Note: I have had this file on my computer for over a decade. Not sure where it originated, but things for each team and player to think about.
Parents, teachers and coaches blame video games for most of society’s ills. This is lazy. Rather than blame video games, we should learn from video-game makers: Obviously, they are doing something right! Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published in Los Angeles Sports & Fitness, September 2011.
When Massachusetts had a five-year period where 16,000 youngsters quit youth hockey before they turned 8, USA Hockey re-evaluated its programming. Roger Grillo, regional manager for USA Hockey’s developmental program and a former coach at Brown University said in a Boston Magazine interview that “The research shows that it’s burnout. It’s too serious too soon.’’ USA Hockey adopted the American Development Model to guide the development of its young players through a long term athlete development plan. Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published in Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development, Volume 1 & 2.
Beyond the Academy, High Performance Centers and the Elite Development League, how can we improve the development system for all players, regardless of level? The above changes cater to the elite players: how do we improve the system for the recreational, developmental and competitive players who have yet to transition to “elite” or perhaps never will? Read the rest of this entry »
Originally published in Los Angeles Sports & Fitness, July/August 2011.
I recently started jiujitsu. In the fall, I tried Pilates. Last year, I bought a paddleboard and started paddleboarding. The winter before that, I taught myself to swim. Before that, I tried boxing and kick boxing. I am, to use the description of George Leonard in Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment, a Dabbler. I enjoy the newness of an activity. I enjoy learning. However, once the newness of an activity wears off, I move on. Once I reach an acceptable level of learning, which for me is far from mastery, I try something new. Read the rest of this entry »
People often cite Tiger Woods as Example A in their support of early specialization. People are fascinated by the stories of Tiger hitting golf balls on the range when he was two-years-old and the images of him on TV.
On another blog, I saw an interview with Seattle Sounders Strength & Conditioning Coach David Tenney. He has an interesting response when asked about soccer development in the United States:
I agree that soccer has developed to a good level in this country…However, there are still some real areas that we lag behind our South American and European competition. I think that if you look at the average high school age or college game, it’s an overly physical battle…The American game is about trying to play at a frantic speed for as long as possible. At times, it looks like uncontrolled chaos. When we start to get coaches that can slow the game down a bit, so players can think, then we will make progress.
Originally published by Los Angeles Sports & Fitness, October 2010.
In fifth grade, my school’s new eighth grade basketball coach (a former high school varsity coach, which was a very big deal) came to our house. He asked for my favorite player. I answered Kenny Anderson, then a freshman at Georgia Tech. He suggested, not too subtly, that I should follow Duke University’s Bobby Hurley (who was white) because I would never be quick enough to emulate Anderson (who was black).
Whether subtle or overt, responsible people (parents, coaches, teachers) told me (and my friends) over and over that I had no chance to play college or professional sports because I lacked the right genes – I did not jump high enough or run fast enough, and these abilities were genetic.
However, several recent research studies, collected nicely into David Epstein’s article “Sports Genes” in the May 17, 2010 Sports Illustrated, suggest that “something other than genetics is at work.”
When we look at the NBA, we see a high percentage of African-American players and assume a genetic advantage. However, if you look at volleyball, another sport emphasizing height and jumping ability, lanky white teenagers appear to have a genetic advantage. In football, we see a high percentage of African-American athletes and assume a genetic advantage. However, watching the best rugby players and nations, one might think that Europeans or Maoris have a genetic advantage even though the games require similar athletic qualities. When we look at marathon running, we see the dominance of East African runners and assume genetic superiority. However, Epstein’s article suggests a socioeconomic (dis)advantage.
“When [Yannis] Pitsiladis [a biologist at the University of Glasgow] compared 400 elite Kenyan athletes with a group of randomly selected Kenyans, he found that as children, the athletes were more likely to have lived at least several miles from school, and much more likely to have had to run there and back. Eighty-one percent of the elite Kenyan runners he studied had to rely on their feet to get to and from school, compared with only 22% of the control group.”
Kenyan runners dominate because they rely on their feet for survival. The same is true in Ethiopia. “Haile Gebrselassie, the world-record holder in the marathon and perhaps the greatest distance runner ever, began running to school when he was five, covering more than six miles each way. For Ethiopians like him, Gebrselassie says, ‘every day is running. Every job is running: working in the fields or just getting somewhere. Life is running.’”
