently be a little less confident about the value of numbers when it comes to understanding the effects of cultural education on our children and indeed the number of occasions a basketball has properly fallen the requisite distance to qualify as a bona fide shot.

So, whilst today’s statistics might look like they’re disappointingly a bit shy of the target, we can find comfort in the spreadsheet when we realise that these numbers are not hard and fast things in their own right, but are subject to interpretation, imagination and the vagaries of the act of counting itself.

Day	Attempts	Near Misses	Baskets	Effort (Baskets/ Attempt)	Baskets/ Minute (BPM)	FeelGood Factor	Total time	Total Shots	Total Baskets	Success rate
1	N/A	0	8	N/A	0.308	N/A	26		8
2	194	0	15	7.73%	0.577	N/A	52	194	23
3	189	87	2	1.06%	0.077	46.03%	78	470	25	5.3%
4	190	107	7	3.68%	0.269	56.32%	104	767	32	4.2%
5	192	105	11	5.73%	0.423	54.69%	130	1,064	43	4.0%
6	167	108	6	3.59%	0.231	64.67%	156	1,339	49	3.7%
7	174	114	14	8.05%	0.538	65.52%	182	1,627	63	3.9%
9	180	108	16	8.89%	0.615	60.00%	234	1,915	63	3.3%
10	166	118	18	10.84%	0.692	71.08%	260	2,199	79	3.6%
11	181	121	20	11.05%	0.769	66.85%	286	2,501	97	3.9%
12	176	115	24	13.64%	0.923	65.34%	312	2,792	117	4.2%
13	179	111	24	13.41%	0.923	62.01%	338	3,082	141	4.6%
14	176	125	19	10.80%	0.731	71.02%	364	3,383	160	4.7%

You can find out why I’m taking the 2.6 Basketball Challenge here Any help you can offer is much appreciated!.

Day 13 of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: only halfway to paradise (or until the target re-sets).

There’s just another 13 days left but still just two tantalising baskets to shoot before I hit target of 26 baskets in under 26 minutes. Mind you, what do you do when you hit target? Generate another one of course.

Not content with shooting 26 basketballs in under 26 minutes (something unheard of for me not 14 days ago), the target driven mind decides to up the ante and find increasingly intricate ways to move the metaphorical goal posts (see Day 11 for further reasoning on this process).

26 baskets in under 26 minutes? Meaningless. Better change it to the fastest 26 baskets in under 26 minutes. Better than that, aim for the maximum number of baskets you can shoot in 26 minutes. Better than that even, maximise the effort, minimise the feel good factor and aim for a ration of 1 basket per shot per second for 26 minutes: ie 1,560 consecutive baskets. This would give Anthony MIracola (see Day Seven) something to think about, even if it is an impossibly unrealistic target in the scheme of things.

But when did realism ever have anything to do with setting targets, hitting them and then resetting them with elevated levels of unrealism injected into them? There’s something about a target culture which is both alluring, frustrating but ultimately addictive.

Quite whether our broader target driven culture is actually making lives better for our children and young people is another matter, but you can be sure that as eggs is eggs (or until they become super-eggs), we won’t stop redefining them and setting ourselves increasingly ridiculous challenges, all for the sakes of some interesting statistics.

Which today, for those who are addicted to such things look like this:

Day 13: shots per day of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge.

Or, as Billy Fury once crooned:

I’m only halfway to paradise

So near, yet so far away.

You can find out why I’m taking the 2.6 Basketball Challenge here Any help you can offer is much appreciated!.

Day 12 of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: it’s a Mighty Team effort.

Whilst it might look like I’m trying to throw balls into a basketball hoop in a solitary fashion, in actual fact I’m part of a bigger Mighty Creatives team effort whose members are all contributing to the task in hand: namely to raise funds in support of our Not Just a Box programme.

The Not Just a Box programme supplies Lets Create packs, boxes filled with creative resources tailored by age to support children to get creative in their homes. Each pack provides vital materials such as paper, pens, paints, craft kits and digital tools, resources which they would otherwise have limited access to outside of education.

Its Not ‘just’ a Box though. Boxes delivered to the doorsteps of children in need provide that critical connection with The Mighty Creatives, where children and young people can access our support and the opportunities we can provide direct to their homes.

A box provides the tools and resources and access to support from our skilled staff team and specialist Creative Practitioners, Mentors and Coaches via online and offline activities.

As a result, a Mighty Creative child in need accesses critical and timely support from The Mighty Creatives, developing their resilience and nurturing activity to sustain their wellbeing. In turn these children are supported to develop the confidence to come together with others to share their story and to take action in their lives and in the lives of others living in their shoes.

