#456： Myths About Kids and Sports
Episode Stats
Summary
Youth sports in America is a 15 billion dollar industry, and a lot of that money is going towards special coaching and training as well as participation in elite travel teams. Parents spend enormous amounts of time and money on their kids involvement in sports, hoping the investment will pay off in accolades, college scholarships, and even the chance to play professionally. My guests today argue that all that special coaching you're spending money on probably isn't doing much to turn your kid into a superstar.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast youth sports in
00:00:19.400
america is a 15 billion dollar industry and a lot of that money is going towards special coaching
00:00:24.140
and training as well as participation in elite travel teams parents spend enormous amount of
00:00:28.320
time and money on their kids involvement in sports hoping the investment will pay off in accolades
00:00:32.220
college scholarships and even the chance to play professionally my guests today argue that all that
00:00:36.740
special coaching you're spending money on probably isn't doing much to turn your kid into a superstar
00:00:40.980
their names are lynn zikowski and daniel peterson lynn is one of the pioneers in the field of sports
00:00:44.640
psychology and was a professor of it at boston university for 37 years over the decades he's
00:00:48.940
consulted for professional and collegiate sports programs as well as olympic teams daniel peterson
00:00:53.360
is a science writer who has spent his career looking at the intersection of neuroscience and
00:00:56.980
athletic performance and is the co-founder and director of 80 mental coaching today on the show
00:01:01.340
lynn and daniel discuss whether you can spot athletic talent in a child and why a kid who
00:01:05.100
looks talented at age 10 can end up being a dud athlete at 20 they explain why you shouldn't
00:01:09.360
regiment your child's athletic training or specialize your kids too early in sports along the way they
00:01:13.420
provide best practices for parents and coaches who work with children in sports and we then discuss
00:01:17.480
how sports can boost children's cognitive abilities and why an athlete's mental game can be just as
00:01:21.960
important as their speed and strength we enter conversation talking about what kind of practice is nearly
00:01:26.000
useless and what kind is the most helpful after the show's over check out the show notes at aom.is
00:01:32.180
lynn zikowski daniel peterson welcome to the show thank you brett great to be here yeah thank you for
00:01:46.920
inviting us to be part of your great worldwide podcast well glad thanks for coming on so you guys you
00:01:52.660
too have a new book out called the playmaker's advantage how to raise your mental game to the next
00:01:57.300
level and it's about basically the latest research in sports psychology neuroscience and how that how those
00:02:04.700
things can separate elite athletes from the rest but before we get into that let's start off with some
00:02:10.200
definitions how did how do you all define a playmaker and is this our playmakers seen you know on the
00:02:16.020
the little league level and all the way up through the pros well i'll start with this we when we wanted
00:02:23.480
when we put this book out we wanted to start a conversation with parents and coaches about the
00:02:30.300
cognitive aspects of the game and we knew we couldn't really like name it the cognitive advantage
00:02:36.380
or the neuropsychological uh benefits of of sports we knew we had to connect it to something a term
00:02:43.720
that people had heard of and the term that popped in our heads was playmaker because there seems to
00:02:50.160
be somewhat of a universal understanding across sports especially team sports that a playmaker is
00:02:56.260
someone who obviously makes plays someone who sees the field the court the ice a little bit better
00:03:02.900
makes quicker decisions better decisions and yes that we do see it at all different age levels
00:03:10.140
that it's that one player who just seems to get it a lot quicker not necessarily from a physical
00:03:17.720
maturity or uh or even a skill component but just someone who kind of orchestrates things out there
00:03:24.600
it's maybe the center midfielder on a soccer team maybe it's the quarterback or someone else on a football
00:03:29.640
team the point guard etc but not necessarily by position i think all players can have some of these
00:03:36.580
playmaking skills and we actually for all the interviews we did with coaches and academics for
00:03:43.100
the book we started each interview with the question to them of what is your definition of a playmaker
00:03:49.840
and we got some very interesting responses and a few of those i'll just share a couple of them
00:03:56.420
for example sydney crosby who was we were very lucky to talk to and we'll tell the story about mike
00:04:02.220
sullivan in a little bit but his response was a playmaker is somebody who is able to create things
00:04:07.700
whether that's for themselves or for somebody else around them it may just be a subtle play that ends
00:04:12.420
up turning into a better play later later on we talked to brad stevens head coach of the uh
00:04:18.480
bros and celtics you know he said in basketball i always think of it in terms of making their
00:04:22.780
teammates better just by their presence on the court the ability to create advantage for everyone else out
00:04:27.400
there and then we also saw a quote from the current manager of manchester city soccer team in the
00:04:34.120
english premier league pep cordiola who's coached barcelona and byron munich one of the best coaches
00:04:40.180
in the world he actually made a comment about one of his young stars 25 year old belgian kevin de
00:04:46.560
bruyne and he was commenting on the skills of kevin and his quote was he makes the right decision
00:04:53.420
in the right moment every single time and we thought that was a great way to define the playmaker
00:04:59.840
but then what the book is about is kind of diving into the science and all the other aspects of trying
00:05:07.020
to figure out what that is that those playmakers have so what i think is interesting is i think
00:05:11.540
oftentimes when people think about sport talent they think of like skill physiology right we had
00:05:17.080
epstein on the podcast talk about the sports team but you guys your focus is on the cognitive aspect
00:05:21.480
right it's all about seeing plays develop and i think this is interesting like you started studying
00:05:27.060
this stuff what back in the late 60s 70s i mean yeah i mean were that were there many people what was
00:05:33.000
the field like at that time of sports psychology were they even looking at that no it was barren
00:05:37.820
there was nothing happening and uh but i always had that fascination wondering who these who these
00:05:45.280
playmakers were these great players and and why did i not become one and and so i'm thinking it had to
00:05:53.380
be the coaching and i always was intrigued with that and finally i had a an olympic champion at boston
00:05:59.920
university david hamry uh won the 400 meter hurdles in mexico city and then followed up in 72 with a silver
00:06:07.660
did his doctoral dissertation on these great athletes and what made them champions and of course
