The Future of Coaching with Matt Bowers

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Hello and welcome to the Transforming Basketball Podcast. Today's guest is Dr. Matt Bowers. He is the program director and associate professor of sport management at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores how different sports environments, from structured teams to unstructured pickup play, the sandlot play, shape athlete and coach development across the lifespan.

Matt's published work, including studies on creativity in youth sport and athlete learning in informal settings, has challenged traditional views of player development. Matt now leads one of the nation's top sports management programs, helping coaches and leaders reimagine sport as a space for creativity, autonomy, and growth.

Matt, welcome to the show.

Thank you. That might be like the best intro I've ever, I've ever gotten.

You're welcome. So, Matt, I have to ask before we kind of get into it, how did you get involved with CLA? What attracted you to it?

Yeah. So I'm a nerd. My exposure to CLA came through my studying of athlete development approaches. You know, I have a coaching background. But also an academic and research background. And as I merged those things earlier on in my career, I became really fascinated by, you know, how can we do this differently?

Why is everybody doing all the same stuff? And kind of came across some of the early CLA research. It connected with me just kind of on, on an intuitive level. And I sort of fell in love with it. Fell in love with thinking about how we can manipulate tasks, how we can manipulate environments, how we can actually like really create the best learning environment for an athlete, their body, their mind.

And I feel like a lot of times we don't really think about it as a learning environment, but it is. And so I came across all the kind of the early seminal research on that and just sort of, it clicked from, from the jump.

And who are some of the early, I guess, you know, I don't know if you got into the research papers or some practitioners, but who are some of the early influences on you?

Oh gosh. Well, I mean, we could get super nerdy, but people don't want to hear that. So I think when we're looking at a lot of the research that came out of, out of England, where your boy comes from, looking at how in an athlete training environment, we traditionally would have just this sort of like block training mentality of Like if we just drive it home, we create this sort of muscle memory, quote unquote, and then it becomes easier for an athlete to execute that.

It's intuitive. It's not that it's, it's fundamentally wrong. But what kind of didn't come through in a lot of the ways that we've thought about training athletes is the neurological piece, the psychological piece, right? And that like what we think of as muscle memory is just really kind of like us like lubricating our neural pathways to make it less difficult for us to have to, you know, think and then act.

Right. And so the fascination for me came from really folding in that brain piece and understanding how by manipulating constraints and conditions, we could enhance that part of it. Right. Not just thinking about sports psychology, quote unquote, as we've often thought about it and motivation and anxiety and folk, but like in the actual skill acquisition piece, like how do we help the brain make quicker work of what we needed to do?

Absolutely. I think, you know, and this leads me to my follow-up question here, but I think it's so important to make sure that players and oftentimes kids, you know, young players are in this environment where they can become better athletes, of course, but also develop these life skills that's going to carry them on through life.

So I want to ask you, when you think about maximizing a young player's potential, what are some practical habits coaches can instill on the practice court right now? If there was a coach that's on his way to practice listening to this episode right now, what could they do?

Yeah, I'll start a little more abstract and then we'll Well, I think we'll maybe get there, but I think the biggest thing that, that I see, the biggest disconnect between what we want for our kids, our kids, you know, as parents, adults, coaches, administrators, what we want for our kids and what we deliver for our kids, there's a gap there.

Right.

And it's not a gap that comes from the fact that we like don't genuinely want to do right by them. We don't genuinely want to create the best experiences for them, but it is so easy in a zero-sum type of competitive environment to kind of immediately lose track of the longer game.

Right. And when you're working with kids, it's all long game, like your job. So as you enter practice today, you should remind yourself that you are the protector of their potential.

Right.

You are the person who is there to make sure that that long-term potential that they have is nurtured and protected in a way that lets every kid stay on their maximal developmental trajectory. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Yep.

Yeah. So, you know, I think all of a sudden we're getting into strategy and tactics and how do we win this game and how do we stop this player in front of us and how do we game plan for this or that? Even when we're coaching 8-year-olds, 12-year-olds, 16-year-olds, whatever, it's so seductive, right?

