Core Values

The Golden State Warriors have started the season 23-0.  Their team is functioning at about the highest level the NBA has seen.  They are led by Steve Kerr, a guy who played for Lute Olson at U of Arizona, Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich.  In Kerr's absence due to a spinal condition, Luke Walton (also a product of Jackson and Olson) is guiding the team.  The team has four core values: Compassion, Joy, Mindfulness and Competitiveness.  Sounds a bit like 'Zen Master' Phil Jackson.  Balancing these values must be a challenge - competitiveness and joy might cause some friction, unless you win every game!? Critics might point out that Steph Curry is responsible for this more than the coach, but Lebron James' and Kevin Durant's teams lose games every once in a while.

Lose Your Mind and Come to Your Senses

What does this mean and how does this apply to sports?  The psychologist, Fritz Perls, used this phrase as a way to get his patients to live in the present.  It's application to sport- I think it's intuitive - the rational mechanisms of the brain do not have enough time to react to, say, a 98 mph fastball, or a tennis serve at 140mph, so, we rely on... what Yoda calls, the force.  Remember when Obi Won Kenobi's voice says to Luke, 'Trust your feelings".  The Jedi metaphor has a lot of wisdom.  This sentiment is said a lot of different ways.   In the words of Andre Agassi, "Freed from the thoughts of winning, I instantly play better.  I stop thinking, start feeling.  My shots become a half-second quicker, my decisions become the product of instinct rather than logic."  

Coaching Pedigree

 Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, is known for his time playing under Phil Jackson and Gregg Popovich, but what about his college coach?  His college coach, Lute Olson, also clearly made an impression.  Kerr wrote, "The thing about Coach Olson was that he created a family atmosphere for us. We admired him and respected him, but feared him a bit too. The best coaches have that. Fear and respect, a combo of both. You just can’t run a successful team or operation without that discipline and structure, but you also want the human side, the family side, the connection. Lute provided all that." 
  No huge surprise - discipline and care.  How to accomplish that as a coach?

Dr. Coach

A professor of social psychology at the University of St. Thomas puts his PhD. to use on the basketball floor.  He tries to recruit self-motivated student athletes who will work with him and the team, and improve over their careers.  DIII coaches do not hover over their players like the DI coaches, so he figures, he better find players who will work on their own.

Coaches wearing out their welcome?

Coaches push players, but how far?  Steve Nash, in his glass half full way, praises his college coach for making him tougher, even if some of what he did was, in Nash's view, unnecessary.  Apparently, Jim Harbaugh pushes  players to the limit.  Is this the right formula for 4 years of college?  Perhaps.

Nurturing Young Talent or Tanking?

In Philadelphia, they are doing both.  With the NBA regular season over, the 76ers will not lose more games this year, but, basically, they are a minor league team conducting in-season tryouts, hoping to land the next Kobe Bryant in order to turn the franchise around.  Will it work?  Is it 'ethical'?  I guess in baseball Pittsburgh did this for a decade, and in basketball, the Clippers were poorly run and unintentionally a minor league team.  The interesting thing is that young players see a losing team as an opportunity...to stay in the league, and so they play hard, and they have a coach who coaches them, instead of manages their egos.

Visualization & slowing down.

Interesting article about the mind game of soccerfootball. Wayne Rooney visualizes, and Messi does a 2 minute on-field analysis after kickoff before really playing. Slowing the game down seems like a universal skill of top athletes. Is this speeding the brain up? How - through repetition? talent? biology?

As an Underdog

Jason Kidd recalls his NCAA days when his Cal Bears beat the 2 time defending champs, Duke.  As underdogs, they played loose, got a few breaks, and won.  Pressure and playing loose...

Dean Smith - RIP

Legendary basketball coach, Dean Smith, died this week.  His legacy is that not only of a successful basketball coach, but as a good man who was respectful of opponents, and supportive of his players in all dimensions of his life.  I am skeptical about the coaching industry, but here is a man who seemed to be successful while keeping his role in perspective.  He took brave political stands, and his players graduated.  With the cloud hovering over UNC athletics, hopefully, they can use the legacy of Coach Smith to balance athletics with university life (again, I am sceptical).  Maybe Smith was lucky that he did not have to bend the rules to be successful because he was smart and innovative.  In any case, his example is one to aspire to.