Our assumption that the East African advantage is genetic often undermines the development of athletes who could compete and challenge the East African’s supremacy. “Pitsiladis’s conclusion is that whatever specific genes are necessary for endurance, they aren’t exclusive to either Ethiopians or Kenyans.”
Unfortunately, the misconception creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a young runner believes that he has a genetic disadvantage, how hard is he likely to train? If he does not train as hard as an Ethiopian runner, he is unlikely to be competitive, which reinforces the genetic advantage assumption. When his times plateau, will he persist and change his training routine or see his leveling off as a sign that he has reached his genetic peak?
When I was young, I was one of the better athletes in baseball, football and basketball. I had the advantage of a late birthdate, so I was one of the older and taller players. I picked up skills quickly and naturally, and I enjoyed the hours of practice required to master a skill.
As I moved toward junior high school and high school, I heard more about genetics and innate talent, almost as if responsible adults wanted to prepare me for an eventual inability to maintain my athletic status.
Because speed and power were deemed to be genetic abilities, not developed skills or qualities, I never dedicated myself to lifting weights or doing plyometrics like I did to shooting or hitting off a tee. Shooting and hitting were learned skills that I could improve, but speed and power were not. I controlled my ability to develop my shooting skills, but not my speed or jumping ability.
Therefore, my lack of speed and power development became a self-fulfilling prophecy: because I did not believe that I controlled my ability to improve my athleticism, I did not train my athletic skills, and therefore I did not enhance my athleticism. However, at the time, it was not my lack of effort, but my lack of genes to blame.
We see the dominance of African descendants (African-Americans, Jamaicans) and believe in their genetic advantages. In recent years, scientists identified and named the ACTN3 gene the Speed Gene, giving more credence to the belief that speed is a genetic trait, not a skill that can be developed. However, “nearly all Kenyans, as well as 80% of Europeans, two groups not renowned for sprinting,” have at least one copy of the sprint gene variant. Unfortunately, because the sporting landscape appears unequal, science is unable to overpower myth.
While I practiced all day and ignored the speed and power work because of the misconceptions, an African-American child watched NBA games and saw a path to success. Nobody told him that he did not have the genes to succeed. While I ran laps around the field during soccer practice and shot baskets by myself, he raced in the streets, played tag and pick-up games – activities that enhanced his speed and power development.
While prominent TV personalities Charles Barkley and Len Elmore lament the fact that so many young African-American teenagers believe that professional sports provide their best path to success, nobody tells a young African-American child that he lacks the genes to play college or professional basketball.
Golden State’s Stephen Curry was a lightly recruited high school player who played at Davidson College, after every ACC programs failed to offer a scholarship. Curry’s father was a long-time NBA player, yet his alma mater, Virginia Tech, offered the younger Curry only a chance to walk-on.
Curry finished third in the 2010 NBA Rookie of the Year voting. In retrospect, people believe that Curry developed into a prolific scorer because his father was a great shooter. Somehow, Curry possesses the shooting gene.
Instead, it was not Curry’s genes, but his environment. When college after college passed over the younger Curry, rather than be discouraged, he worked harder. Curry knew that he could play in the NBA because his dad, an NBA authority, told him that he was good enough. This motivated the low Division I recruit to work harder, while many others forfeit their dream.
Pitsiladis notes that few progeny of Kenyan greats excel as runners. “How many of the top Kenyan runners have sons or daughters who are excelling at running? Almost none. Why? Because their father or mother becomes a world champion, has incredible resources, and the child never has to run to school again.” Their environment changes, and the children ignore the process that led to their parents’ greatness.
If the eight grade coach had never said anything, chances are that I never would have played college or professional basketball. The odds are steep. However, rather than dampen my motivation, under different circumstances, I may have embraced the weight room and enhanced my athleticism. With improved athleticism to complement my high basketball I.Q. and technical skill level, who knows what would have happened?
Athletic success is not determined at conception. Instead, many factors account for an athlete’s development. The more that a young athlete believes that he controls his success through his work ethic and determination, the more likely he is to persist through the plateaus, mistakes and tough days that are inevitable in the talent development process. When someone believes that his genes determine his success, he is less likely to persist and maintain the same high level of training effort and intensity once he reaches a sticking point.
