1. When a winner makes a mistake, he says “my fault”; when a loser makes a mistake, he throws the blame on someone else.
2. A winner credits his “good luck” for winning on being fundamentally prepared; a loser blames his “bad luck” for losing on bad breaks even though he is not fundamentally prepared.
3. A winner works harder than a loser and always finds time to do what is expected of him; a loser never finds the time and when he does, he works on the wrong things.
4. A winner makes commitments and sets goals with his heart and sets out to accomplish them; a loser makes “promises” with his mouth and never sincerely means to keep them.
5. A winner shows he’s sorry by making up for mistakes; a loser says “I’m sorry” but does the same thing next time.
6. A winner thinks, “I’m good, but not as good as I should or could be.” A loser thinks, “I’m not as bad as some of the others.”
7. A winner would rather be admired for his ability than liked, although he would prefer both; a loser would rather be liked than admired because he knows he hasn’t worked hard enough to be admired.
8. A winner hates to lose; a loser could care less although he may put up a good front.
9. A winner is fundamentally sound in all aspects of the game; a loser is not!
10. A winner knows that strength, agility and quickness are the keys to success in athletics and works hard to attain those things; a loser may know, but never attains.
11. A winner takes constructive criticism from the coach, realizing that it will help him and the team; a loser pouts and thinks he’s being picked on.
12. A winner thinks of the team first and never wants to let the team down; a loser thinks of himself first and the team last.

In the November 2011 Wired, Chris Hardwick wrote “Self-Help for Nerds,” in which he writes:

“Videogames make you feel like you’re actually doing something. Your brain processes the tiered game achievements as real-life achievements. Every time you get to the next level, hot jets of reward chemical coat your bain in a lathery foam, and it seems like you’re actually accomplishing stuff” (p.159).

This, of course, is the aspect of games that parents, teachers and coaches blame: video-game makers are experts in psychology, and they have created a system that encourages continued participation. If our goal is to create the same type of adherence and dedication to sports teams, academics and/or physical activity, we need to learn from these psychological tricks.

In a typical sports league, does moving from one level to the next produce the same type of chemical reward? Unlikely, as sports leagues are based on age, and children are promoted when they are too old for their present age group. What if a league based promotion on the mastery of certain skills? Would players have more of an incentive to practice and play more? Martial arts use a belt system to create an external reward which fuels internal motivation. Ascending to the next belt classification means learning new skills and refining or perfecting already learned skills. The belt system creates a clear objective for the instructor and the learner. Does the typical youth league have a clear objective? Are the players’ objectives the same as the coach’s?

Hardwick continues:

“This is not all bad news. If you’ve been obsessed with a game, you have already proven to yourself that you have the ability to focus. You know how lion cubs play around and it’s all cute ‘n’ stuff? They’re not playing for the fuck of it. They’re training to eviscerate things professionally later in life. If you’re a gamer, this is what you have been doing. This is the skill set that will help you accomplish most everything you want in life and make you ‘better’ than your peers” (p.159).

Many criticize video games for creating a short attention span in children. However, as Hardwick points out, this is rubbish. Children can concentrate on a video game for hours without interruption. At its extreme, there have been deaths blamed on the person playing the game continually and ignoring basic bodily functions or developing blood clots from sitting in the same position for an extreme amount of time. How do we can reconcile these situations with a short attention span?

The focus with which children possess when playing video games should be the jump-off point in other activities. Again, however, the key is to tap into the psychology and find ways to engage the child in ways that many teachers and coaches fail to do. The Khan Academy uses some of the same psychology in its online teaching. Khan uses a “system of mastery” which is very similar to the levels that make video games addictive.

For coaches and leagues, how can we create the “system of mastery” or levels which engage and motivate players rather than maintaining the status quo, traditionalist teaching and age-based promotions that dominate and often de-motivate?

By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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. 

For its youngest participants, the change meant cross-ice matches rather than full-ice matches that were no different than NHL games and multiple teams on the ice at practice. These changes prompted USA Hockey to create a document justifying the changes and dispelling 10 myths about the change away from real hockey. Some of the myths included:

1. It isn’t real hockey.
2. The kids won’t learn teamwork.
3. The kids won’t learn about positioning.
4. The ADM is only for the average player.
5. Too much fun is a bad thing.
6. The kids won’t have as much fun.

These excuses are used any time a league changes away from the adult-form of the game. Parents and coaches view sports from an adult mindset, rather than from the perspective of the child participating in the sport. However, when you factor skill, speed, size, strength and cognitive development, the small-sided games create more similar task constraints for youth players than the full-sided games.