Emily Bowman is leading the The Mighty Relay Rabble Team: 30+ friends whose mission is to run a virtual relay across three continents! Each member of the team is running / walking 2.6 miles, then passing their baton onto the next member of the team. From the South East of the UK to the US, passing through Finland and Australia along the way!

Emily York is trusting her friends and family to submit daily challenges for her to undertake, some creative, some physical but most are for her to make a fool out of herself!

Hannaa Hamdache is creating 26 paintings over the course of 26 days. You can follow her daily progress over on Instagram: @thehamthatdoodles.

Hope C is learning 26 famous dance routines from music, movies and tv. Without giving too much away, she’s got a track list of tunes from the 80s, 90s, 00s, some K-pop bangers (of course) and scenes from some movies too. She is not a dancer, so this is a real challenge for her!

Charlotte Moseley is running a mile a day for 26 days and…

Lorrie Stock will be baking as many cakes as she can, taking orders from family and friends for any cakes and bakes they want, in return for donations and all the support she can get!

Yours truly, as you may know, is aiming to shoot 26 basketballs in under 26 minutes over 26 days. With variable but encouraging results! Here’s today’s stats produced for you in a slightly different format…

And here’s some for the more curious amongst us:

Day	Attempts	Near Misses	Baskets	Effort (Baskets/ Attempt)	Baskets/ Minute (BPM)	FeelGood Factor
1	N/A	N/A	8	N/A	0.308	N/A
2	194	N/A	15	7.73%	0.577	N/A
3	189	87	2	1.06%	0.077	46.03%
4	190	107	7	3.68%	0.269	56.32%
5	192	105	11	5.73%	0.423	54.69%
6	167	108	6	3.59%	0.231	64.67%
7	174	114	14	8.05%	0.538	65.52%
9	180	108	16	8.89%	0.615	60.00%
10	166	118	18	10.84%	0.692	71.08%
11	181	121	20	11.05%	0.769	66.85%
12	176	115	24	13.64%	0.923	65.34%

Not long to go now!

Day 11 of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: dance the Time Warp at your peril.

Today started with an alarming statistic: the first ball went through the hoop on the second attempt. Granted it took another 30 attempts to score a second basket, nevertheless this moment of euphoria soon faded when the near misses kept building up. Just off the left-hand side, just off the right: bounce back at ya from the back of the board, bounce back at ya and over your head, just to spite ya. I then had what you might call an epiphanic moment: the hoop, taken aback by the success of the second shot decided to move itself, ever so slightly, at will. Its own will, not mine, not yours, not the invigilators but its own.

Now, they talk about moving the goal posts in football: but this is always in the sense that some human beings somewhere have tiptoed over to the goalposts mid-game and surreptitiously unscrewed the goal posts, unhung the net and then scuttled 5 yards up the pitch only to reverse engineer the entire process and mount the goal posts even further away from the opposition. Implausible it may be, but the phrase ‘moving the goal posts’ must have come from someone’s lived experience so we doubt it at our peril.

Tennis players will be also familiar with the natural phenomenon of the tennis net sagging ever so slightly during a game so that one minute you’ve served out, and the next you’ve served an ace. This leads to a false self impression of actually how talented you are when all along it was the net’s tendency to sag when you least needed it which was the actual cause.

But basketball is different. Whether this is because the hoop and the net are light and easy to manoeuvre, or whether the repeated hammerings they get from all those near misses causes them to contract, expand, take a step to the left or a step to the right in true Rocky Horror style, the fact is they move of their own volition. In their own time, in their own manner. All you can do as an itinerant basketball player is count to ten, take a deep breath, stick out your BUTT and lob the ball into the air in the hope that the hoop has decided to stay still for a while.

A successful basket can lead to you dancing a little time warp jig but you’d better be aware that the hoop is watching your every move and is only too ready to make a fool of you if you get carried away with your success rate.

Check out those statistics here:

Day	Attempts	Near Misses	Baskets	Effort (Baskets/ Attempt)	Baskets/ Minute (BPM)	FeelGood Factor
1	N/A	N/A	8	N/A	0.308	N/A
2	194	N/A	15	7.73%	0.577	N/A
3	189	87	2	1.06%	0.077	46.03%
4	190	107	7	3.68%	0.269	56.32%
5	192	105	11	5.73%	0.423	54.69%
6	167	108	6	3.59%	0.231	64.67%
7	174	114	14	8.05%	0.538	65.52%
8	Training Day
9	180	108	16	8.89%	0.615	60.00%
10	166	118	18	10.84%	0.692	71.08%
11	181	121	20	11.05%	0.769	66.85%

You can find out why I’m taking the 2.6 Basketball Challenge here Any help you can offer is much appreciated!.

