Freeze a video of your shot at the set point and look at your elbow. If it points toward the sideline instead of the rim, you've found the source of those misses that spray to both sides. The good news: it's one habit, not ten.
One line to the rim
A jump shot flies straightest when the wrist, elbow and shoulder stack in a single vertical plane aimed at the basket. Picture a pane of glass running from your shoulder to the rim — the ball should ride up through it and launch along it.
When the elbow flares out, the forearm has to swing back toward the middle during the shot, and the timing of that swing decides where the miss goes. Swing early, miss one way; swing late, miss the other. That's why a flared elbow doesn't produce one signature miss — it produces both, which is what makes it so confusing to self-diagnose.
Here's the part most players never hear: the flare usually isn't a shooting decision at all. It starts with how you hold the ball. If your hand sits on the side of the ball, the elbow follows it outward, and by the time you reach your set point the whole arm is tilted. Get the shooting hand behind and under the ball and the elbow slides underneath almost by itself.
At the set point, you're looking for the classic L — about 90 degrees at the elbow, forearm pointing up. That shape puts the ball on a straight runway to the rim before the shot even begins.
Seeing what you can't feel
Alignment is hard to feel and easy to see. How far your wrist, elbow and shoulder drift out of that line to the rim is one of the numbers CoachVision pulls off a single clip of your shot — a drift too small to notice in the moment shows up plainly on video.
The rebuild happens in front of a mirror, with the Mirror Elbow Check.
Stand close to a mirror with a ball. Shoot in slow motion — no jump, no rim, just the motion — and watch exactly one thing: your elbow. Under the ball, pointing at an imaginary rim, on every rep. Ten slow reps, every day.
Slow is the whole point. At game speed, your old pattern runs the show. At half speed, you can steer. If the elbow drifts out mid-rep, stop, reset your hand behind the ball, and start again. You're not counting reps — you're counting honest ones.
Give it two weeks of daily mirrors before you judge the results in games. New alignment feels strange before it feels automatic; strange is what progress feels like from the inside.
Your shot already knows how to fly straight. You're just teaching your elbow where home is.