00:06:14.200
we were really talking about champions but we decided to call them playmakers rather than champions
00:06:19.520
but but that was kind of the beginning so that that's mid-1980s where it's kind of i'd have to say one of
00:06:27.040
the first publications on examining who these people were that became the playmakers or the champions
00:06:35.040
so uh i'd have to i'm proud of the fact that i kind of started a lot of this inquiry but it's really
00:06:41.580
mushroom and you mentioned that david epstein's great book on the sports gene where he kind of
00:06:46.820
debunked the whole idea that so much of uh performance is around what you inherited from
00:06:52.440
your parents so it's yeah it was a barren field and it's slowly picking up but uh and we're hoping
00:06:59.660
with you know your your help for sure in your podcast that we can spread the word that we've got
00:07:05.260
to be thinking more about this area that's been historically ignored i'm sure there's a lot of dads
00:07:10.840
listening to this show their kids are involved in sports uh now you know we talked before we got
00:07:15.440
on the show my kid's doing flag football this year he's done t-ball and things like that and you know
00:07:20.780
our approach is you know it's very casual but there's a lot of parents who they they invest a
00:07:26.420
lot in their kids right and because they want them to be successful they're hoping they'll go to
00:07:30.720
college scholarships maybe they'll go pro and we've probably all seen those specials on the news
00:07:36.220
about parents sending off their kids to these really intense training camps when they're 10 or
00:07:41.280
11 and because i think people there's an idea out there that if you want to be great you have to
00:07:46.160
start young because there's a story of tiger woods right he was golfing when he was three or wayne gretzky
00:07:51.160
um but what's the research say does can can you spot playmakers that early and can you can you
00:07:58.980
really train it like like we think we can if you send your kid to an extensive soccer camp is that
00:08:04.580
can help them become a playmaker well the answer let me start with that is definitive no that is
00:08:12.480
it's that uh like yogi berra the great philosopher i chuckle at him he always said like prediction is
00:08:19.620
difficult particularly for the future and uh it's the with the all the pro leagues and the colleges
00:08:26.680
have all failed miserably and trying to predict talent from me at a young age and it's it really
00:08:32.680
bothers me when i hear colleges offering scholarships to to young athletes who might be 13 14 years of
00:08:39.600
age and they're five or six years from entering college and it's just so unpredicted but uh they
00:08:46.640
keep trying to make those kinds of predictions that based upon that early talent that they're going to
00:08:52.000
get there and and then that kind of ties in also to the the whole era of specialization that you've got
00:08:58.340
to start early and the entrepreneurs of course that's how they make their money uh having parents
00:09:03.580
invest big money in kids coming to camp or hiring a team of specialists and i'm when i talk about that
00:09:10.740
i'm reminded of the great story that probably many of our listeners will not have heard of but there was
00:09:16.220
the athlete football player at usc the todd morenovich i think he was drafted about 1991 number in the
00:09:22.740
first round but by oakland just absolutely fizzled and his father had this he was a he was a football
00:09:29.000
coach who had the idea that i'll get uh you want to train him to be a quarterback that i'll get all
00:09:34.880
these specialists from the mechanical people the technical people the nutrition people strength and
00:09:40.620
conditioning and all these experts and just had him so regimented and he he had a very modest
00:09:48.140
career in at usc and then failed miserably in the pros and then got into drugs and alcohol but he
00:09:55.380
was so regimented and and even though the father had great intentions it really backfired on him that
00:10:02.200
may be the most you know horrific story i but i've heard of in in in sport where you know parental
00:10:08.800
beliefs uh really kind of backfired on and dan can you highlight i mean i mean so if specialization
00:10:15.040
doesn't work i mean when you guys looked through the research what most of these playmakers we think
00:10:21.160
of today like tom brady basketball players like did they specialize in their sport at an early age or
00:10:27.140
were they doing all sorts of different stuff no they the common theme that we heard throughout all of
00:10:32.800
those and in fact we we have quotes in the book from from brad stevens mike sullivan the coach of the
00:10:38.060
penguins etc saying the ones that they look for and the the players who are at that elite levels
00:10:43.840
most of them now we're going back you know 10 years or so now uh they played multiple sports growing
00:10:50.200
up and what's interesting is we did look at a lot of the research and there was one study in particular
00:10:56.020
that really stuck out dr arnie gulick who was the head of the department of sports science at
00:11:01.720
kaiser sloten university in germany he did a very long gated study of the soccer young soccer athletes who
00:11:11.580
went into the elite german soccer academies and you can imagine that's pretty elite because you know
00:11:17.680
soccer is everything in germany so some of these kids coming in at age 8 age 10 to these basically
00:11:23.880
you move away from home and go to these elite academies and he uh gave a presentation at the 2016
00:11:31.440
youth athlete development conference in singapore and he just dropped a bomb on everybody and his
00:11:37.460
his uh opening remark was future top athletes cannot be predicted reliably by way of young age talent
00:11:45.880
identification particularly early talent development programming is neither necessary nor beneficial
00:11:51.960
but correlates negatively with long-term senior success and what he did was he he looked and tracked all
00:12:00.360
of these players over time and he saw that in fact another quote here their success at the age of 10
00:12:07.460
had zero correlation with their success as a senior so in other words he followed them
00:12:11.680
through the years to see if they ended up on elite teams if they ended up with the german national team
00:12:17.520
etc and he said no that those who were better at a young age were not those who were better at an older age
00:12:24.720
and of those who were recruited at an age of u11 or u13 by the time they were 19 only nine percent of those
00:12:33.280
kids were still in the program they had all dropped out by then on the other hand those who made it to
00:12:38.880
the national a team of germany those we see in the world cup were being built upon gradually across age
00:12:45.100
stages and so what they found was these kids who made it who were some of the top german stars today
00:12:53.000
played multiple sports probably up till about the age of of high school you know age 14 15 then they
00:13:00.620
turned their attention and specialized in a sport uh through the high school ages but from age six
00:13:06.820
from age eight the age of your son up till high school it was trying to get them in as many sports
00:13:12.600