Day Ten of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: counting the cost but feeling the value.

Believe it or not, this campaign is not really about how many basketballs I can throw in a hoop in 26 minutes, how many near misses I can frustratingly curse at or how many complete no-hopers have found themselves on the neighbours side of the fence.

No, it’s part of charity wide campaign to draw attention to how children and young people in the East Midlands have been feeling the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic over the last year.

And actually, it’s not really even about that: it’s about recognising that the real crisis that young people face both here and across the UK, and indeed the world, is one of child poverty. For the 5^th richest nation in the world, our country’s child poverty statistics are disgraceful.

This is why we at The Mighty Creatives have established direct relationships with the End Child Poverty Campaign and regional organisations who have highlighted the roles of food banks in communities and how arts resource packs can make a material difference to families’ financial welfare and quality of life.

“It takes the pressure off and – all these lovely things that people have got, but not had to go into debt for. For lots of people these things are normal, but not for everyone. They were extra things that we could provide for them, for the whole family, although it is for the kids it helps the whole family.”

Many of our partners in the areas hardest hit by poverty have highlighted how important receiving an arts pack which stimulated young people’s creativity was to their mental health:

“Mental health problems are so entrenched in our area – and we all know the effects a creative experience can have to remove the mind from the rabbit warren. We would do it again in a heartbeat. We felt very proud to be part of it, and part of the chain that got those packs out.”

We now want to extend our relationships with organisations working to address poverty.

Our vision is to show people directly how just an apparently modest donation of arts resources can have life changing effects and this is where your help comes in.

Just £2.60 can help a young person find the pleasure of finding a creative moment in the time of a heartbeat.

A £26.00 donation can help that heartbeat moment shape a life time’s memory of the pleasures of creativity.

The cost is one thing: but the value of your donation is immeasurable. That’s one thing I’m not forgetting in counting those misses, near misses and baskets.

And for those of us who love the numbers, here’s today’s results:

Day	Attempts	Near Misses	Baskets	Effort (Baskets/ Attempt)	Baskets/ Minute (BPM)	FeelGood Factor
1	N/A	N/A	8	N/A	0.308	N/A
2	194	N/A	15	7.73%	0.577	N/A
3	189	87	2	1.06%	0.077	46.03%
4	190	107	7	3.68%	0.269	56.32%
5	192	105	11	5.73%	0.423	54.69%
6	167	108	6	3.59%	0.231	64.67%
7	174	114	14	8.05%	0.538	65.52%
8	Training Day
9	180	108	16	8.89%	0.615	60.00%
10	166	118	18	10.84%	0.692	71.08%

You can find out why I’m taking the 2.6 Basketball Challenge here Any help you can offer is much appreciated!.

Day Eight of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: all the single ladies, all the single ladies!

Stick your butt OUT like BEYONCE advises Tahir, my coach. We’ve met on a wet windy Tuesday morning on an impressive basketball court in St Matthews in Leicester and I’m getting some mid- 26 Day Challenge training advice. It’s clear that standing upright, throwing the ball from over my head like a footballer’s throw in isn’t cutting the mustard when it comes to shooting from the basketball charity stripe.

I’ve never been instructed to behave like Beyonce before but the offer is too good to turn down. Butt OUT, pounce in place and voguing it like a MF, and I’m away, all those Beyonce tunes bouncing around my head in sympathy with the ball as it bounces out of the net and all over the court. All the single ladies are irreplaceable, putting a ring on it if I were a boy crazy in love.

The energising effect is indisputable and whilst the conversion rate from miss to near miss to basket hasn’t noticeably improved over the course of the training, I’m confident that a combination of butt OUT, elbows UP, follow THROUGH and flick your WRIST will see me through the remaining 18 days of the challenge.

I’m definitely on a tipping point of basket success rather than becoming a basket base and it won’t be a matter of ‘Will I ever shoot 26 baskets?’ to ‘How much can I reduce the time taken to shoot them?’

Wishful thinking may be but as the lady might have said, ‘if you like it then you gonna put it through a ring’.

You can find out why I’m taking the 2.6 Basketball Challenge here Any help you can offer is much appreciated!.

Day Seven of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: the ball is my friend.

Hard to believe but still true: the ball is becoming my friend.

