A shot isn't built straight away.
It's built over persistence and time.

College brought a different kind of rep: three years as a practice player for the Western Colorado women's team — running the scout, seeing the game through a coach's eyes — then co-founding my university's first club basketball program and leading it as president to the NIRSA championships in Boulder.

Player, practice player, builder. The shot looks different from every seat. Coaching is the fourth seat.

First varsity season, December 2020: starter as a junior, 73 made threes at 39%, Honorable Mention All-Conference. Around it, a 30-game summer with the Colorado Chaos — 18.2 points a game, 48% from three, 92.5% from the line — and a scouting line that still holds: "Big-time shooter from deep. Tremendous range and quick release."

Numbers like these look sudden from the outside. They weren't. They were 2012 arriving on schedule.

Lakewood High School, Level III — the bottom rung of a program with a varsity floor three flights up. Freshman basketball is an honesty test: nobody's record-holder, nobody's captain, just a kid in a new uniform proving it from zero. The plan was simple: outwork the depth chart. Level III, then JV, then varsity — no skipped steps.

That summer, a camp at CU Boulder: eleven thousand empty seats and one shot echoing. You can be discouraged by the gap between where you are and where you want to be — or organized by it.

The Lakewood feeder program, under Coaches Jenson and Wisniewski — the bridge between youth ball and the high school program, playing for the school before you're old enough to walk its halls.

A feeder team is exactly what it sounds like: you're being fed into something bigger than yourself. The uniform changes the stakes. The rims stay ten feet.

Coach Brett Hammontree's Golden team. Look at the frame: everyone else is moving, and the shooter is the stillest person in the gym. That stillness was built, not found — and it's the same stillness that would read 92.5% on a club stat sheet four years later.

The folder my family kept for this season is literally named "DOMINANT Golden" — one photo from that winter shows a final score of 44–3. This frame is from the Gold Crown Field House, Nuggets logos on the scoreboard, mid-air at eleven years old.

Form gets built fastest when winning makes the reps feel free.

Second season, three coaches, one lesson: the shot starts from the ground. The ball still launched from the shoulder, the legs still didn't fully know their job — but look at the elevation, the eyes. The arc was beginning to repeat. Repetition is the first teacher, and it grades honestly.