as possible and there's also a a physical component and a burnout component as well lots of studies from
00:13:19.640
orthopedic surgeons etc and we've seen this a lot in baseball with kids you know having surgeries on
00:13:26.100
their elbows in their early teens that the recommendation from the medical doctors as well
00:13:32.340
as the the cognitive scientists is to play one sport per season play a different sport every season
00:13:38.220
and then take some time off as hard as that is for parents to do with their kids you know and
00:13:43.940
some of the research also shows that as long as they play complementary sports that have a similar flow to
00:13:52.100
them so in team sports if your son or daughter were to play soccer in the fall basketball or hockey in
00:13:58.700
the winter and maybe lacrosse in the spring and then maybe take june or july off but those three those
00:14:05.860
sports are all invasion based as we call them they all have similar concepts of offense defense passing
00:14:13.380
shooting dribbling moving the the ball or puck down the field and so those cognitive skills cross over
00:14:20.420
between the sports and reinforce each other but yet they're using different physical muscles
00:14:26.980
um they're playing a different sport with different teammates so they don't have the mental burnout of
00:14:33.180
playing 12 months a year of soccer 12 months a year of basketball and so that's um i think that's
00:14:39.340
you're going to hear more and more of that it's it's tough for parents to come up against that because
00:14:44.200
kind of the for-profit coaching machine tells them to oh your your son or daughter has to be playing
00:14:50.560
this sport 10 12 months a year if you want to get them anywhere and that's just that's just simply
00:14:55.940
not true and there's a lot of social pressure too right because like because your kid sees all the
00:15:00.840
other kids doing it and like well i got to do that too yeah i guess i could if i could add something
00:15:05.760
here uh the the message uh take home message for parents would be when when your children are young
00:15:13.740
and interested in getting into sport and they're they're seeing it on television hearing it their
00:15:18.900
friends are playing have them sample of it we call it sampling jean coutet and others uh in canada
00:15:25.160
study this extensively and they call develop these different periods of what kids should be doing
00:15:30.340
in in terms of talent development but those years when they get interested in sport it may be four
00:15:36.400
or five years of age six have them sample a variety of sports and and let the the youngster decide what
00:15:43.780
they seem to be best at and what they what they have a passion for and as parents we tend to socialize
00:15:50.240
our kids into sports that we played and we have a passion for in life and think that our kids are going
00:15:55.940
to be uh going to like it and and be good at it but that just isn't correct so get try have them
00:16:03.360
experience a whole variety of different sports i know it's expensive but that way they they'll get
00:16:08.480
a better sense of what that youngster has a passion for and could really be good at so give them a try
00:16:14.980
right sample i mean another thing you talk about too is you mentioned earlier is that like sports today
00:16:20.620
youth sports particularly is very regimented from an early age where you know when i was a kid i had
00:16:25.640
neighbor kids that we play pickup baseball we'd play pickle or we'd play football and like we would
00:16:30.760
so i mean what's going on cognitively in a child's brain when they do when they're playing a sport but
00:16:36.660
it's not it's not adult supervised is there something like something something different
00:16:40.580
that happens compared to say a regimented practice well for one thing uh red is that they're making
00:16:46.520
decisions for themselves there's no parent or coach telling them what to do that's the great
00:16:51.680
tragedy that we have now is that we've lost all that and youngsters are being told what to do at a
00:16:57.680
very young age and they they're find themselves incapable of making decisions for themselves on
00:17:04.760
the field so that was the great thing of of sandlot baseball or pond hockey or pickup games and soccer
00:17:11.420
kids you know made their own decisions made made up some of their own rules just so that they could
00:17:16.720
advance the play so uh yeah there's there's a lot of good things that we've lost by with organized
00:17:22.760
sport um i think yeah i think it's a jammer like you you see these parents in america you know spending
00:17:28.560
lots of money sending their kids to like these really extensive baseball camps and yet a lot of the
00:17:33.660
great players come from these caribbean countries yes where they they used a paper bag for a glove
00:17:39.280
great point great point yes so okay well okay you don't want to specialize early uh what's the
00:17:46.560
best way you know for those who are parents of athletes or coaches who are coaching young people like
00:17:51.560
what's the best way to coach kids because i remember when i uh i i was the volunteer dad to be
00:17:57.280
the coach for t-ball last year and i remember getting there and so i had baseball is a really
00:18:02.740
complicated sport it's very abstract right but then there's like the skill is really hard like throwing a
00:18:08.020
ball really hard hitting a ball off a tee it's like a small object hard but then there's these
00:18:13.520
rules i remember one day when we finally i said i'm gonna i'm gonna teach them the difference between
00:18:17.360
a forced out and like a tag out and good luck yeah it didn't happen and so at that point i was like
00:18:25.100
you know i just realized you know what i'm just gonna let them have fun um so yeah so like what what
00:18:30.500
is the best approach for coaching like you know ages you know five to ten any insights there from the
00:18:36.000
research i'd say i'd start with we talked with another one of len's longtime colleagues um
00:18:44.240
and at the university of new jersey and uh uh professor feigenbaum and he has spent his whole career
00:18:55.560
advocating for what what he calls the technical term physical literacy but what he argues is that so many
00:19:02.820
kids today jump right into sports and that that are coached by parents well meaning i was one of them
00:19:10.340
uh but they go way off the deep end as far as teaching them all the minor tactics and tricks and
00:19:17.360
rules and things that they just aren't ready to handle and what uh professor feigenbaum says is
00:19:22.640
first they have to learn to run and jump and you know spin around and learn all of those
00:19:30.280
physical athletic skills and he said that's what used to come like you said from just playing
00:19:36.460
outside with your friends playing tag climbing trees etc and what he sees when he works with a lot of pe
00:19:43.200
educators in schools is a lot of these kids don't even know how to do those some of those things they're
00:19:49.100
not good at some of those basic physical skills and they also don't have the physical development or
00:19:54.840
the strength uh because a lot of that time has been restricted in school and they don't do as much
00:19:59.720
of it after school etc and so we put in the book some some ideas of just that's a place to start
