What is Ecological Dynamics and How Does It Impact Basketball Coaching?

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast, and I'm your host, Alex Sarama. This is the podcast where we help coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to create the ultimate resource to help make sense of how contemporary skill acquisition ideas can be applied within the basketball world.

Throughout the podcast, we'll unpack how an ecological dynamics framework alters our perspective If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, then this is the podcast for you.

Adam, let's get straight into it. And in episode 2, I outlined ecological dynamics, and obviously we then covered the CLA in another episode. But, you know, we've obviously had lots of questions from coaches, lots of queries. What can we do to better explain what an ecological approach is for coaches working at all levels of the game?

Oh, wow.

Yeah, we're starting there. What is the lowest hanging fruit? Let's make that a little easier, a little, uh, otherwise that's a huge question I just asked you.

Yes, it is a very huge question. Here, Adam, explain the book that I wrote in 2 minutes. To me, it just comes down to how motor behavior emerges and how, how we're skillful. Like starting with that question, which I think is the basis behind all these things, is just like, and that's any scientific understanding is like, well, how does this actually occur?

How do babies learn to crawl and walk? And then just build off of that into how, how does a jump shot occur? What, what goes into it? And just continually questioning and trying to understand any sort of behavior in an environment. And that's, for me, it started with like learning itself.

Like I was seeing the players and like they weren't connecting with information that I was seeing and opportunities I was seeing for them. So I'm like, well, how do they learn these skills? So if you're not asking questions about how people learn, Then you're not gonna get to information processing, ecological dynamics, anything like that.

So I think it starts with literally questioning like, how does what I'm seeing happen? How do they learn this?

That's it. Within the book Transforming Basketball, I remember one of the graphs I had, it was like the first thing was considering what is skill, which you touched on, right? Then the second thing is, all right, if we understand really how skill is emergent, and an ecological approach obviously can give us a perspective of what skill is, well then the next logical question is what practice conditions can we, you know, create which better allow for skills to develop and allow skills to be more adaptive?

And then of course, I think the final question is how does this impact not just the basketball coaching, but everything else we're doing in an organization. And that's, I think, one of the biggest ones because people think a CLA and all these things, it only applies to what we're doing on the court.

And then you might see a traditional warmup, traditional weight room activities, traditional scout, traditional athletic performance, traditional player evaluations. And what we're trying to get at here with Transforming Basketball is, no, it's everything.

Yeah. And that's honestly, and it's understandable why in certain aspects of my own life that I still struggle. implementing an ecological dynamics approach to practices and stuff like that. And the reason is because we're constantly surrounded by a linear way of thinking. It's simply embedded in all of, in all of Western society.

I don't, I haven't, I haven't been to the East, so I can't speak, speak upon the East, but everything in, in the West is built upon linearized thinking. They, it's cause and effect. It's clear, distinct categories. Like as you were talking there, I was just thinking like, yeah, like Well, like, 'cause you, you mentioned athletic performance, like strength is specific, it's context specific.

There's a blurred line, like what is strength as opposed to speed and stuff? It's, these lines are very blurry and they're, and they're highly specific to the context in which they're occurring. Yet we lose sight of that and we, we try and like remove it, remove it, remove it everywhere in our lives.

And it's like separate, like you can even think about like I find the most useful aspect of it, and I catch myself saying it every once in a while, and that's my tune. It's my more or less like a trigger for me to switch how I'm discussing things is if I say like change as opposed to changing.

All behavior is a process. Where's this endpoint? It's arbitrary. It's made up. Now in sport, we actually have clear, we have some clearer endpoints, but that's made up out of the rules of the game. In life, it's always -ing. It's always becoming. It's always a process.

So, Adam, let's go back to— you mentioned in the answer, in your first answer, about how skills emerge and kind of the athlete-environment relationship is obviously— I think that's the central part of explaining what an ecological approach is. But let's imagine that we had a coach or a general manager in a lift, AKA an elevator, We were in there for 30 seconds and we wanted to try and explain what we're doing and what we believe in and how we coach.

