Front rim. Front rim. Front rim again. When your misses keep dying on the same piece of iron, stop adjusting your aim — your aim is fine. Your shot is running out of fuel on the way there.

Short is an energy problem

Coaches read misses in two languages. Left and right misses talk about alignment. Short and long misses talk about energy. A ball that keeps landing on the front of the rim is telling you, every single time, that not enough power made the trip.

Power lives in your legs, and the legs get loaded during the dip — that little sink before you rise. The sweet spot is around 115 to 120 degrees of knee bend at the deepest point of the load. Bend meaningfully less than that and the spring never compresses; your arms try to make up the missing distance, and arms alone reach the front of the rim on a good day.

The shallow load sneaks in quietly. You get tired, you rush a catch, you drift into a lazy habit during casual shooting — and the dip shrinks an inch at a time. Nothing feels different. The front rim just gets louder.

Put a number on your load

Knee bend at the bottom of the dip is exactly the kind of thing video catches and feel misses. CoachVision measures it from a side-on phone clip, so a shrinking load shows up as a number before it shows up as a cold night.

The rebuild drill is the BEEF Ladder, and it earns your distance back one honest step at a time.

Start close to the rim — genuinely close, a step off the baseline. On every rep, run the BEEF checklist out loud or in your head: Balance, Eyes, Elbow, Follow-through. Feet set, eyes on the target, elbow under the ball, hold the finish. Make two in a row and you've earned one step back. Miss twice and you step in. Work the ladder from the baseline out to the free-throw line.

Here's the detail that makes it work for short misses: take the full leg load on every rep, even point-blank. It feels like overkill three feet from the rim. That's the point — you're gluing the deep dip to the shot itself, so it comes along automatically when the distance grows. If a step back suddenly produces front-rim misses, the ladder just showed you exactly where your legs check out.

Fifteen minutes on the ladder tells you more about your shot than an hour of jacking threes. Load fully, climb patiently, and the front rim goes quiet.