00:20:06.720
is just out there not teaching them a complicated sport but just setting up some basic rules and like you
00:20:13.420
said play play catch uh uh play hot box you know between two bases things like that and then going on from
00:20:22.080
there i think the um a lot of the literature would say you're really trying to build up a lot of
00:20:28.800
pattern recognition being able to see their sport in a lot of different situations and so the old
00:20:35.660
adage of practice like you play instead of breaking down a practice session into drills of going around
00:20:41.820
cones and stuff you know set up some small-sided games uh you know football's an easy one play four
00:20:49.020
on three tag football or flag football like you're doing and just let them experience it and make
00:20:54.480
decisions about where to cut and when to run and how to avoid people and things like that before you
00:20:59.680
try to teach them offsides and everything like that but len what do you think yeah if i could add to that
00:21:04.980
that that's that's that's an important concept you've brought up here but one of the things you can't
00:21:10.240
be afraid of is just to to coaches to modify the rules a little bit and you see it so much in in youth
00:21:18.560
sport where i've had arguments with parents and administrators over things like teaching youngsters
00:21:26.900
baseball at eight nine years of age and they're they're afraid of that hard baseball so when somebody
00:21:33.900
developed this little the ball the same size or perhaps a little bit smaller but but didn't have
00:21:39.880
that hardness that a baseball has that made kids afraid when they get hit by the ball and they said
00:21:44.960
no you can't that that's not baseball they've got to be banged with that real hard baseball
00:21:49.520
to learn the sport so they they really objected to the to the uh to the modification of the ball itself
00:21:56.040
or having a smaller basketball for example a smaller soccer ball when they're first starting out
00:22:02.920
or the the height of the hoop in basketball they were just no you you've got to keep it that what
00:22:09.640
at what level the the adults are playing it at and that's absolutely insane so having a smaller ball
00:22:16.360
lower hoop and now we can teach them the mechanics of making a good free throw or a jump shot if we
00:22:23.040
make those modifications and as dan was saying having them work in tight areas where they get to touch
00:22:28.580
the ball more frequently in a soccer pitch or on an ice hockey rink we did a lot of cross cross ice stuff
00:22:35.100
it not only gives them more touches but it forces them to think quicker they got to make quicker decisions
00:22:41.220
because a defender is on them all the time and i think is another thing that's important to kind of
00:22:46.660
get at this cognitive dimension brett is that that as coaches we're often telling kids what to do
00:22:53.260
and as parents were telling them what to do we we really lost the art of asking good questions
00:22:59.580
so when you ask questions kids have to think and so when you're asking them why would you do this
00:23:06.340
what's a good way to to do this it gets the wheels turning in the in the young brain of a little
00:23:14.800
athlete and so that's one way of kind of enhancing the the cognitive development of kids in sport
00:23:20.820
brett i'm just going to bring up one quote that we have in the book we um from a dr istvan bali who
00:23:26.960
is a world expert in developing these player development plans that you see from a lot of
00:23:32.420
the national sport organizations he's done usa hockey is u.s lacrosse is he's worked with olympic
00:23:37.380
committees etc to kind of understand this idea of physical literacy and building sports skill over time
00:23:43.020
not all at once and the quote that he always likes to use in his presentations is uh and this is dr bali
00:23:49.480
i learned this from jesuit priests in ireland if you want to teach latin to johnny you have to know
00:23:55.140
latin and obviously you have to know johnny so instead of latin if you want to teach any sport
00:24:00.500
to johnny you have to know that sport which we do obviously very well and you have to know johnny
00:24:06.140
we know the sport very well but we do not know johnny or jane from age six to sixteen and he goes on
00:24:13.300
to talk about you can't just impose an adult training program on little kids you need to adjust it
00:24:19.340
down to their cognitive level uh one really great brass tack piece of advice that i got from that
00:24:26.360
was the the research about working memory in kids and when you're instructing them because you know as
00:24:31.920
a parent you know i'm watching my kid play and i'm like shouting instructions at him right and you
00:24:37.240
think it's helpful but like when you guys talked about like no a kid's working memory is not very
00:24:42.740
developed the prefrontal cortex is not very developed so when you're just barking these instructions like
00:24:46.520
they're trying to maintain all that information that you're sending them while also trying to
00:24:50.920
process what's going on in the the sport that the game itself and it just shut like it just shuts down
00:24:55.960
and they don't do well so like basically the tip was like just shut up and let your kid play
00:25:01.520
and it's interesting because uh it just to go a little bit deep in some of the uh the cognitive part
00:25:09.080
of that one of the few of the scientists that we quote in the book really do not get do their work
00:25:15.320
in sports but a very well-known one is daniel kahneman and amos toversky kahneman won the nobel prize
00:25:21.260
and kahneman came out with the book thinking fast and slow several years ago and he introduced the
00:25:28.380
whole topic of how we may how humans make decisions with system one and system two system one is your
00:25:34.600
you're thinking fast you know two plus two is four you don't have to really think about it
00:25:39.080
football's flying at your head like len said you're gonna duck or you will the second time and so those
00:25:44.540
are the system one things those are the automatic things and in a sports world that's when you have
00:25:50.360
mastered a skill that's when you can dribble a basketball without looking at the basketball
00:25:54.160
or you can stick handle a puck without watching the puck and the system two is the more deliberate
00:26:00.660
analytical side where you actually have to stop and think to figure something out and it's as
00:26:07.240
obviously when you're learning to do a new skill you're stopping to look at your hand as you're
00:26:11.680
dribbling the basketball until you till you can figure it out for sure it's the same way like you said on a
00:26:17.480
on a field or on a court in among all that chaos what we want is we want system one happening we want
00:26:24.280
automaticity we want kids who see something see an opportunity see an opening see a pass and they just
00:26:30.440
do it instinctively intuitively and that comes from years and years of pattern recognition of seeing
00:26:37.360
opportunities oh tried that once and it didn't work and slowly subconsciously that database of ideas
00:26:44.580
and patterns build up until the point where it just looks automatic and they always talk about the game
