Bulldogs’ Bittner hit 1,000 shots a day so he could take and make one

In the Fresno State Bulldogs’ victory at San Diego State, Sam Bittner took two shots from the 3-point line, made one, and that one was big. Down three points inside of five minutes to play Bittner set up in the left corner, received a pass from Ray Bowles Jr., and fired with Matt Mitchell, the Aztecs’ 6-foot-6 forward, closing. The shot went down.

But to get it, to take it and to make it, took thousands on the practice court.

That was the challenge this summer.

“Coach (Rodney) Terry, he assigned me to make 1,000 shots a day,” Bittner said. “When you think about it, that doesn’t seem like a lot of shots, but that’s actually a lot of shots.”

That work has Bittner among the top 3-point shooters in college basketball, though his name isn’t anywhere in the national or Mountain West Conference rankings.

To qualify, a player must make 2.5 3-point shots per game and Bittner is shy of that. He is a judicious shooter, sometimes to a fault. He will pass up an open look to move the ball, trying to create a better shot from a good one. But in making 27 of 48 shots from the 3-point line his shooting percentage (56.3) is the highest in conference for anyone who has 30 or more attempts.

The Top 5:

▪ Sam Bittner (Fresno State) 27 of 48, 56.3

▪ Noah Bauman (San Jose State) 30 of 56, 53.6

▪ Hallice Cooke (Nevada) 21 of 45, 46.7

▪ Caleb Martin (Nevada) 53 of 114, 46.5

▪ Justinian Jessup (Boise State) 56 of 121, 46.3

More shots might lead to more misses, but fewer shots doesn’t necessarily mean fewer misses.

There are 30 players in the conference who have taken between 20 and 60 shots from the 3-point who are hitting less than 40 percent, and 12 at less than 30 percent.

Last season, Bittner would have been one of them. As a sophomore, he was 8 of 33 at the 3-point line, 24.2 percent, which is where Terry’s challenge and Bittner’s work comes in.

“It was something that when we sat down at the end of the year and really evaluated it was something that we challenged him to be better this year with,” Terry said. “He has always been a guy that helps our offense flow with ball movement, player movement, but we needed him to be able to step up and make some shots.

“That’s all want-to. If you want to improve and get better you’ll do it. He definitely wanted to improve and get better.”

At home over the summer, Bittner worked with his high school coach Greg Lockridge, who was a manager at Fresno State under coach Jerry Tarkanian in 1997 and ’98.

“I bought a tripod that I could attach to my phone and I put that underneath the basket and I’d shoot free throws or I’d shoot from 5- or 10-feet out and I’d record in slow motion and see exactly what hitches I’d see in my shot, whether it was elbow coming in or my feet turned sideways or my hips are not square,” Bittner said.

“A good shooter, he can fix those mistakes. When you’re actually shooting you don’t actually feel what’s wrong, you’re just thinking, ‘I’m missing, I’m missing.’ Being able to see what I was doing wrong really helped me.”

Bittner didn’t always get to 1,000 makes, but he did get to a point where he was charting swishes instead of makes, honing his shot.

“If it rattled or if it hit the side of the rim and it didn’t feel like a good shot I wouldn’t chart it,” he said. “I’d count it as a make – Coach Terry said 1,000 makes. But I wouldn’t chart that one. I wouldn’t do a muscle memory follow-through like that.

“A swish is the most pure form of a shot or ones that come right back to you, the ones that hit the back of the rim and hit and come right back to you. It’s called walking the dog. That’s what my shooting coach would talk to me about. He’d say, ‘You have to walk the dog.’ When you shoot and the ball comes back to you that means the ball likes you.”

With Lockridge, Bittner refined his shot.

“We went back to the principles of shooting, the science of it all,” Lockridge said. “Every morning, we just got after it. Slowly but surely, he changed his hand position. He changed his point of release. It’s always dangerous doing it with a kid his age, because you could mess the thing up totally.

“But to his credit, he paid attention to it all and before you knew it, he found it and I tell everyone, once you find your jump shot you fall in love with it.”

When Bittner got back to Fresno he was head over heels, ready to fire away.

“He put his time in and he earned his,” Terry said. “Anybody that spends the time that he has in terms of working outside of the time with the coaches, he has warranted the opportunity to have a green light. (Jahmel Taylor) is another one of those guys. He puts time in, in the morning, at night. Those guys are green-light shooters because of that.

“They don’t have the green light just because they want to shoot. They put the time in. When those guys are open and they get a chance to have an open look, we don’t have a problem within the context of what we’re doing taking a shot.”

Terry stopped himself, smiled.

“It’s when a guy that takes a shot that isn’t putting the time in, that’s a problem,” he said. “You have to put the time in to earn the opportunity to shoot those shots.”

This story was originally published January 19, 2018 at 2:11 PM with the headline "Bulldogs’ Bittner hit 1,000 shots a day so he could take and make one."