Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy

The Shot Scientist

The Shot Scientist

Mitchell Kirsch ’17 (left) takes Duncan Robinson ’13 through a workout last summer in Love Gymnasium. Robinson spends his NBA offseasons training with Kirsch.

During the tranquility of summer on Exeter’s campus, Mitchell Kirsch ’17 summoned a group of basketball players to Love Gym to simulate the swarming defenses Duncan Robinson ’13 would face in the NBA his season. To compensate for their lack of height relative to long-limbed pros, these defenders flailed long black padded sticks in front of the 6-foot-7-inch Robinson, attempting to obstruct his vision and movements as he dribbled the ball and shot it.

As strange as this exercise looked, Robinson invites this kind of organized chaos on the court. It’s why the Detroit Pistons forward hired Kirsch to refine his game.

Kirsch, who played on two NEPSAC championship teams at Exeter as well as in college and overseas, has embraced a nontraditional approach to skill development. His methods have captured the attention of numerous college and NBA players, as well as coaches at the highest level of the sport. Some of them are among his nearly 100,000 Instagram followers.

Historically, sports training has focused on muscle memory: Athletes improve through the repetition of proper techniques. But, Kirsch says, “there’s a major shift happening.” Static drills in practice don’t always translate to success in the unpredictable environments of competition. Shooting a basketball alone on a court, for example, will rarely happen during a full-court game.

Over the past two decades, a growing body of interdisciplinary research has shown that manipulating variables to mimic the challenges an athlete might experience during competition can lead to better results. This constraints-led approach, or CLA, draws from scientists’ understanding of ecological dynamics, or the nature of how individuals move through different environments. By providing players with various limitations or constraints — every-thing from dimmer lighting to extra defenders — coaches force athletes to learn to adapt to game conditions.

As Robert Gray, an associate professor of human systems engineering at Arizona State University, says, “Instead of the coach telling the athlete what to do, how to move, it’s letting the athlete figure it out on their own.”

Although some coaches contend that they have always operated this way, Kirsch belongs to a new generation of trainers who are steeped in the scientific underpinnings of the CLA methodology.

Summer school

Exeter is Kirsch’s laboratory. For the past three summers, he has refined drills at the school while working with scores of local teenagers in his Elevate Basketball skills academy. Between those sessions, he holds private workouts on the grounds. Among his clients are Notre Dame forward Ryder Frost ’25, NBA veterans like Robinson and Georges Niang, and current Exeter players.

Robinson knew Kirsch as the brother of Max Kirsch ’16, his teammate on the Academy’s first NEPSAC Class A title team in 2013. Over the years, they crossed paths. Kirsch’s unconventional, studious approach appealed to Robinson, who blazed a trail from Williams College to the University of Michigan to the NBA. Eventually, Robinson enlisted Kirsch to design and oversee his offseason regimen.

“When I’m training, I want to think throughout my workout, and I want to learn,” Robinson says. “And he helps me do both.”

Last summer, Robinson holed up with Kirsch at Exeter for the better part of eight weeks. As usual, Kirsch posted clips from the sessions on his Instagram account, @hoopin_mitch; they collected tens of thousands of views.

These videos offer snapshots into the idiosyncrasies of a constraints-led approach. In one, Robinson warms up by shooting with basketballs of different weights and sizes. In another, he must immediately hoist a 3-pointer upon receiving the ball, never letting it fall below his shoulders and never holding it for more than half a second before releasing it, as if an NBA defender were bearing down on him. Time and time again, Robinson still makes the shot, though his footing and form don’t always look the same.

 

 

A player’s goal is to shoot the ball through the hoop during games. “What we’ve found is you don’t do that by repeating the same movement every single time,” Kirsch says. “You do that by having adaptability within your movement. That’s why we’re applying so many game-realistic challenges to encourage him to find consistency in the chaos.”

In about 20 studies comparing the effects of constraints-led training and more traditionally prescriptive coaching, Gray says, a majority have found that a constraints-led approach delivers superior results. “We’re making more adaptable, problem-solving athletes,” Gray says.

For Robinson, “that ultimately is what translates.” Whether it’s facing defenders with bats for arms or trying to beat a shot clock in his head, he finds these drills prepare him for a grueling NBA season that leaves little time for skill development.

Seeking solutions to problems

Growing up in the small town of Atkinson, New Hampshire, Kirsch didn’t have many peers nearby to play basketball. So he became his own trainer, often running through muscle-memory drills alone. Yet, for all his practicing, Kirsch wasn’t improving to his liking. “I felt like there was no one working harder than me, but a lot of other people were getting better faster than I was,” he recalls.