Developing Talent

This article in the New York Times is about a young 'prodigy' from Norway who just signed for Real Madrid.  His father - a former pro player - devoted lots of time to his development.  Is it nature or nurture?  Yes, and, probably.

To sleep, Perchance to dream

Recent research suggests that athletes perform their best according to their internal clock - their circadian rhythms.   Early risers do better earlier in the day than late risers.

This makes sense to me.  When I can, I am a late riser.  I find I am sharpest in the afternoon/early evening.  I figured it was the result of years of after school sports that usually start around 3pm.

Anyhow, I suppose we can get a good sense of when we perform our best, and try to schedule accordingly.  I can sympathize with those golfers who must contend with 6a.m. tee times.

 'As for coaches and team owners, Dr. Smith said, “It would be handy to know the phenotype of all of your team members. You could predict who would be playing well at various times of day.”'

Coaching Styles

Interesting article on ESPN about Pete Carroll's career fall, and current rise.  In New England, he followed Bill Parcells - the expected hard-ass type coach.  Carroll was seen as a west coast hippie.  His relentless optimism vs. Parcells' more 'old school' toughness. 

A few weeks ago, an article about Urban Meyer, coach of Ohio State football, documented his rise and fall and rise.  He turned to a Christian book about leadership to re-find success, and to find some balance in his life. 

So, is the old-school, Parcells-type coach just outdated?  Do players' respond to the military-style of coaching that puts discipline above all else?  Has Bobby Knight's style come and gone?

His protege, Mike Krzyzewski just coached his 1,000th victory in collegiate basketball. Coach K. IS a product of the military, but he seems to blend in other influences.

Are these just cosmetic differences in coaching style, or do we live in an era of different expectations, or something else?

Sport Psychology

Sport Psychology, or, at least, the role of the sport psychologist, is often viewed as b.s. for the weak of mind.  The Onion pours it on Mark Sanchez, who, as of time of writing, seems to be succeeding.

Coaching Perspective

Coaching college basketball is a difficult job because it requires recruiting, coaching, and raising money for the university.  There is much more to say on this topic, but for the moment, this article about Steve Lavin, the coach at St. John's University in New York, discusses a bit of the tumult of coaching big time college basketball - losing recruits to bigger fish, and trying to maintain perspective.  I'm usually cynical about coaches, but this article is humanizing.

Why sport?

Freshmen basketball player, Lauren Hill, of Mount St. Joseph's College, has incurable brain cancer and has months to live.  On November 2, 2014, she played in a college game and scored the first basket of the game.  Lauren has taken on the mission of increasing cancer awareness, and raising money for research.   Her attitude is admirable - she has willed herself to focus on something positive out of a tragic situation.  My thoughts go to her and her family.

Though this story is a bit of a tangent for this blog, the story spurred me to think about sport and the role it plays in contemporary US society.  Why sport in a time of difficulty?  For Lauren, the answer is simple.  It was her dream to play college basketball, and she was thrilled to do it and raise attention for a worthy cause.  She was heartened by the support.

One of the things that sport does is to literally bring people together - as in the same building.  In this case, people showed up to support a young woman's dream and a young woman's cause.  The game was attended by over 10,000 fans who filled Xavier University's basketball arena in Cincinnati. In the US, sporting events and major pop music concerts are two events that can reliably bring people to share the same physical, and often psychic/emotional space.  Sport can offer a forum to express some of our thoughts and emotions.

How else could 10,000 people show up to support a person, or a cause, in a clear way?  I'm not saying that this is a good thing, but it's a reality of the culture we live in.  Sport reflects and inspires all sorts of human behavior ranging from greed and arrogance to achievement and self-sacrifice.  Stories like this show the good that sport can help bring out. Thank you Lauren.

The Effectiveness of a Football (Soccer) Manager and Hope for the Cubs?

ESPN writer, Gabrielle Marcotti, wrote this article about the role of the manager in top level European soccer.  His thesis is this:  There is no objective, analytic way to judge a manager, and therefore, hiring and firing is done on reputation (self-promotion and PR) and has more than a little bit to do with timing and luck.  He uses the examples of Jose Mourinho, the self-appointed Special One, and David Moyes, the failed successor to the extremely successful Alex Ferguson, at Manchester United.

Marcotti's argument is consistent with the view of the book, Soccernomics, (earlier version reviewed here) written by a sports economist - Stefan Szymanski and a journalist - Simon Kuper.  The book self-admittedly takes cues from baseball's Moneyball - which is basically an ode to using statistics to evaluate sporting performance.  Statistical analysis in football is difficult since there are few discrete, objective data points (ie goals scored), but they argue that the wages of a team are the best indicator of success with coaching/managing accounting for a small fragment - though they do cite a few notable exceptions to the rule - thus, implicitly backing Mourinho's self-styled moniker, the Special One.  They found that about 10% of managers actually overachieve - in other words, their teams did better than their wages would suggest (2012, p. 114).

This makes me wonder if Joe Maddon will be able to improve the lot of the Chicago Cubs.   He was hired by General Manager, and analytics acolyte, Theo Epstein.  According to the New York Times, "Maddon was the ideal fit, open to ideas from the analytics-minded front office and popular with players for cultivating a loose clubhouse atmosphere while thriving on competing with the payroll behemoths" (full article here).

What Cubs fans really want to know is,  will he get the Cubs to overachieve, or at least achieve up to their payroll?  Is he the exorcist needed to rid the curse of the Billy Goat, and win the World Series?  If he does, we know he will get the credit, but we won't probably know if it was the analytics, or the 'loose clubhouse' that got them there, or just luck.  Cubs fans won't care. 

Competitive Practice

So, the previous post- quote- extolls the virtues of 'having fun' in sport.  This post extolls the virtues of competitiveness.  I recall Michael Jordan saying that one of the best things about his college coach, Dean Smith, was that he made practices competitive.  Under Smith as an assistant, current UNC head Coach, Roy Williams, used to track the performance of each player in practices. Here is an article that touches on this aspect of Coach Smith.
"Much of practice was competitive, and often the losing team in drills and scrimmages had to run."
Read more at http://www.wralsportsfan.com/respect-discipline-among-lessons-from-the-dean-s-office/13132307/#f5vGu8mW1QUcxK4l.99

In another article, UNC's legendary women's soccer coach, Anson Dorrance, winner of 20 NCAA titles, talks of the influence of Coach Smith.

"Coach Dorrance measures and tracks everything his players do in practice, and calls this atmosphere the “Competitive Cauldron”." 

For some, there is a tension between competition and fun.  Some dislike competition and perform better when the stakes are low.  Michael Jordan thrived on competition.  It seemed to make him focus and excel all the more.  This was clearly an asset on the basketball court, but can be destructive in daily life, if, say, you need to gamble to enjoy a round of golf .  Jordan was motivated to prove every detractor wrong, and seems to have the memory of an elephant when it comes to slights received, as his hall of fame speech attests to.

So, how can 'fun' and competition co-exist in a health balance?  Can the competitive mindset be let go of when the context calls for humility, graciousness, and gratefulness?  The post baseball life of Pete Rose might indicate no, but maybe someone like Magic Johnson might indicate something else.

Tiger Woods on Earl Woods,

Don't force your kids into sports. I never was. To this day, my dad has never asked me to go play golf. I ask him. It's the child's desire to play that matters, not the parent's desire to have the child play. Fun. Keep it fun.

Tiger Woods

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/t/tiger_woods.html#2QMHZjM3qpaUT36x.99


Regardless of what you think of Woods the younger, he dominated golf for a long time.  This quote (and I've heard other similar ones) points to role of fun in sports and in instilling a sense of intrinsic motivation in athletes.

Hello World!

This blog is an inquiry into performance - most especially, how the human mind can be used or trained or manipulated to one's advantage or disadvantage.  It is founded by a former athlete and hobbyist photographer who was maddeningly inconsistent, and, more frustratingly for him, acutely aware of his inconsistency.  We hope to draw from  the world of sports, of brain science, of art, of literature, of psychology and of all sorts of human endeavor to explore what makes humans perform well, and perhaps more importantly, take satisfaction in their life's work.  We are skeptical of cliches, tips, new age-y, stuff, but not above it.  We hope this blog will be of relevance to athletes, coaches, teachers, managers, artists, creators, researchers and to the curious.  We acknowledge the tension between the intellectual dissection and classification of performance and its attendant anxieties, and the 'flow' of actually just 'doing it', so, we'll search for sustainable practices and processes rather than just observations.  This tension is the thrust behind the moniker of the blog, 'The Smart Play Dumb'.  Please do let us know what you think.