Not something to throw vehemently at the target, not something to disregard as if it were an intruder in your own private quest for the Holy Grail but an essential partner you have to coax, encourage and woo in your attempt to achieve something which, whilst on the one level is not especially an audacious attempt at the Guinness world record for basketball free throws (67 in one minute, since you ask, achieved by Anthony Miracola of the USA in Temperance, Michigan on 5 April 2020) but still something you could look back in your dotage and confidently whisper, ‘Yes, I did that. Really I did” to your disbelieving great grandchildren.

Whether Miracola will have that pleasure remains to be seen. His life mission was to become “the greatest shooter” and had he turned up at my neighbour’s and shot 67 in one minute, we would have been on Twitter before you could shout Harlem Globetrotter.

Mind you, the bigger question would have been could he have kept it up for the full 26 minutes? And how many near misses did he achieve in his 67 throws over that minute? This might seem a curmudgeonly response to a Guiness World Record beater, but these statistics are critical in establishing the truth about what really makes a world record beater.

My dad always used to say that it was all very well for a High Jumpers to jump 8’ ¼” but it was unfair that they landed on a mattress. His argument was that if you wanted to jump high, you had to be able to land safely too, without assistance. The fact that high jumpers would would be likely to break their backs in their attempts to be the best they could be, seemed to elude him.

Perhaps this rather tortuous logic worked its through the generations and has left me wondering how many near misses Miracola had in beating the world record: but you’ll see by the picture that he wasn’t short of a bit of technical help in his attempt on the World Record.

You’ll see that Miracola had an automatic ball feeder to help him. Presumably he didn’t have to go and chase the ball every time it spun around the hoop and leapt out towards a kichen window? Or extract it from the neighbours garden every time it bounced over his head? These things matter in world record beating attempts!

Anyway, perhaps he’ll get in touch one day and we can share notes on how he shot 67 in one minute and how it took me 26 minutes to shoot 14 today. I’m sure the ball (or the myriad of balls he used) were all his friends. That’s what being a World Champion is all about: you’re everyone’s best friend, even if it is just for a minute.

But on a more cheering note, here are today’s ‘scores on the doors’. I feel I’m on a tipping point and nearly ready to meet Anthony Miracola on any court of his choosing. (Just give me a few more weeks, Anthony).

Day	Attempts	Near Misses	Baskets	Effort (Baskets/ Attempt)	Baskets/ Minute (BPM)	FeelGood Factor
1	N/A	N/A	8	N/A	0.308	N/A
2	194	N/A	15	7.73%	0.577	N/A
3	189	87	2	1.06%	0.077	46.03%
4	190	107	7	3.68%	0.269	56.32%
5	192	105	11	5.73%	0.423	54.69%
6	167	108	6	3.59%	0.231	64.67%
7	174	114	14	8.05%	0.538	65.52%

You can find out why I’m taking the 2.6 Basketball Challenge here Any help you can offer is much appreciated!.

Day Six of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: this is The Why.

For all the fun to be had in trying to throw basketballs into hoops, there is a serious intent behind all this.

It’s about raising awareness of Child Poverty, about contributing to the fight against it, and to actively provide children and young people with the resources to develop their own creativity, expressiveness and to find the fun in culture.

Along with many other colleagues from The Mighty Creatives, we’re finding our own fun in culture – whether this be singing, dancing, experimenting, throwing basketballs or the many other possibilities that are available to us. We’re the lucky ones: but many yougn people aren’t and this is why this campaign is so vital.

By supporting our campaign, you will be supporting our ‘Not Just a Box’ programme, born out of the national ‘Lets’ Create’ programme last year in which over 25,000 packs of creative resources were distributed to children and young people across the country.

We did our bit then, and we’re continuing to do that now.

With £15 of your support, this will help fund one Let’s Create Pack to support a child living in poverty.

With £20 of your support, this will help fund a Let’s Create Family Pack for 2 or more children living in poverty.

With £3000 will help us to fund a Let’s Create Cupboard ( at a local FoodBank across the region) for one holiday period, serving over 200 children and young people living in poverty.

So it all helps – there’s no such thing as a Small Donation!

You can find out more here.

And thank you, in advance, for any support you can offer.

(And in case you’re following the statistics… here’s the good news about day 6. Never mind the BPM, just check out the FeelGood Factor!

Day	Attempts	Near Misses	Baskets	Effort (Baskets/ Attempt)	Baskets/ Minute (BPM)	FeelGood Factor
1	N/A	N/A	8	N/A	0.308	N/A
2	194	N/A	15	7.73%	0.577	N/A
3	189	87	2	1.06%	0.077	46.03%
4	190	107	7	3.68%	0.269	56.32%
5	192	105	11	5.73%	0.423	54.69%
6	167	108	6	3.59%	0.231	64.67%

Day Five of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: the flight of the bumble ball.