Attending Exeter altered the trajectory of his development. When he arrived at the Academy as a day student in 2013, he was a slight 6-foot-2. “He, physically, was overmatched,” says Jay Tilton, his former Exeter coach. “But he always had the mindset, the confidence, the drive to be able to hang with the older athletes.”

Playing with them, including his brother, Max, taught Kirsch to work out more efficiently on and off the court. Over his four years, Kirsch honed his skills and gained about 50 pounds of muscle. He started every game at point guard his final two seasons and, as a senior, helped lead Big Red to his second NEPSAC Class A title, in large part because of his intelligence. “He’s always had a very high basketball IQ,” Tilton says. “A very inquisitive player. Asked a lot of questions — good questions.”

By that time, Kirsch had begun answering some of his own questions and had started training younger students. “I saw so many kids that reminded me of where I was,” he says. He wanted to expedite their development, just as others had done for him. And Tilton may have unwittingly planted the seeds for his constraints-led approach to basketball.

“You can have every excuse in the world, but we’re not looking for problems,” Kirsch recalls of Tilton’s philosophy. “We’re looking for solutions. Having that shift in mindset really helped both academically and on court. And funny enough, now that’s a large part of my training style. I’m giving players problems, and I’m encouraging them to find solutions.”

A prescribed path awaited Kirsch at Claremont McKenna College in California, where he continued his playing career. Many student-athletes there opted to pursue careers in consulting or investment banking. Landing a job at a big company was considered “the gold standard,” Kirsch says. Yet, when these alumni returned to the school, “largely, they were just unhappy,” Kirsch recalls, “and, to me, that didn’t make much sense.” His internships at a Wall Street firm and Nike confirmed his suspicion that he would be miserable in the corporate world. When he jokingly told people he was visiting “career services,” he really went to the gym.

With the onset of COVID, the college’s athletic facilities closed and Kirsch started working out at the gym of Jordan Lawley, an NBA skills trainer, in Irvine, California. In exchange for using Lawley’s courts, Kirsch oversaw the development of Lawley’s middle-school clients.

With 30 youngsters and just six hoops, Kirsch lacked the space to run drills as he normally would. Yet the offensive and defensive games he devised on the fly were working better than he could have imagined. The players were improving — fast. And they were having more fun, he says. A limitation was working to their advantage. “I was like, there’s some-thing to this,” Kirsch says.

He honed the idea for a training business grounded in science while earning his master’s degree in business at Babson College in Massachusetts. He also continued to play basket-ball and harbored dreams of playing professionally. He performed well enough at Babson to sign with a professional team in Colombia and later in Norway.

When he returned to the U.S. between seasons, he resumed training other athletes. “I was training people that were probably making what I make in a season in two minutes,” he says. “So I had to shift a little bit and understand where the value creation was.”

He ended his playing career and devoted all of his attention to training. But basketball wasn’t done taking him around the world.

The global game

Kirsch recently offered instruction in Kazakhstan, Sweden and Luxembourg. He also spends time in London, where his fiancée, Eloise Shields ’17, is pursuing a master’s degree.

When Kirsch is in the States, he’s regularly in the NBA orbit. Beyond keeping tabs on players he has trained, he stays in touch with coaches and front office types around the league, many of whom have adopted his methods. The Boston Celtics, for example, recently invited Kirsch to a practice.

Still, his most receptive audience may well be in his old locker room. Kirsch has trained several current Exeter players, and the Academy’s new basketball coach, Harry Rafferty ’13, advocates a constraints-led approach.

“I love that a Phillips Exeter grad is introducing our younger guys to different ways to improve that make them think,” Rafferty says. “It’s not, hey, we’re going to do these sets of drills, and that it’s this way or the highway, or this is the only way to get better.

… I think the biggest power in Mitch’s approach is that it creates an environment where our players are actively thinking of ways that they can improve that are outside the box.”

As much as he enjoys the challenge of fine-tuning the basketball brains of NBA players, Kirsch espe-cially appreciates instilling this mindset in younger players, like those who attend his academy each summer at Exeter. “It’s the most rewarding thing,” he says. “Seeing all these kids from New Hampshire and Massachusetts really improve and embrace this different way of training.”

And this approach can be useful well beyond the basketball court. As Noah LaRoche, a consultant with the Miami Heat who grew up in Exeter and coached Kirsch, says: “It’s not a basketball thing. We’re dealing with constraints all the time.”

Benjamin Cassidy is a first-time contributor to the Bulletin. His writing has appeared in Boston, The Boston Globe Magazine, GQ, National Geographic and Scientific American, among other publications.

This feature first appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of The Exeter Bulletin.