Psychological strategies are increasingly becoming potent in realising the goal of gaining competitive advantage in sports. Research oriented efforts are therefore central to understanding strategies that could be employed to ensure improvement in sports. In a bid to contributing to research effort in this area of scholarship, this study investigated the effects of goal setting and preperformance routine on accurate execution of layup shot among basketball players in the Polytechnic, Ibadan. The Randomised pretest-posttest control quasi-experimental design was employed in the study using the 322 factorial matrix. Three treatment groups were used in the study with two serving as the experimental while the remaining was the control. The experimental group one was the goal setting group, the second group was pre-performance routine group while the control group was given a placebo. The research instruments used in measuring the accuracy of the lay-up shot was modified from basketball skill ability test, developed by Yadav (2011). Data were analysed using descriptive statistics of frequency counts and percentages as well as inferential statistics of ANCOVA at 0.05 alpha level. The findings of the study showed that there was significant main effect of treatment on accurate execution of lay-up shot among the respondents. There was however no significant main effect of gender, and playing experience on layup shot execution. The result of the study also showed that there was a significant interaction effect of treatment and gender on layup shot execution. There was however, no significant interaction among the moderator variables, but a significant three-way interaction effect was found among the treatment and moderator variables of genderand playing experience.