00:26:51.120
slowing down at a higher level that's the process it's going from system two to system one where they
00:26:56.640
can just react the way they should but like you said when a when a parent a well-meaning parent i've been there
00:27:02.920
i know you know yells no pass over there to fred you know your son or daughter already had an idea in their
00:27:10.020
head of what they were going to do and now you've just introduced a whole nother decision there and they slow
00:27:14.860
down and they lose the ball and or they make a bad pass or when a coach yells the play by play from the
00:27:21.040
sideline of exactly every pass they should make it just it disrupts that automaticity and learning
00:27:26.820
process so like you said the best thing to do is cheer positively and and don't give them specific
00:27:32.240
instructions we're gonna take a quick break for your words from our sponsors and now back to the show
00:27:38.180
so let's let's recap here for coaching young kids or parenting young kids who are athletes don't want to
00:27:44.000
specialize early let them play lots of different sports don't make the practices too regimented like but make
00:27:49.820
them more like gameplay so maybe do little mini games within practice so they can recognize those
00:27:55.080
patterns and get that get those or practice those skills that underlie the game would that be a good
00:28:00.560
summary sure yeah and ask questions a lot don't always be telling even though it's a more efficient way of
00:28:06.560
running a practice but talk to the kids and ask them questions challenge them mentally we see that's a
00:28:12.080
great question i always wonder like how do i if i'm watching my kid do something and i see something
00:28:16.680
that okay maybe he should he should have done something differently like do you bring that up
00:28:21.080
right after like in the car ride home like do you ask a question like what what were you thinking in
00:28:25.920
this i mean because like you don't want to ask it in a way like what were you thinking you you idiot
00:28:29.680
like so like i mean so like what what kind of advice there like how do you have that conversation
00:28:35.000
with your kids so they can uh develop more cognitively for their sport well it's heightening
00:28:41.100
that awareness i think picking your spots and when to do it it may not be in the car car ride home
00:28:46.020
wait for a while depending upon whether it's a success or failure uh attempt but it's it's asking
00:28:52.260
those questions of your children as a parent or as a coach uh i think is really healthy you know
00:28:58.180
without kind of coming across as uh you know it's really an inquisition but rather how how are they
00:29:05.040
seeing the field and the pitch or the court they might be seeing it very differently than when
00:29:11.000
they're on there than you as a parent or a coach on the sideline because they're getting a different
00:29:15.260
angle so it's it's always good to hear them and but kind of do it with a little bit of humor too and
00:29:21.120
encouraging them to to talk it through and ask why they make these decisions and you know brett i always
00:29:26.420
when my my guys were little we had a hockey coach who's a great guy and he told his parents on the
00:29:32.660
first day of the season he said abide by the the parking lot rule and we're like what's the parking
00:29:38.520
lot rule and he said after a game you start up your car your kids in the car you're heading out of the
00:29:45.200
parking lot when by the time you get out of the parking lot stop talking about the game you know
00:29:50.180
that's it you know it just good game bad game maybe one question but once you leave the parking
00:29:55.880
lot it's done and and don't dwell on it and i thought that was always useful at least it was i guess that
00:30:01.700
doesn't mean you can sit in the parking lot and yell at them but basically you know you get you
00:30:06.620
get about 30 seconds or a minute to talk about the game and then it's over let it go right so yeah i
00:30:11.400
mean i think a lot of parents where if they don't do the regimen stuff they're not going to pick up
00:30:14.580
the game but like the kids are picking this stuff up you just have to give them opportunities i guess
00:30:18.780
that's i think that's reassuring so at what point can kids start specializing is it different i
00:30:24.800
imagine i mean maybe it's different for every kid well it's different for every kid and maybe by
00:30:28.680
sport you'll see the specialization in something like gymnastics where they start awfully young
00:30:33.600
swimming to some extent has that as well where they start young and i think there's a belief system
00:30:39.660
that they that that is fairly important that they start young but most of the other sports
00:30:45.060
no sample different ones and i remember sydney crosby telling me in my long interview with him that
00:30:50.340
he said he played every conceivable sport he could as a kid and he didn't specialize in
00:30:54.700
and hockey until he was around 14 or 15 but he said there were so many transferable skills
00:30:59.740
that he learned and he said even cognitively like that the different patterns of play you learn
00:31:06.100
something from every sport that you can transfer and he says you just won't get that by playing one
00:31:11.180
sport and exposed to different coaches as well who give you different ideas on how to process
00:31:16.640
information yeah so that's kind of my take on that yeah i think from the some of the researchers
00:31:22.720
said based on what you know where some of the elite athletes have come from a lot of them didn't
00:31:28.300
start until about that high school age about 14 or 15 years old did they really kind of get rid of
00:31:33.580
the other sports in their life and and pick one and it certainly like you said every every child's
00:31:38.760
difference some may never get rid of them you know the the the three-letter athlete in high school
00:31:44.060
has become more and more rare but they're still out there and there's no reason you have to quit
00:31:49.160
the other sports i know there's all this you know i've lived through it the whole quest for the
00:31:55.060
college scholarship and all of that a couple of my guys did that and but it's it it's a conversation
00:32:02.020
with them at that age of hey if you really want to go for it from high school and beyond here's
00:32:07.640
probably some things we need to do but you don't have to you can keep playing all of your sports if
00:32:12.160
you want and then they make the decision i think the data are pretty clear too that specialization
00:32:17.080
is much earlier today than it was when david henry did his study in the mid-1980s i think
00:32:22.960
it was the the of the 50 some athletes he interviewed they they were specializing at about age 15 you
00:32:29.720
know my i don't know what they are the exact number would be today but i suspect it's much younger than
00:32:37.120
15 years of age to specialize in the sports that they're playing yeah i mean you you see very few
00:32:42.480
even in college like multi-sport players i think oh you has one right now the quarterback
00:32:47.640
for oh yeah he's good good baseball baseball player football yeah but no they're not a lot of
00:32:53.080
deon sanders anymore jackson's jim thorpes right but but part of that i think brett is is you know