You know, what would be— how could we even go about it? Do you think it would be a case of maybe trying to connect to a lack of transfer that we see in these traditional practice environments and performance within the game? Would we want to talk about research-based, evidence-based approaches?

Or where would— how would we even go about that? This is something— essentially pitching this person, 30 seconds, like, how could we maybe introduce the essence of what we do in an ecological approach and try to hook a, a coach or a front office executive for the first time?

What comes to mind for me is something very simple, is I can't remember which article it came from, but For something to happen, it always happens somewhere. That's how I would open the discussion. That's essentially what we're doing. We're taking, we're taking into account all the variables and we're trying to figure out which ones are most important when it comes to performance in the game.

And we're experimenting with all the vari— and we take, we are taking into account all of the variables that go into performance and we're not separating them.

For me, it's, it's talking about how We're not leaving development or performance in basketball up to chance. And I'd say, you know, for the first time we can actually use research to inform how we go about things within this organization. We're not just relying on opinion.

And I think we have to come back to skill. And maybe in that 30 seconds, actually saying that traditionally no one actually understands what skill is. And if we really have a paradigm shift in how we understand human movement, performance in basketball, and skill, well, then our whole organizational approach can change based on, you know, how we conceptualize skill.

And I think that could be maybe an entry point.

I think that's why you are where you are and where I am, why I am. Not at all, man.

Not at all.

I just immediately cut to the core and like, let's get freaking deep, dude. And he'd probably like, Leave me alone. Who are you? Who are you? Because they're like, hey, hey man, there's research behind this guy and come on in. Let's, let's have a discussion.

So yeah, I think I, that, that would probably be the best approach would be to just like, hey man, people are like, there's, there's research behind this and people are thinking deeply about it. Well, why don't we start asking questions about how we can use this stuff?

Absolutely. We, but I think we both agree, Adam, that the words, the ecological language is very important. But at the same time, I do completely understand how some of the coaches listening, you know, to the podcast and all the resources we're sharing, the first time you're exposed to dynamical systems theory and ecological psychology, okay, yes, it can be a little bit intimidating.

I remember too. But all I would say is spend a little bit of time just thinking about like something like an affordance from, you know, ecological psychology. When you actually think deeply about what it is, it makes sense. And if you try and, you know, put it into some examples of basketball possessions, I think you could really make sense of what these terms mean.

And you'd agree on this, that, you know, we— I think we as a basketball community, we have to actually try to learn the language and implement it in what we're doing on a daily basis.

Well, yeah, it's the same. Every single niche environment has their own language. We have, I'm in Hudson Falls, New York right now. We speak a little bit different than they do in London. Like there's different phrases and we have different ways of doing things.

There'd be an adjustment period where you'd have to learn and adapt. So it's like that with any, anything you're learning new. I mean, I encounter stuff all the time where I'm just like, I don't quite understand this, but I want to understand this because I think it can improve my life.

In my profession. Give yourself time. I'm like, nobody's like, nobody's looking down at you if you don't understand terms.

It's not gonna come immediately. It's, it's gonna be a gradual process. But if we have that intention to just try and not dismiss the language completely, we can make amazing progress.

And I know that. The only thing I would add, Alex, is like, the language is there for a reason. It's actually to simplify it. It's just, you have to get over the initial barrier of not seeing, not being familiar with that term initially.

Again, that's why I like— we use these terms all the time when we're talking to one another because it does make things easier.

I think that's it. I wanted to keep today short. So we hope that some of the, you know, questions that we've been getting about an ecological approach, you know, we covered it a little bit today, but maybe just go back and check out if there's a podcast where, you know, the language wasn't familiar, maybe just try listening to it again another time and just See if it resonates in a different manner.

And, you know, that's really what we encourage here at Transforming Basketball. So thanks for listening and see you again soon.

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