In most youth sports, the majority of the players chase after the ball. Is that an adult form of the sport? Children do this because they lack higher order cognitive skills and the strength and skill to use the whole field or court. In basketball, presses work because young players cannot make a good 30-40-foot pass. This same defense would not work against stronger, more skilled adult players because the players understand spacing and can exploit the openings by making a strong pass over a large distance much faster than a defender can recover.

As a child, I started 11v11 soccer at seven years of age. We did not learn about teamwork or positioning – we learned to kick the ball as far as possible and hope that our fastest player could get to the ball and score. We never learned how to play the ball out of the back, how to interchange positions and more. We never had a left fullback sprinting the wing for a cross into the middle. We never played with the quick, short, one-touch passes popularized by F.C. Barcelona.

Consequently, nobody really developed the requisite skills to be a great player. We had fast players and some toughness, but not much skill (and we often won our league!). Our parent-coaches had never played soccer and did their best based on what made sense: we dribbled through cones, shot on goal and ran laps. When I drive by soccer fields today, I see the same practices.

JP Soccer, a youth league in Massachusetts, tired of the unskilled and tactically unaware players graduating from its league and blew up this model. Like a typical league, players practice one day per week and play a game on a second day. The league hires professional soccer trainers to work solely on technical skills with the players during the practice. On game day, the players join teams and play games without adult interference: no parent-coaches, no officials.

The league sets up fields of different sizes. One field might be long and narrow, while another field would be short and wide. The director assigns teams based on the order in which players arrive on a particular day. The first four players who arrive form one team and play the second four players to arrive. All games are played 4v4. After 15-20 minutes, the director switches the teams to different fields to play different opponents with different field constraints.

JP Soccer solved many problems plaguing most youth leagues: unequal teams, blowouts, playing time, individual involvement, inexperienced coaches, and more. Teams switch weekly so nobody loses or wins all of his games. Fifteen-minute games mean few blowouts. The limited number of players and space means everyone touches the ball and plenty of goals are scored. Professional coaches eliminate the need for inexperienced coaches – the league pays professional coaches to run skill sessions rather than paying officials to officiate 11v11 games.

Somehow, despite alleviating many problems associated with youth sports, many criticize the league because 4v4 soccer is not a real sport!

When I played, we arrived one hour before the game to ensure that nobody was late. We sat around, watched another game, stretched, ran some laps and listened to some pre-game talk. Finally, we took the field, kicked the ball around and eventually the game started. One game was drawn out to a three-hour event. JP Soccer eliminates the pretenses and gets straight to the playing. Do children enjoy the warm-ups and pre-game talks or the actual playing? What helps a player improve: running laps or playing with the ball?

Bert van Lingen in Coaching Soccer: The Official Coaching Book of the Dutch Soccer Association describes 4v4 as the optimal game for youth players, an assertion supported by a recent study commissioned by Manchester United and published by Rick Fenoglio from the Department of Exercise and Sport Science, Manchester Metropolitan University. 4v4 is the smallest possible game that maintains the integrity of the game.

Similarly, FIBA sponsored 3v3 basketball at the 2010 Youth Olympics, while 2v2 beach volleyball is an Olympic sport, yet many resist small-sided basketball and volleyball leagues.  I learned volleyball by playing 2v2 on the beach and never took to 6v6 volleyball because of the reduced action and touches on the ball. Those touches in 2v2 or 3v3 are the reason why the games are better for developmental athletes.

Young players need the opportunity to use in games the skills that they practice. If a volleyball coach practices setting with his players because he feels that all players need to develop all skills, but the middle blocker never sets in games, will he focus in practice on the setting drills? Will he retain and transfer the skill? Worse, if the coach only teaches his setters how to set, what happens when the 10-year-old middle blocker is only six-feet tall as a high school junior and unable to play in the middle because of his 6’5 teammates?

If the player never learned the skill as a youth, he is unlikely to transfer to a new position. By concentrating on position-specific skills at a young age, the coach narrows the player’s development. By playing 2v2, where the player has to perform all the skills in every game, the player has a broad foundation of skills and can transfer the skills to different environments and tasks.

In the Boston Magazine article, Boston University head coach Jack Parker lamented that only three of his players were from Massachusetts compared to 15 a decade ago. “There are more recruitable players from the state of Texas and the state of California than from the state of Massachusetts,’’ Parker said. “That is unbelievable.’’ USA Hockey made a decision to focus on age-appropriate leagues that create task constraints more similar to those imposed on adult players despite the smaller playing surface and provide all players with more opportunities to perform the skills that separate the good players. JP Soccer, PBDL and USYVL made the same decision in soccer, basketball and volleyball.

Rather than concentrate on what is or is not real, parents should find leagues that give players more opportunities to perform with the ball and have fun. These will be the developmental experiences that lead to better skill levels and better performance when the players’ maturation level moves the players to the real game.

By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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? 

The public school system offers the best and most economical way to reach the most players. However, change is necessary to maximize these players’ experience. Each school district approaches sports differently, often because of financial issues. Some districts offer elementary school teams, while other districts no longer offer physical education classes. In order for the development system to work, we must standardize school sports to ensure adequate opportunities are available in every district.

The Youth Basketball Schools Initiative starts with the varsity high school coach. While some criticize the EDL because it “eliminates” the high school coach, the YBSI increases his or her role and creates a position more in-line with his or her profession (teaching), as opposed to the current system where winning is the sole criteria upon which a high school coach is judged.

In most areas, districts are set-up with an elementary school which feeds a middle school which feeds a high school; most high schools offer two or three teams, usually junior varsity and varsity or freshmen, junior varsity and varsity. If one views each varsity team as the top of the pyramid, a varsity coach oversees an entire program down to the elementary school level. This shift creates a true development program using the schools, as the varsity high school coach is the leader within this pyramid and takes responsibility for the entire program, not just the varsity’s success.

Recently, a friend and high school coach questioned his priorities and expectations: how can a coach be expected to win (because league standings are in the newspaper every day), while also developing players’ basic movement skills and fundamentals? The answer, I suppose, is he cannot, in one season with limited practice time, do everything. Therefore, the lower levels must prepare players for the varsity team so the varsity coach is not stuck with players with remedial movement skills and fundamentals.

In the current system, with the Peak by Friday mentality and no continuity of programs, this may or may not happen. However, through the YBSI, the varsity coach is responsible for ensuring players are prepared for the varsity level.

An example of programs:

Elementary School

• After-school skills program
• Saturday AM Recreation League
• 1^st-4^th graders play 3v3 (mini-hoops)
• 5^th-6^th graders play 5v5
• No cuts
• Runs late November through February
• Minimal game coaching: players use concepts/skills learned during the week at the skills workouts
• Instruction-based
• Man defense only
• Encourage players to play other sports in the off-season
• March-October: fee-based skills program at high school to support high school program

Junior High School

• 7^th grade team: 3 practices per week plus one game: focus on development in line with Cross Over model
• 8^th grade team: 3 practices per week plus one game
• Any player cut from either team eligible for a developmental program.
• Skill-based program like elementary school program
• 1-2 days per week with a weekend game
• Combine with other district schools if necessary
• Opportunity for every player who wants to make the commitment

High School

• 9^th grade team: November-March season with 30 games
• 10^th grade team: November-March season with 30 games
• Varsity: November-March season with +/-30games
• Sunday afternoon informal recreational league for any players in district cut from a team. All high schools cooperate to organize, promote and assist with the league, possibly rotating sites every year.
• Fall/Spring: Limit organized basketball activities to promote multi-sport athletes, rest, weight training, plyometrics, etc. Allow open gym skill training and informal pick-up games, but no direct team coaching and/or games/tournaments against other schools.
• Allow limited training and competition during summer, but prohibit teams from playing 60+ games in the six weeks from the end of school until July 31. Out of season emphasis on training, not competing.

A change incorporating the Youth Basketball Schools Initiative, Elite Development League and High Performance Center provides the framework to enable the implementation of a long term athlete development like the one proposed in Cross Over. However, the framework and template only work if parents, players and coaches buy into a new model. As long as the Peak by Friday mindset penetrates youth sports and exposure dominates high school basketball, no framework or model is sufficient. The framework creates an instructional, developmental, progressive environment: coupled with a learning orientation and growth mindset, this framework will create a profound change for youth basketball players, putting the youth back into youth basketball, while providing better preparation for elite players.

By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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. 

Other people differ. Around the same time I started kick boxing, my friend took up poker. He spent hours playing poker online at work and traveling to Las Vegas to play or hosting poker parties. He was determined to master the game and make it to the World Series of Poker Main Event. He was consumed by poker. Leonard refers to people like my friend as Obsessives. They will not settle for second best; they want to master the skill or game.

I have another friend who runs. He has a love-hate relationship with running. He does not train overly hard; instead, he does just enough to get by and run an adequate time in a couple 5k charity runs each year. Leonard would call this friend a Hacker.

When I was young, my parents gave me plenty of opportunities. At different times, I tried the saxophone, clarinet and piano. I played every team sport that was offered back then (football, soccer, baseball and basketball). I took a variety of lessons: swimming, tennis and karate. I dabbled. I stuck with soccer, baseball and basketball.

When my parents gave me the opportunity to try these activities, I do not recall their motivations, but I imagine they did not expect me to quit after a couple lessons (tennis) or one season (football, track & field, cross country). I imagine that with every opportunity, they expected me to persist and try to learn the skill.

Over and over, however, I quit, which generally has a negative connotation. When the novelty of learning the theme song from Jaws in piano lessons wore off, I stopped practicing. My mom implored me to practice and probably tried to bribe me. I hated to sit inside at the piano and look out at the street with children playing. I practiced less and less and eventually my mom relented, and I quit.

Despite its negative connotation, Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, suggests on his blog that quitting is a positive. He says that quitting requires recognition and creativity: one recognizes that the current path isn’t working and looks around to find something better to do. I realized piano was not my passion, so I quit and spent more time playing sports.

In soccer and baseball, I was more of a Hacker – I did just enough to be a starter or a better than average player. However, I never invested a lot of time outside team practices to develop my skills.

In basketball, however, I was an Obsessive. My mother’s best friend had a son 3-4 years older than me who played basketball. My mom would come home from their house and tell me about something that he was doing, and I would go outside immediately to master the skill. If my mom told me that he was dribbling between his legs, I went outside until I could dribble between my legs. If he was shooting 90% from the free throw line, I went outside until I could make 25 in a row. I never stopped until I had mastered the specific skill.

While most parents hope their child persists in an activity, and often invest a lot of money up front in shoes, gear and more to encourage this persistence, most children are dabblers: they play for fun and when the fun wears off, they look for other activities. I see the attitude at the park when I train players. We work out on Saturday mornings, and there are impossibly young children playing baseball. As soon as their game ends, the children run for the hill by the basketball court. They just want to climb in dirt. Their moms yell at them to stay out of the mud, so they wander to the basketball court and try to play. They are young and motivated by fun.

Obsessives are rare, especially at young ages. Before one becomes obsessive about improvement and mastering skills, and shows the willingness to engage in more deliberate practice, the player has to develop the passion for the sport. When young athletes dabble, they check out a sport to see if they have that interest to persist and try to become good. If not, they move on to a new activity: Coyle’s recognition and creativity.

At what point should a parent insist on some persistence? After all, if a child continually dabbles and never gives an activity a fair chance, how will he ever know if he has a passion or not?

Coyle argues that when the activity is new, the person should give it at least eight weeks, as “eight weeks appears to be a threshold time required for practice to build reliable new circuitry.” Initially, every new skill is difficult. If after eight weeks the child does not like the challenge of the activity, quitting is not such a bad thing. Coincidentally, many youth sports seasons run between 6-10 weeks, providing a perfect initial experience to dabble and gauge one’s interest.

Coyle writes, “When you trace the paths of many top performers, you find very few straight lines. Beneath their forward progress is a churn of false starts, a steady drumbeat of quitting.”

On the other hand, nobody reaches a level of expertise without a great amount of practice which requires persistence and a quality called grit. Jonah Lehrer, the author of How We Decide, argues for the importance of deliberate practice in the process of talent development in an article titled “Which Traits Predict Success?” in Wired. Specifically, he cites a paper titled “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee” published in March 2011 in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth. The paper argues for the importance of grit, which is the quality that allows you to show up over and over again.

Mastery focuses on learning plateaus, which are a temporary discontinuation of learning. Leonard suggests that plateaus lead Obsessives to work harder to overcome the plateau, while plateaus lead Dabblers to quit and pursue something new. In essence, Obsessives possess grit to work harder in the face of a tougher challenge, and this grit leads to more deliberate practice, which is characterized as often unenjoyable work.

In Leonard’s terms, Lehrer argues for Obsessives, while Coyle argues for Dabblers. Coyle argues that persistence differs from the “endless stubbornness” that it is perceived to be. Instead, he sees persistence as “the quality of responding to dozens of different setbacks in dozens of new, different strategic ways.” Grittiness, however, is the opposite of quitting and is much more like the “endless stubbornness.”

In the end, both argue that expertise requires a lot of deliberate practice, as demonstrated by the work of K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University and author of The Road to Excellence. The Obsessives ultimately become the experts.

The difference, of course, is how one becomes an Obsessive. Should we encourage grittiness in every activity and force persistence to teach that quality or develop that personality? Should we encourage the dabbling and quitting until one finds something about which he is passionate and willing to expend the effort required of deliberate practice and grittiness?

This is the million-dollar question. Did quitting the piano make me less gritty in basketball? I don’t know. Would persisting with the boring piano lessons have led to more grittiness in basketball? Maybe. Did quitting piano lessons afford me more time for deliberate practice in basketball? Certainly.

By Brian McCormick
Brian McCormick Basketball
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

Many times, people imagine the block practice and the hours of dedication to perfecting his golf swing through specific instruction and deliberate practice. However, on Daniel Coyle’s blog, a reader paints a different picture of Tiger’s early development:

My nomination is Rudy Duran, Tiger Woods’ coach from the age of 4 through 10. I was privileged to hear him speak recently and I kept thinking of The Talent Code throughout his talk. Rudy owned and ran a small 18 hole, par 3 public golf course…Tiger was coached by Rudy once per week for about 2/3 hours at a time and 85% of their time was spent on the course. There was very little technical instruction, much more playing and competing with Tiger trying to beat Rudy. Rudy would say to Tiger ‘I own you’ and Tiger would try his utmost to beat Rudy in line with his ‘Personal Par’ (an informal handicap designed to enable Tiger to compete from the same tees but score in line with Rudy and his dad). Rudy said that he would play the games and wait for the ‘coachable moments’ and then ask Tiger a few questions about how he might approach the shot again.

In my view Rudy Duran had an enormous role in the development of one of the greatest golfers the game has ever known. He taught Tiger to play golf first rather than to teach him to hit a ball and understood that he just needed to guide him rather than to instruct him. So many other coaches would have tried to give Tiger technical information and to develop his swing.

I believe that Tiger’s phenomenal ability to score even if he is not hitting the ball well is what sets him apart from so many of his contemporaries. I also believe that Rudy Duran provided the platform for this to take place.

This piece fits more in line with the descriptions of the experiences of other elite performers outlined in Benjamin Bloom’s Developing Talent in Young People, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Talented Teenagers and Josh Waitzkin’s The Art of Learning. In fact, this story is almost identical to Waitzkin’s descriptions of his beginning years as a chess prodigy.

Think about the key points of this description and how it differs from popular perceptions:

• Reduced technical instruction
• Immediate playing of the game
• Early competitiion
• “Just right” challenges
• Waiting for teachable moments
• Asking questions of Tiger
• Guided the learning
• Taught to play golf rather than hit a ball
• Developed Tiger’s adaptability

In a sense, Duran’s coaching perfectly capsulated Joan Vickers’ concept of decision-training and also fits within a Teaching Games for Understanding approach.

I think the last three points may be the most important: Duran guided the learning and taught Tiger Woods to play the game which enabled him to adapt to different situations even when his swing was off. Waitzkin describes the same experience as he learned chess from the end-game while most young players learn intricate openings. Once Waitzkin survived the openings, he would beat other players who lacked the adaptability to the true game. In basketball, this is the difference between simply teaching structured plays – if the play does not work, and the player does not know how to play the game outside of the play-context, what happens?

Hearing the early Tiger Woods’ stories, I think many people assumed that he sat at the driving range with an instructor and hit thousands of balls over and over as his deliberate practice to master his swing technique. However, this description of Duran’s coaching suggests that 85% of his early practice was spent in variable, random, and match-like practice and conditions with a competitive goal that was a challenge, but not impossible to reach. This description almost perfectly describes the role of a coach early in a player’s development and hopefully becomes the story that we associate with Tiger Woods’ early years, as opposed to the popular perceptions.

By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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.

From the fitness standpoint, I think we are burning out many good young players because our volume of training and games for the 16-18 year old is just too high. We have created a system where it’s the “grinders” that make it through to the next levels, and the more creative, smaller kids sometimes get left by the wayside by those in charge. Some kids are left out because they are not “big enough or strong enough”, while others are left out because we place such high physical demands on them, that some technical, but under-developed kids may break down. Look at the Spanish team that won the World Cup, guys like David Villa, Iniesta, Xavi, etc. are these slight, quick little players who don’t look physically imposing, but can dominate the tempo of the match.

Do we see the same thing in basketball? Do the “grinders” progress while more creative or skilled players are ignored? Do we concentrate too heavily on physical attributes at a young age and ignore differences in maturity?

By Brian McCormick
Author, Cross Over: The New Model of Youth Basketball Development
Director of Coaching, Playmakers Basketball Development League

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

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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

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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:

1. Apparent purposelessness – play is done for its own sake
2. Voluntary
3. Inherent attraction – it’s fun
4. Freedom from time – we lose a sense of the passage of time
5. Diminished consciousness of self – we are fully in the moment; we stop worrying about looking awkward or stupid
6. Improvisational potential – no one way to do things
7. Continuation desire – pleasure of the experience drives a desire to continue

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

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