00:33:00.180
as parents you know we think we're we've got to do the right thing and and there there are good
00:33:06.140
entrepreneurs out there that are sales people and they say there's only one way to get to the top
00:33:10.980
you gotta stick with me and they've got to play 12 months a year and we'll start early and they
00:33:16.440
buy into that they think more more is better and yet you know but these people aren't reading journal
00:33:22.880
articles or the sports science information so how would they know they're hoping that they're making
00:33:28.280
the right decision and intuitively it might make sense to them but it's research just does not support
00:33:34.820
that so we've been talking about so far how the brain works the child's brain works when they're
00:33:40.420
learning a sport and the best way to approach that when they're young and we want to specialize
00:33:43.620
later on when maybe when they're in high school but you also hit on research saying how how sports
00:33:49.740
can affect cognition and that cognition carry over to other parts of our life because oftentimes we
00:33:55.140
think of sport it's very like domain specific but there's research showing that you know when you
00:33:59.220
play sports you work parts of your brain that can help you in decision making and say you know just
00:34:05.240
school work etc yeah it was one of the interesting studies that we looked at was from the university
00:34:11.680
of illinois dr beckman and who's dr hillman at university of illinois hillman yeah yeah they did
00:34:18.600
uh some very interesting studies uh probably about five or six years ago where they had they have a
00:34:25.620
facility there that they call the cave it's basically almost 180 degree surround screen where they can
00:34:33.000
flash movies and images of environments up there and then test certain things as you react to them
00:34:38.460
and one of the things they had in there was a scene of a busy street and your job was to cross the
00:34:46.240
virtual street without getting hit by the cars and so they brought in university of illinois student
00:34:52.220
athletes and they brought in some recreational athletes and then they brought in some athletes who
00:34:57.900
didn't play a lot of sports and they tested them as far as their ability to know when to cross the
00:35:04.820
street virtually in other words timing things you know there's cars coming both ways and all of that
00:35:11.060
and then they did so well the first thing they found is that yes indeed elite athletes got across the street
00:35:17.540
better than than the recreational athletes or the non-athletes but then they also threw in some things like
00:35:24.260
distractions as most students are distracted they'll have a phone ringing they'll have a have
00:35:30.100
them look at a phone while they try to cross the street etc and there again that for what they found
00:35:35.480
is that the elite athletes had better awareness peripheral vision etc and they were able to get across
00:35:41.620
safer but it still didn't answer the question and they they admit that this they haven't asked the
00:35:46.520
question whether it's nature or nurture you know are they are these elite athletes better at this
00:35:52.600
because they played sports and that trained their cognitive abilities or are they elite athletes
00:35:59.860
because they were born with better cognitive abilities a lot like the the david epstein discussion
00:36:04.520
that he's brought up of of is it is it genetic or is it uh is it training and that goes into the
00:36:10.560
whole 10 000 hour discussion etc which we'll get to but and they have also found that they've tested
00:36:16.740
athletes who can show better vision results and other things but usually they only show better
00:36:23.860
vision perception etc when they're in a sports context so if you show a bunch of elite soccer
00:36:31.020
players a soccer situation and and stop something and have them think about working memory or whatever
00:36:36.580
they find that in a soccer setting they do much better than people who are not soccer players
00:36:41.860
but in a non-sports specific context they don't they're they're not that much better they don't
00:36:47.780
have that many more cognitive gifts than uh than the general population so still a lot of interesting
00:36:54.000
research to do out there but um a few hints here and there yeah let me let me add a little bit to
00:36:59.220
what dan said brett there are a couple of studies that i'm quite familiar with uh my my colleague at
00:37:04.320
university montreal jocelyn foubert developed a device called the neurotracker which is really
00:37:11.680
multiple object tracking so it takes incredible cognitive skills particularly attention skills
00:37:18.740
and an executive function processing skills to do well on the task and this is published in
00:37:25.500
in prestigious journals nature and in science and basically has demonstrated that that elite athletes
00:37:32.600
outperform other people on that but again we don't know that's something that they were they were
00:37:38.680
gifted with i tend to think it is something that that helped sport helped them develop yeah they
00:37:44.160
may have had high baselines to start with but sports certainly contribute to that and then we cite in
00:37:50.720
in the book also a famous dana study looking at executive functions of high-end soccer players and
00:37:57.820
lo and behold they used a couple of spanish players that i worked with in 2006 and and eight
00:38:03.360
iniesta was one of them i think ramos was the other and they were yeah yeah yeah xavi was xavi that's
00:38:10.320
right who would they were just off the charts on executive functioning standard psychological test
00:38:17.100
they used for lucky and executive functioning abilities and they were just nobody close to them
00:38:23.060
here again did they did they come into the world with those those great abilities or did the kind of
00:38:31.020
football they played help develop it and i'm leaning towards the latter for sure okay yeah because i
00:38:36.440
know there's a lot of uh discussion too now about the role of physical education or sports in school
00:38:42.700
when there's all this pressure now for you know kids to do well on tests so a lot of schools are
00:38:47.320
dropping pe they're dropping sports and you think well what are what are they missing out i mean is that
00:38:52.180
is that going to affect how well they actually do on these tests because they're not exercising their
00:38:56.160
their brain in that way exactly right you hit that right on and my my good former student and
00:39:02.840
colleague avery fagenbaum in new jersey he's kind of the world's advocate on that he said and and i
00:39:09.020
think there are a lot of pretty bright people who would support that we've got to have that that
00:39:13.640
exercise dimension to to enhance brain function it's just that uh you know the policy makers uh believe
00:39:21.640
there's you just got to have more reading writing and arithmetic and uh the world's problems will be
00:39:26.320
solved not true so i mean so far we've been talking about um this is very like very recreational i think
00:39:32.640
sports are i mean for me sports are important for kids because you make a lot of memories uh you make
00:39:37.960