Q: What’s orange, striped and has all the aerodynamicity of a cottage loaf?

Q: What hovers in the air, tremulous, unsure of its destination or how it’s going to get there?

Q: what looks like its about to soar to the sky only to fade gracefully into the waiting arms of a fisherman’s net?

AAA: no, not a bumblebee but a basketball.

The two objects have much in common apart from the capacity of one to bounce heartily over your head when waiting for it to come to a stop and the capacity of the other to commit Hara-Kiri if it ever feels ever so threatened. Having said that, bumble bees rarely sting; much like the basketball which also rarely drops itself easily into the awaiting net.

They say that the chance of being stung by a bumblebee can be reduced by avoiding provoking them or making them aggressive. They also say that taking ones temper out on an recalcitrant basketball never ends happily for either you or the ball.

They say that it is important to be calm when working with bumblebees. This is equally true for basket balls. There is no point whatsoever in waving your arms at the bumblebees, or indeed waving your arms around whilst throwing the ball. This will only end up in the ball breaking a kitchen window, bouncing over the fence to the neighbour’s garden or worse.

Whilst they also say that you should not touch or try to hold bees, the opposite is true of basket balls. You have to pick up one, you have to hold it in the right configuration, and you have to let go at the right time, with the right pace, with the right follow through and the right air of optimism. Otherwise, that too will end in tears.

The only difference between the bumblebee and the basketball is that bumble bees live in hives and the basketball tends to migrate around the house, depending on where you last left it and forgot about it.

Meanwhile, here are some statistics, gathered together into the safety of a spreadsheet. You’ll note a new metric: the FeelGood Factor. This represents the ratio of Near Misses to Total Attempts, and given the relationship between this emergent athlete and his wilful bumbleball, is a hugely motivational statistic that means for the moment at least, the bumbleball is unlikely to find itself speared onto a garden railing any time soon.

Day	Attempts	Near Misses	Baskets	Effort (Baskets/ Attempt)	Baskets/ Minute (BPM)	FeelGood Factor
1	N/A	N/A	8	N/A	0.308	N/A
2	194	N/A	15	0.077	0.577	N/A
3	189	87	2	0.011	0.077	0.460
4	190	107	7	0.037	0.269	0.563
5	192	105	11	0.057	0.423	0.547

You can find out why I’m involved in the 2.6 Challenge – and how you can help – here.

Day Four of the Basketball 2.6 Challenge: dressing to impress

There comes a time in the emergent athlete’s life when they realise they have to finally shed the drab cocoon grey of the unwashed t-shirt, the shorts which had been shoved unceremoniously into the bottom of a bin bag many years ago during a unexpected change of student digs and the trainers which were the height of fashion back in the day when clogs were de rigeur in the trendiest school chum circles: and stretch out into the day light, shining in a luminescent orange Trumpian glow, fresh from a visit to their local nuclear power plant. In this transformatory moment, you can see high energy neutron beams shooting out from every limb and cranny, invigorating their sense of purpose and instilling a new determination to beat yesterday’s achievement of 0.07692308 BPM.

The metamorphosis of the emergent athlete from wannabe to andwhynote is a startling sight. It is even more of a startling experience for the athlete themselves who is able to look at themselves in a new, surprising light and find themselves asking themselves “Could I? Should I? What if…?”

For a few seconds a new career in basketball beckons. And then a few seconds later, once it’s taken over 50 shots to see the first ball of the day reluctantly fall through the hoop and down past the net with a grudging swoosh, reality seeps back in and the day job becomes an oasis of calm and serenity.

It’s all very well to dress to impress, impress for success or success in a dress but in the end, no amount of sleek shorts, body hugging t-shirts or ergonomic trainers are going to be able to counteract the emergent athlete’s inability to throw a ball in a curved enough line so that it flies in a graceful arc up and over to a welcoming net and thrilling swoosh noise.

Having said that, the statistics are a bit more bearable.

Attempts =190 (up by 1 from yesterday)

Near Misses = 107 ( up 20 from yesterday)

Scores = 7 (up by 5 from yesterday)

BPM = 0.26923077 (up by 0.19230769 from yesterday)

Effort = 0.03684211 (up by 0.0262601 from yesterday)

The Only Way is Up! as Yazz used to sing for the Maltese Labour Party back in 1988. Whether or not she was singing in a bright orange leotard is another matter but it’s a song to get your red blood cells racing, ready for tomorrow’s challenge.

You can find out why I’m involved in the 2.6 Challenge – and how you can help – here.

(Thanks to Tahir for the opportunity to dress, impress and the road to success!)

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