North Oldham Girls Basketball hosted its 2025 Summer Youth Camp from June 16-18 at North Oldham High School.
This was the second year it was run by head coach Marcus Shelmidine. He had 32 girls sign up, a few more than last year’s camp.
“I think getting both elementary schools there is a good number from both of our elementary schools and represents all second through sixth grade,” Shelmidine said. “It was really good. We had basically all of our older girls there to help. It was a good week.”
Shelmidine ran the camp, but his players helped lead drills throughout the three days. The camps helped the youth learn basic basketball skills and set a foundation to grow from year to year.
“I think the thing, this is across all of girls basketball, is just basic ball handling,” Shelmidine said. “If you can handle the ball, you can play. [We worked on] basic ball handling and just basic shooting. That’s all the girls want to do anyway is just shoot, so I try to meet them halfway on that. I would say ball handling is the biggest thing, and something that, high school girls basketball in general, just needs to get better at.”
Shelmidine knows the camp is a great way to introduce himself to the younger athletes, especially with youth girls basketball that is connected to North. He also knows that the key to building a strong program is getting players interested in the sport early and developing their basketball skills early on.
“With me being in the middle school teaching, it helps a lot,” Shelmidine said. “Being able to retain girls and kind of maybe direct girls towards basketball that maybe hadn’t thought of it in the past and being able to build relationships with girls at a younger age, so by the time they get to me in high school, they know me as a lot more than just the high school basketball coach. I think that’s really important. I think our current older girls help a lot, and they’ve bought in. They have some big personalities in a good way and being able to help that.”
For Shelmidine’s high school players, the camp allows the Lady Mustangs to build their knowledge of the game, so they can teach it to the younger girls. Shelmidine has started to see strong relationships form with his group.
“The relationships are there. The foundation is still being set,” Shelmidine said. “We’re still really young, but just the conversation and the relationship is different, and then, that confidence I have in them has, I think, translated to the younger girls too. In our camp, I’ll direct it obviously, and I’m keeping it on the road, but I let the older girls run with it. They play games, and they instruct. They did a great job with that.”
Shelmidine was able to be more comfortable and confident hosting and running the camp in his second year.
“I think just being able to have a certain level of confidence that, ‘okay, this is the way I want to do things going forward. This is what we have to be better at as a program,’ so in five or six years, those girls come up, they know the expectation and get them into our middle school program at an earlier age,” Shelmidine said.
For year three, he wants to see the youth interest take off, especially with the WNBA’s growth in popularity over the past few years.
“There’s a lot of good athletes and a lot of good girls in North that, I don’t think, basketball has been presented to them in the second, third or fourth grade before,” Shelmidine said. “It doesn’t have to come at the harm of other sports, but you look at the success of volleyball at North, they do a great job in elementary schools. We have to capitalize on that too. I think just continuing that and understanding that you might not see the dividends for five or six years, but that’s okay.”