friends you get to exercise you get to work your brain a different way so i think for most parents
00:39:42.860
who are listening like this is going to be useful advice because they'll their kid will play sports
00:39:46.720
through high school and they'll have a good time but like what about like is i mean we talked about
00:39:51.420
earlier can you recognize if a kid like they say they're a senior in high school like okay he has a
00:39:57.460
chance to do well in college is that even i mean is that possible like can you see like you can see
00:40:02.060
the playmaker ability there or like even if he gets to college can you go well now maybe he has a chance
00:40:06.340
to go pro is that possible can you are there things we can look for that will determine performance
00:40:12.380
like later on in their athletic development i'm not talking when they're 10 i'm talking when they're
00:40:16.020
18 17 years old well let me just kind of comment on that brett is that up until now in every major
00:40:24.540
sport that i've worked in the the drafts uh are very poor at predicting those who are going to make it
00:40:31.960
and they keep repeating the same mistakes because they basically look at the attributes that they
00:40:37.900
could easily measure so it's easy to measure athlete speed athlete strength you know their emotion
00:40:43.740
their biomechanics and they they try to create an equation that's going to predict whether they're
00:40:49.080
going to be successful as a collegiate player or a pro player men and women and and the prediction rate
00:40:56.300
has been terrible and and and so why and my opinion is that the area that they're missing may be the most
00:41:04.820
important one in the equation it's not part of the equation and that's the the these perceptual
00:41:10.060
cognitive abilities of that individual and because we haven't been able to measure it up until now
00:41:15.720
it's not part of the equation and and kind of makes the the the prediction terrible as it's been
00:41:22.120
so i'm i'm predicting i'm making this prediction that in the future it's going to get a lot better
00:41:27.440
because now we're at that point scientifically where we can measure these perceptual cognitive
00:41:34.340
abilities and we cite that in the book uh and i keep talking about it where there's really good
00:41:41.000
things happening in the world of sport and sport science where we're able to measure these perceptual
00:41:46.220
abilities cognitive abilities and i think it's going to enhance the predictive uh ability of uh
00:41:52.780
talent scouts so what is what are they doing to test for that cognitive aspect of the sport
00:41:59.700
or they're starting to well uh let me briefly mention a couple of them the the first thing
00:42:05.800
we talk about in in part two of the book is being able to uh to read read the play so it's it's a kind
00:42:13.360
of perceptual skills and most of it's with with vision of course but certainly we rely on some of our
00:42:19.440
other senses too but vision is the primary one what are we seeing out there and uh there is a
00:42:25.500
a company called uh right eye r-i-g-h-t-e-y right eye that in 10 minutes gets you all the valuable
00:42:35.540
visual metrics that are important for basically every sport it's more than just doing acuity
00:42:41.040
tests with an optometrist it captures these wonderful metrics that's getting a lot of traction
00:42:45.960
in the world of sport in the last couple of years very familiar with that company and how they're doing
00:42:51.520
it and i think that's adding adding to our predictability by measuring these perceptual
00:42:57.300
skills then the decision making part you may know from the knowing the football world a bit
00:43:03.860
they've used the this wonderlick test which was kind of a 1930s uh primitive iq test and they i think
00:43:12.340
the dallas cowboys introduced it to see if they could identify smart quarterbacks way back when and and they
00:43:19.180
continue to use the wonderlick and every year they talk about how somebody scored on the wonderlick
00:43:23.360
even though it's supposed to be confidential but it's a terrible predictor or measure measurement tool
00:43:28.480
for cognitive abilities and so my good friend scott goldman uh started a project when he was at
00:43:35.380
university of arizona and then when he moved to michigan kind of fine-tuned it and he's developed
00:43:40.620
something called the aiq or the athlete intelligent quotient and it basically looks at important executive
00:43:47.020
functions the kinds of intelligence markers that you need basically executive function skills to be a
00:43:53.880
good athlete and that's getting a lot of traction in the high performance world and i think it's it's
00:43:59.820
only going to alert most of the sporting community that we've got a way now of measuring those executive
00:44:06.820
functions that work at the free prefrontal cortex and so forth so now that we can we can insert into
00:44:14.220
the equation the perceptual dimension and the decision making dimension i think it's going to do
00:44:19.240
great things for the predictability of of athletes at the college level and at the professional level
00:44:25.200
you know brett another just to add on to what len said in high school football we have a section i think
00:44:32.120
it's chapter two called you know what gets measured gets noticed and one of the things they have every
00:44:38.600
year for the elite high school football players is nike sponsors it called the opening and it's regional
00:44:44.620
competitions across the country i believe there's six of them and then if you do well at the regional
00:44:49.400
competition you get invited to the national competition and these are high school football players looking to
00:44:55.380
move on to college or get recruited for college and one of the things that we noticed and we looked at a lot of the
00:45:02.820
numbers etc and the conversation about it was you know the national recruiting services will rate a player
00:45:10.220
three-star four-star five-star and then they go to these combines basically they do run some football
00:45:16.940
specific plays etc and look at them that way but one of the things they do is they put them through these
00:45:21.500
physical tests uh the nike spark test for speed power reaction time agility and quickness and these are all
00:45:28.520
measures of their of their athleticism and what's interesting is what we found is that at the
00:45:35.700
regional at the national level the players who were five-star recruits as ranked by national scouts
00:45:43.740
did not were not always the ones who scored at the highest levels within their position group in the
00:45:50.360
physical test the athletic test and vice versa the guys who scored really well on the spark test
00:45:56.580
or maybe three-star recruits and so from that we kind of you know all right well then what's the
00:46:03.360
what's the x factor then why are why are these guys ranked five stars when they're not even the best
00:46:08.720
athletes within their position group certainly they're elite athletes among the rest of us
00:46:13.200
but within their position group and within their peers physically they're not as gifted as the others
00:46:19.780
yet they're ranked higher and that's where we started thinking well it that's where we need to start
00:46:25.240
