Critical Support To The Shotputting Free Throw Shooter

They say that shooting a basketball starts in the legs, especially in the case of free throws. You bend your knees and use the greater, more controlled power source of your legs to generate the force of a shot, only finishing the motion off with a flick of the wrist. That’s the theory anyway. South Florida big Kendall Puryear shoots forth in defiance of that orthodoxy. Puryear shot and missed two free throws in her USF debut on Monday night, though “shot” and “missed” are insufficiently descriptive verbs for whatever the hell is going on here.

You’d never teach anything Puryear’s doing here: the way she brings her shooting motion to a full halt at the top of her rise, the way she cocks back the ball in one hand as if quivering an arrow, the way she hucks it in a soaring arc as if it’s a projectile weapon. One potential explanation for Puryear’s form is that she was a champion shot putter throughout high school, winning plentiful district and sectional titles in Missouri. Being good at shot put isn’t the sort of thing that necessarily breaks one’s form like this, but it feels like a start. She shot 58.1 percent from the line through her first two seasons at Purdue, which isn’t great but isn’t game-killingly terrible.

However, the more I watch Puryear and find out about her, the less I care about her weird form. She’s not a novelty player, but rather a legit bedrock player for a team with ambitions. In her USF debut, she stuffed the box score, scoring 12 points and adding six offensive rebounds, four assists, and three steals. South Florida has been extremely successful for decades under now–Dallas Wings head coach Jose Fernandez, and Puryear is a big part of the program’s second post-Fernandez season of the century. The team has big expectations, and Puryear is a core part of the team. I’ll be rooting for her and hoping for the cranial health of anyone seated in the first few rows of USF games.

Correction (11:48 a.m. ET): The 2026–27 season is not USF’s first without coach Jose Fernandez in this century; Michele Woods-Baxter was the interim coach in 2025–26.