By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts Originally published by Los Angeles Sports & Fitness, September 2010.
In the lead-up to the 2010 World Cup, Michael Sokolove wrote “How a Soccer Star is Made” in the New York Times about Ajax, a club team in Amsterdam famous for its Total Football style of play and the development of young soccer stars, including several who played for the Netherlands in South Africa. Despite its small size and population, the soccer world looks to the Netherlands, and specifically to Ajax, for its methods of developing youth soccer talent.
Despite its international success in numerous sports, the United States lacks a definitive development system. In most team sports, players bounce from recreation leagues to club teams to school teams with little to no coordination, progression or consistency between leagues, clubs, schools, teams and coaches.
In effect, the system creates a “survival of the fittest” process, as the biggest, strongest athletes receive more playing time and are selected for teams as children get older and the competitive stream narrows.
In Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development, I categorize four athlete types: Recreational, Developmental, Competitive and Elite. When I was young, children progressed through the first three types gradually and at one’s own pace.
I played on soccer and baseball teams when I was seven-years-old, but there was no performance pressure. These teams were about having fun and making new friends. Eventually I started to play basketball and quickly decided that I wanted to be a good player, so I practiced on my own and attended camps. I played on teams focused more on teaching fundamentals and preparing players to make high school teams than winning games.
When I reached high school, tryouts for teams grew very competitive, and those who made the team competed for league, area and state championships. The better players sought more developmental experiences to expand their games and their athleticism to prepare for college sports or professional careers.
Now, many children completely ignore the recreational and developmental steps, as teams quickly turn competitive. Youth teams focus on winning games and tournaments and play far more than they train. Youth teams often practice once or twice per week and play in weekend tournaments with three to five games.
The Ajax system largely skips the recreational step as well. Ajax uses scouts who scour the countryside for potential professional footballers as young as five-years-old. Those invited to the the academy enter into a prolonged developmental stage. “The boys are not overplayed…Through age 12, they train only three times per week and play one game on the weekend” (Sokolove).
The academy focuses on the process, not the results. The goal is to move players from the developmental programs quickly through a competitive period in their late teens and on to the elite (professional) level at a young age (late teens/early twenties).
Youth sport is a billion-dollar business in the United States, and the entrepreneurialism affects the environment in which youth players develop. Likewise, the Ajax academy is very much a business, and its approach to business influences its approach to youth development.
In the U.S., a youth athlete is a commodity. Coaches, instructors, facilities, leagues and clubs profit immediately from participation and increase revenue by increasing quantities. More tournaments with more teams and more players per team mean more revenue for the businessmen (coaches/tournament operators).
Ajax treats youth athletes like an investment or asset, and it profits by maximizing the asset’s talent and selling the asset to a bigger, richer club as the asset matures. Wesley Sneijder, the star of the Dutch National team and Serie A (Italy’s top league) champion Inter Milan, started with Ajax when he was seven, and Real Madrid bought his contract for 27 million euros when he was 23.
The different business approaches create different positives and negatives. For a player entering the Ajax system, he receives professional coaching throughout his childhood and every possible resource to maximize his talent. Ajax’s style of play “demands the highest order of individual skill: players with a wizard-like ability to control the ball with either foot, any part of the foot, and work it toward the goal through cramped spaces and barely perceptible lanes.”
Rather than engage in common drills, “training largely consists of small-sided games and drills in which players line-up in various configurations, move quickly and kick the ball very hard to each other at close range…these exercises [are] designed to maximize touches, or contact with the ball.”
While teams in the U.S. compete to win games, even at the youngest ages, the Ajax academy is more concerned with developing players. Once the players develop their individual technical and tactical skills and move to higher levels of competitions, Ajax cares more about the results. However, at the young ages, the process of developing the player supersedes any result.
U.S. teams often pigeon-hole players into positions and concentrate solely on position-specific skills. Rather than concentrate on important skills like field vision and a player’s first touch, fullbacks are taught to boot the ball out of trouble and midfielders send low-percentage through balls to strikers whose role is to shoot on goal. Teams concentrate on winning the next game, not developing skills for the long term.
Most differently, a child selected to train at Ajax incurs no fees except a nominal insurance charge. The academy pays for its professional staff as an investment – the business’s research and development budget. In the U.S., players pay to play, and more competitive teams or clubs with better coaching typically cost more than local or recreational leagues.
The negative side of Ajax’s investment is that when it becomes apparent that a player lacks the requisite talent or skill to develop into a professional player, the academy dismisses him.
These players, and there are many as only so many players reach the professional side each season, suffer emotionally and socially. One unnamed youth player said, “My best friend left [was cut] two years ago…I don’t speak to him anymore. He thought that I was not in touch enough, that I was not supporting him. He was furious. I realized he was just a football friend and that you can’t have real friends at Ajax” (Sokolove).
While the U.S. system may not provide the professional coaching like a European club’s academy, many youth players develop life-long friends through youth sports. My best friends are guys who I played against in middle school who became my high school teammates.
Our coaches were parent volunteers and while they may not have been baseball, soccer or basketball experts, they insured a safe environment where we had fun and made friends (several friends did earn college scholarships or play professionally).
Beyond the social aspects are academic and other non-soccer pursuits. Another player said, “I would feel very bad if I’m not one of them [professional player]. I have tried everything I can do to make it. I haven’t done as much in school as I could. I would feel like I’ve been wasting my time all these years. I would get very depressed” (Sokolove).
Many youths in the States pursue college or professional careers and manage to excel academically and in other pursuits. When their competitive careers end, they transfer the athletic lessons like determination or work ethic to new pursuits in academia, coaching, business, parenting and other areas of their lives. When asked if he might have learned something at Ajax which would benefit him in a non-football life, this boy answered, “No. We’re training for football, not for anything else.”
Unfortunately, youth development in the U.S. appears to be adopting some of the negative consequences of the Ajax’s academy without incorporating the positives. While many coaches remain volunteers and the progression between age groups, leagues and teams remains disjointed, more and more youth athletes feel a pressure to reach a certain goal – usually a college scholarship – to feel like their athletic endeavors had a purpose. Without the scholarship, they feel they wasted their time.
In Drive, Daniel Pink describes the Sawyer Effect: practices that can either turn play into work or turn work into play. Many children no longer play sports; they train or work at sports, even from a young age. When this work fails to result in the end-goal or a pay-off for the effort, they feel like a failure. They do not remember the fun of playing a game, learning new things or challenging oneself. Instead, they view the time spent pursuing an unrealized goal as time lost.
There is a fine line between the benefits of a professional development system like Ajax and the ruination of children’s games and play for the sake of playing. While a more balanced approach to training and competition and better organized practices may enhance a child’s experience and his talent development, is it worth the possibility that he views sports as work rather than play? Is it so bad if some players squander some of their athletic talent because they pursue multiple sports or act in plays or start a band?
Should the business of youth sports cater to the development of professional athletes or promote healthy living and life-long activity? I certainly advocate for changes to the way that we develop youth athletes in the United States, but part of the change must be a return to play for the sake of playing.
“Recreational” should not be viewed as a bad word or a dumbed-down program for the uncompetitive. Young athletes need a healthy progression from recreational to developmental to competitive to elite (if good enough) based on their own interests and motivations. Playing sports should be fun, not work, and nobody should view their youth sports experience as time wasted regardless of the outcome.
By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts Originally published by Los Angeles Sports & Fitness, Summer 2010.
The Internet’s interminable need for new and original content makes web sensations out of five-year-old Little Leaguers and eight-year-old basketball stars. This season, various sports sites, including Yahoo! Sports, promoted dribbling sensation Jaylin Fleming as the world’s greatest nine-year-old basketball player. Last year, 6th grader Jashaun Agosto had his 15 minutes of fame when a Seattle television station’s segment showing him making shot after shot went viral. Not to be outdone, Yahoo! Sports touted New Jersey’s Ariel Antigua as the best five-year-old baseball player ever!
These internet sensations are the outliers, not the norm. Those who appear destined for greatness at an early age rarely reach sustained excellence at a competitive level due to the many varied factors of professional success. For every O.J. Mayo identified in junior high school as a future superstar, there are dozens of Demetrius Walker’s, the former Sports Illustrated cover boy hailed as the next LeBron James in 2005, who recently transferred from Arizona State University to the University of New Mexico after averaging only four points per game in 23 games as a freshman.