measuring or find a way to measure the cognitive end and in fact we were so interested in that and
00:46:31.660
exactly your question how do we measure this decision making component i think that's become uh len and i
00:46:38.320
have decided that's the topic of our next book in 2019 is to look specifically at decision making in
00:46:46.040
sports and dive deep into that and all of the interesting science and interesting anecdotes
00:46:53.580
about good decisions bad decisions winning games losing games uh how do you coach decisions how do
00:47:00.360
you measure decisions and all of those things so there's a lot of work still left to be done there
00:47:04.560
no for sure um and one of you mentioned the 10 000 hour rule in in practice because we've had
00:47:10.120
andrews erickson on the podcast to discuss this and i i thought one of the really kind of
00:47:15.600
counterintuitive findings you you have in the book is that at an elite level it seems like more
00:47:21.120
practices and help like you you got you give the example of uh kyle ivory no the basketball player
00:47:26.600
just decided he wasn't going to practice anymore oh ellen iverson ellen iverson right his famous rant
00:47:32.000
right his famous rant against practice i mean so i thought that was kind of interesting it's like
00:47:35.480
it doesn't seem to help that much at a certain point what's going on there well i think in
00:47:40.860
iverson's case it was you know his practice days were when he was in college so when he's like a in
00:47:48.440
the nba for 12 years skipping a practice isn't going to significantly affect alan iverson i think
00:47:55.180
that's what he would when he raised all that that iris and why is the practice important well you
00:48:00.200
know he's his his skill set was all automated by that time you know getting an extra 15 minutes in
00:48:07.360
wasn't going to make much difference for ellen iverson but for the developing athlete it's hugely
00:48:11.120
important and and and it's got to be like and i'm sure you learned that from uh andrews erickson
00:48:16.320
that it's got to be deliberate practice we had a great interview with him and i've known andrews
00:48:21.680
for many years that he just doesn't see much of this what he called deliberate practice or what i
00:48:27.640
refer to more purposeful practice where you're actually trying to accomplish something not just
00:48:32.760
going through routine stuff at any level whether it's at the youth level or collegiate level or at
00:48:39.860
the pros you have to be trying to get better with each and every practice on certain subskills
00:48:45.700
and i think he probably clarified and summarized better than i could you know the the whole conversation
00:48:52.340
about 10 000 hour theory and and even you know malcolm gladwell in his outliers book he didn't
00:48:59.220
really even mess it up that bad i mean he was just he took this before that it was a somewhat of an
00:49:06.120
obscure piece of research by dr erickson among people outside of his field and and it was on musicians
00:49:12.320
it wasn't even on athletes and but and malcolm will say this as well and we we have some of his quotes
00:49:18.720
in the book that you know he didn't play up he called it the 10 000 hour rule but other than that
00:49:25.380
it just kind of one of those things that kind of took off on its own that poor people heard 10 000
00:49:30.880
hours is what you need to be world class and that's the thing that stuck whereas gladwell and erickson will
00:49:37.620
say that's not the thing that we wanted to stick what we wanted to stick was the idea of deliberate
00:49:44.140
practice as len said where you're focusing on something specific preferably a weakness you have
00:49:49.960
a coach there to guide you it's uncomfortable you don't like doing it but over time you will get
00:49:55.740
better at these things and that goes back to our discussion about automaticity you're moving from
00:50:00.820
system two to system one with all of that practice if you just go out in the driveway and shoot baskets
00:50:07.220
for an hour casually okay you can chalk that up as an hour of practice but you really didn't improve
00:50:13.820
anything one of the quotes that anders gave us during our interview is he's saying i'm basically
00:50:19.660
arguing that when you look at a lot of the practice that i've seen visiting all sorts of different teams
00:50:25.260
very little of that is actually even getting close to this idea of individualized deliberate practice
00:50:31.080
where somebody's doing something that is uniquely appropriate for them to improve some aspects of their
00:50:36.340
performance in some individualized context so that's kind of his mission and maybe he said
00:50:42.940
something similar when he talked to you but that's his mission is to push the deliberate practice part
00:50:47.800
not the quantity right so i imagine like you wouldn't want to do this deliberate practice on young
00:50:52.880
kids with the skill like just have them you know throw balls over and over and over again and like
00:50:58.360
make it right you just want them to play but i imagine as you get you decide to specialize you're going
00:51:03.520
to start spending more time refining skills that's when a coach come in and i imagine at an elite
00:51:08.340
level like the practice that you're doing is not so much the the physical skill of it but it's like
00:51:14.200
the the mental part like the film like if you're a football player it's like you're spending a lot of
00:51:17.780
time watching film analyzing things how you could have done things better you know increasing that
00:51:22.780
pattern recognition in your brain right exactly exactly well guys this has been a great conversation
00:51:29.360
where can people go to learn more about the book well it's available just about anywhere it should
00:51:33.620
be in your local bookstores it's obviously on amazon and all the online booksellers it's called the
00:51:38.820
playmakers advantage it is uh in our website is 80 mental.com 80 mental.com and people can also
00:51:48.840
follow me on twitter at daniel peterson all one word and like i said it's uh we've had it out there
00:51:56.120
since june uh getting a lot of good feedback it's available in hardcover audio version or ebook and
00:52:02.680
then there's a paperback coming out in january well lynn zikowski daniel peterson thanks so much for
00:52:07.900
coming on it's been a great conversation thanks for having us on brett my guests today were lynn
00:52:12.960
zikowski and daniel peterson they are the authors of the book the playmakers advantage it's available on
00:52:17.480
amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can find more information about their work at 80 mental.com
00:52:22.380
also check out our show notes at aom.is playmaker we can find links to resources we can delve deeper
00:52:28.940
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:52:45.180
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at art of manliness.com and if you enjoy the show
00:52:49.320
you've gotten something out of it i'd appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher that
00:52:52.680
helps out a lot and if you've done that already thank you please consider sharing the show with
00:52:56.220
a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it as always thank you for
00:52:59.680
your continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly