YBCA

Steve Nash excelled as a youth soccer player before making his mark as an NBA point guard. Uruguay’s World Cup hero, Diego Forlan, was an age-group tennis champion before pursuing a professional football career. Former NBA All-Star Allen Iverson was an all-state option quarterback before leading the NBA in scoring.

Typically, when mentioning the diverse youth sporting pursuits of elite players, parents and coaches suggest that these players are simply exceptional athletes, and therefore their varied pursuits did not prevent eventual elite performance in their chosen sport.

However, what if their varied sports participation actually enhanced their development and helped them become elite performers?

In “Sport-Specific Practice and the Development of Expert Decision-Making in Team Ball Sports” published in JOURNAL OF APPLIED SPORT PSYCHOLOGY, 15: 12–-25, 2003, Joseph Baker, Jean Cote and Bruce Abernathy write:

An important finding unique to this study is that the range of accumulated hours reported by the expert athletes was highly variable both within and between sports, suggesting factors additional to the total hours of accumulated sport-specific practice influence expertise attainment in team sports. Related practice, in other non-sport-specific contexts, emerges as a prime candidate as an additional factor critical to the acquisition of decision-making expertise in sport.

Rather than practice only basketball skills, this study found a positive correlation between playing other sports and developing expertise in one’s primary sport. These elite performers fell short of the magic 10,000 hours in their specific sport prior to reaching the elite level; however, they reason that the additional hours of participation in different, but similar sports count toward the magic 10,000 hours because the skills transfer between sports.

Participation in other activities may indeed be a functional element in the development of expert decision-making skill. Exposure to practice in other sport settings, especially in generic aspects of pattern recognition and decision-making, may circumvent the need for, or perhaps partially substitute for, some of the many hours of sport-specific practice needed to become an expert in team ball sports. Perhaps, unlike the domain of music, within which Ericsson et al. (1993) developed their theory of deliberate practice, sport expertise in team sports may be sufficiently multi-faceted to permit beneficial learning to occur through settings other than deliberate, task-specific practice.

While playing soccer will not enhance one’s basketball shooting or dribbling skills, plying soccer, lacrosse or another similar sport will enhance the pattern recognition skills that are vital to one’s tactical success.

In recent years, as youth basketball players play more and more basketball and specialize at earlier ages, many critics note that their decision-making skills and game awareness has decreased. Rather than specializing at earlier ages, these players may need more time plying a variety of sports to increase their exposure to and implicit learning of the basic tactical skills that are similar in many sports.

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Yes, I have interviewed Damian Farrow's co-worker, Adam Gorman in my newsletter, and have emailed and cited A. Mark Williams' studies several times. Other researchers include Helsen and Starkes, Paul Ward at Florida St and others. From an attention standpoint, Nideffer is the oft-cited researcher, and Vickers is often cited for perceptual skills and vision. 

here's another related article:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscie…..expertise/

the de Groot experiments are the foundation of almost all literature in this area. in a sense, everything we know about perceptual-cognitive skills starts with chess…

For de Groot, this failure was a revelation, since it suggested that talent wasn’t about memory – it was about perception. The grandmasters didn’t remember the board better than amateurs. Rather, they saw the board better, instantly translating the thirty-two chess pieces into a set of meaningful patterns. They didn’t focus on the white bishop or the black pawn, but instead grouped the board into larger strategies and structures, such as the French Defense or the Reti Opening.

This mental process is known as “chunking” and it’s a crucial element of human cognition.

If you want the long answer, email me and I'll email a paper that I finished on anticipation, attention and the decision-training coaching style. The short answer:

Invasion games are thought to be tactically similar enough that learning transfers between games. Obviously the specific skill does not transfer – shooting a basketball versus kicking a soccer ball – but the information processing or the perceptual-cognitive skill transfers.

One researcher has identified six tactical concepts that are similar between invasion games, so these principles or ideas transfer.

Another research showed how an attention-broadening program – allowing young players to discover and explore different situations without direct instructions – leads to better decision-making because of increased cognitive flexibility or creativity.

Other research shows that increased skill improves decision-making by allowing one to turn his attention to the environment rather than concentrating on the actual task – dribbling a basketball. 

What does it mean? Expert decision makers tend to play more unstructured games and more varied sports as young children, so encouraging these activities is a start. Second, players need to master the basic skills so they do not have to think about what they're doing, which is where the deliberate practice comes in. Finally, players also need opportunities to play with some freedom to improve decision-making as opposed to simply following the coach's directions:

http://learntocoachbasketball……ng-players

I advocate small-sided games because it reduces the coach's influence and gives players more time on the ball per game than 5v5 games:

http://learntocoachbasketball……evelopment

As for the taxi drivers, I'd almost equate that with a player memorizing a coach's play and running the play so many times that changing that play or seeing something outside the play is sometimes difficult. I watched a girls' team commit 3 straight turnovers on point to wing passes while the post was wide open. However, the post was busy screening across – running the play – rather than looking for the ball when she was two feet from the basket. The constant memorization created rigid thinking as the players followed directions and in this case led to a poor decision and what could be termed inattentional blindness. 

Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning is a good book that covers many of these ideas in a narrative form (his dad wrote Searching for Bobby Fischer about him and he was also a world champion in push-judo) rather than simple research. I especially equate his competitors learning the advanced opening sequences but breaking down once Josh got past that sequence to teams who rely heavily on set plays and break down when the defense changes or takes away the first two options. I think is has to do with Rand Spiro's idea of cognitive flexibility, and I think cognitive flexibility is an important skills for basketball players.

how's Sheridan's book? I've nearly picked up that one and his first book on fighting.