Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Behold maybe the first-ever shot from a homemade catapult

Since they had already made baskets from the top of a monument, from a moving roller coaster and from a hot air balloon, the Legendary Shots knew their next trick shot would have to be creative to top their previous efforts.

The result? Check out the Catapult Shot.

The Alabama teens spent most of their winter break in January drawing a blueprint of a catapult they saw on YouTube, then constructing a giant wooden version powered by a pair of 110-pound garage springs. In addition to shelling out $300 for building materials, they borrowed power tools from their parents, painstakingly cut the wood at precisely the right angles and even painted a "Legendary Shots" logo on the side.

Actually sinking the shot turned out to be more difficult than constructing the catapult.

Because the catapult's accuracy was more scattershot than the Legendary Shots expected, it was rare for the ball to get within a foot or two of the rim. The group spent six Saturdays shooting for roughly seven hours a day at a nearby football stadium and in group founder Carson Stalnaker's backyard before finally sinking a shot on a bounce from roughly 50 yards away.

"We just had too much invested in the shot to stop," Stalnaker said. "The thing was� so inaccurate that it would sometimes go 10 feet over the goal and usually it would start catching spin and go left or right. The one that went in was a very rare occasion because we had only hit the rim a couple times before."

Stalnaker isn't certain how the group first came up with the idea for the catapult shot, but he's proud that he and his friends followed through after he first mentioned the idea to a reporter last August. It helped that group member Bryan Anderson had engineering expertise from classes he'd taken in high school and that Jeffrey Higginbotham and John Massey were handy with the power tools as well.

The Legendary Shots aren't certain they're the only ones to have ever made a basket with a catapult at this distance, but they haven't found video footage of any shots even remotely similar on YouTube. They also don't think it detracts much from the shot that it went in on the bounce rather than on the fly.

"Yeah, it hit the ground, but we built a catapult with our own money," Stalnaker said. "The fact that we shot a ball with a catapult, you can't take too much away from us."

Amanda Swisten Scarlett Chorvat Kim Smith Hilary Duff Lake Bell

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