Unfortunately, the outliers grab the headlines, distort our perceptions of the path to success and alter our approach to youth sports. Others gravitate to these stories and attempt to emulate their success. We rush the development process and ignore developmentally-appropriate play activities because another child developed a skill a few years earlier than normal, and a television station desperate for feel-good stories featured him in a segment that captivated the Internet.
Childhood is moving quickly from a time of exploration and discovery to a pre-professional training environment. Rather than encourage children to play on their own and engage in self-discovery, parents set appointments with pitching, goalie or shooting coaches to train their offspring so their child can keep pace with the perceived status quo.
Sports, in their most basic form, are a form of play. In Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul, Stuart Brown, M.D. defines play as an activity possessing the following seven characteristics:
Developmentally, many view play as superfluous because it is fun, and therefore not serious practice. However, play offers the same learning experiences that drive the desire for more intense training. When I was young, I shot in my driveway for hours while engaged in self-initiated play. I was not training to be a professional player; I chose to play because I preferred playing outside to sitting at a piano and because shooting free throws cleared my mind.
Playing in my front yard or going to a neighborhood court for 3v3 games was fun. Hours flew by. I made up new moves or copied moves that I saw on television. If I dribbled the ball off my foot or airballed a shot, I chased down the ball and tried again and again until I mastered the move. I did not avoid mistakes but embraced them as challenges.
This play offers the same or better opportunities for skill development as more intense training sessions. In fact, a great trainer manages to engage many of the same characteristics as the child-initiated play. Regardless of the trainer’s knowledge, the child’s learning depends on his self-motivation and desire. If the child does not want to improve or does not value the lesson, he will not invest the time and effort required to learn something new. Play, however, is inherently fun.
Play differs from training because of its purposelessness. When a player moves from playing for the sake of playing to training for sports success, the motivation starts to change from fun to goal-oriented activities. In an athlete’s development, one naturally progresses from a period of play to more training-based activities. This progression is natural and gradual and occurs after a player has played a sport and developed an affinity for the sport and a desire to continue participation at more advanced levels.
The irony in the rush to eliminate these playful periods in favor of more specific training is that the prodigies’ initial skill development occurs through play, as the child explores different ways to manipulate the ball and engages in hours of self-initiated practice.
In 2001, I coached a nine-and-under team with amazing ball handling ability. At the AAU National Championships, we stayed at the same hotel as a 13-and-under team from Minneapolis. As our van pulled out of the hotel to get to one of our games, the players from Minneapolis were outside doing different ball handling drills and tricks. While idling in the driveway waiting for a coach, one of our players jumped out of the van, grabbed a ball and perfectly executed one of the moves that the other players struggled to perform.
Our players did not develop these skills through training-based activities. While we did ball handling drills, we did not do typical drills. One coach led the players through follow-the-leader type drills and incorporated different tricks out of streetball videos. However, these activities only enhanced the players’ motivation. Their development primarily occurred outside of practice.
After almost every practice, our top two ball handlers wasted time while their parents talked by going 1v1 in a hallway, trying to find ways to dribble past or through each other in a small, confined area. Nobody told these players to practice while their parents talked. Instead, they made their own games, and the games happened to enhance their skill development greatly. As they practiced, they did not have some higher goal; they simply wanted to have fun and one-up each other.
When we eliminate play at a young age, drills become tedious as the player loses his freedom, and he engages in more and more adult-initiated activities. Rather than trying new things and exploring different moves through play, players follow the coach’s instructions. Learning follows explicit instructions rather than through self-initiated exploration and imagination.
There is a time in the athletic development spectrum for training and specialized coaching. Unfortunately, more and more, parents seek this specialized training before their child plays the sport and develops the desire to train to be a better player.
By skipping these playful periods, players miss out on the self-discovery and exploration. They develop in an environment of extrinsic motivation and schedules, and an atmosphere of pleasing parents and coaches rather than playing for the sake of playing. They play in competitive environments at an earlier age where people focus on their performance and they worry more about how they look or perform as opposed to staying in the moment and engaging in an activity for the sake of playing. Often, this early training atmosphere leads young athletes to quit the sport at an early age because the sport loses its fun: the sport is no longer play.
By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League
Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts