Oklahoma head coach Lon Kruger said there were moments early in Young’s freshman season when he wasn’t expecting Young to fire up a long-range 3, but Kruger grew comfortable with it because it was a high-percentage shot early in the season. One of the main reasons Young chose to play for the Sooners was because he was going to be the main option on offense, and he wouldn’t have to adjust the way he played from his Norman North days. When I saw Steph do it, to be honest, I wanted to do it more often.” “It was kind of perfect timing because Steph was doing it and playing really well and showed that you can have success with it,” Young said. Young didn’t start shooting his long 3s because of Curry, but those shots started becoming accepted because of Curry’s success in college at Davidson and in the NBA. The comparisons between Young and Golden State’s Steph Curry grew rapidly because of the shared shot profile, and it continued when Young stayed home and played for Oklahoma. When you combined his long-range abilities with his elite passing skill, Young practically was unguardable in high school and became a 5-star recruit wanted by the top programs in college basketball. It’s the same concept in basketball - a player who is a threat to shoot from 30 feet and beyond gives his teammates more space to operate and stretches defenses. He compares it to the early days of college football programs running the spread offense. Young’s ability to shoot from distance with accuracy was Merritt’s dream. When you combine the confidence and the skill, that’s why he did it. He wasn’t getting those shots off, so he had to pull it from 25 feet. That freshman year, he’s smaller than everyone else he was playing. His confidence definitely helped him attempt those shots, but it was out of necessity. He wasn’t going to be kidding around either he really would have believed it. “ LeBron James could have walked in our gym, and Trae would have swore that he was better than him. “Trae has always had the utmost confidence,” Merritt said. Career high and OK 6A record 62 points! #NormanNorth #OKPreps #PrepHoopsOK /BTzDHMUSwa Young scored 62 points and made 12 3s in one game his senior season, and the majority of those 3s were from well beyond the 3-point line. ![]() In his junior and senior seasons, he was pulling up from the jump circle, Merritt said. Merritt wasn’t going to limit Young’s range because he shot better than 40 percent from 3-point range. If that meant shooting from the other side of half court, then so be it. When Young was a sophomore, Merritt told him that he didn’t care where he shot from as long as the percentages remained high. Young said his confidence during his freshman season when it came to his deep-range 3-point attempts peaked when he made seven of them in a game, including three from the logo of Norman North’s gym. That’s how he came to shoot those longer shots.” ![]() The 24-foot shot was clean, and the 20-foot shot was contested by a guy that was bigger than him. He wasn’t pulling up from the jump circle like he was when he was older because he was so little. “When he was a freshman, he might have been shooting from 24 feet. He had to do something, otherwise he wouldn’t have been successful. Ninth-graders normally don’t play 6A basketball in Oklahoma. When you’re going out there as a ninth-grader - he probably didn’t play against a ninth-grader all year. “Most people don’t have to do that because it’s not a necessity because they don’t get to play until they’re a sophomore or junior. “He had to do this at such a young age where he could pull up from 30 to 35 feet,” Merritt said. When Young would pull up several feet behind the 3-point line in games, Merritt didn’t have any negative reaction because he had seen him do it countless times in practice. Young tried to get up at least 500 shots per day when he was in high school, and around 50 of those 500 shots would be deep 3-point attempts. He couldn’t spot up from the 3-point line because of the size difference, so Young had to move his range farther back and shoot before the defender could get in his face. But Young wasn’t the typical 2-guard because of how short and skinny he was. ![]() Young was at a physical disadvantage almost every time he stepped on the floor, and it was one of the reasons Merritt mainly only used Young as a spot-up shooter in the ninth grade. Marcus Dickinson, now a senior point guard at Boise State, was Norman North’s starting point guard at the time, and he mainly ran the team’s offense while Young mostly played on the wing. If they did, it was either in garbage time or if that school’s team had numerous injuries. Merritt couldn’t recall many, if any, ninth-graders playing on the varsity level in Class 6A in Oklahoma.
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