The game element of it that it's really easy to become sort of detached from what we're really trying to do, which is to protect and nurture the long-term development. And the challenge there is that most of the incentives that we have in place push us toward a more short-term focus.

And that has the corrosive effect over the long haul of actually lowering an athlete's long-term trajectory for what they can be because we didn't protect that for them.

Well, it's almost like coaches are putting too much emphasis on, oh, you know, you didn't do this correct today, or, you know, this week you haven't been doing this correctly, but it's more so about what I'm hearing you say is, you know, but you're showing up.

And you're giving maximum effort and you're enjoying this. Everyone's enjoying this and we're here together. So that's, you know, let's keep that up. That's where I'm protecting you. I'm making sure you're having fun in this environment so you can stay in it as long as possible so you can succeed later on, whether it's in the sport or not.

Yeah. And as sort of idealistic as this sounds, like in the long term, like if they don't have joy, in what they're doing. That doesn't mean every single minute of every single practice, right? But like in the long term, if they aren't driven by joy, they're never going to get to where they could get.

And so again, like I've failed this many times in my own coaching background and career. So like, I'm not here to cast stones, but from a research standpoint, yeah, to look at this, I have the benefit of being able to sort of zoom out and look at youth athlete development, look at how we do things here in the US in basketball, and to be able to see it from 30,000 feet.

And that lets me see the little things that we all do that, that kind of like create these sort of suboptimal outcomes.

And we're going to get into that a little bit later, especially with AAU culture. But before we do, I do want to ask you about the pressure that maybe some coaches feel about specializing players early. I know for me, like my warmups, it's either, it's like 2 things.

It's like I'm working on a skill, if you will, whether it's passing, but I'm always doing it in a game, right? Or I'm just playing another sport because I want them to open up their, you know, their degrees of freedom, but more importantly, have fun.

I want them to have fun. So it's almost like, oh, we're wasting, quote unquote, you know, using that 10, 15 minutes of warmup time at practice. to play volleyball, right? Or play handball or touch football or whatever the case is. But in your experience, what are some trade-offs of early specialization versus more diverse sporting experience?

Yeah, that's a really, really good question. It's an important question. You hear this term a lot these days, sports specialization. The, the sort of opposite end of that spectrum is sports sampling, a sports sampling approach where you systematically are You know, having a kid play lots of different sports over the course of, say, a year.

So specialization is, it's very clear why we fall into this trap, if you will, because specialization creates a differential training effect, right? So if a 5-year-old is specializing, if she's hooping all the time, year round, And her parents have her working with a trainer multiple times a week.

We know this, right? Like that kid's going to look like a lot better player. They're going to look like they have the aptitude to be great. And they're going to, they're going to have such a difference in, in skill and ability from a lot of the kids that they're competing with.

And so it's sort of, it's intoxicating to chase that because we want, you know, we figure like, okay, we get out, we get a lead on these other kids. Right. And then we have to hold those kids off as we're jockeying for AAU spots, college scholarships, whatever it might be.

The problem with that, according to the research, is that when we look at like team ball sports, like basketball, your longer-term ceiling is actually raised by spending time outside of basketball, playing other sports. You said the, one of the key phrases there, like degrees of freedom that you can create, like allowing your body to play and move in different contexts, different levels of structure from pickup to, you know, highly organized, but also like across different sports.

And there's a lot of sports that are complementary to basketball, right? So Kobe, RIP, you know, talked about how his background in soccer really set him up well to be able to step into a triangle offense. And that felt so natural because in soccer, you're kind of, you're thinking and moving in kind of triangles in terms of your movement patterns.

Right. So it's really easy to sort of chase that, like the more direct things that produce the more immediate advantage for a kid, but that might actually be lowering their long-term trajectory. Like it doesn't mean anything if you're the best 8-year-old. It doesn't.

It might to you in that moment. But there's a lot of physical, social, psychological pressure that comes with that as well. It's probably the thing, one of the things that's kind of poisoning our athlete development system the most these days is the advantage that can be gained at an early age by kind of specialized, kind of like juicing the training effects.

And then that kid gets more attention. They're treated as if they have better potential. And we're overlooking lots of kids who actually may have higher ceilings in the long run, but we're not seeing it right then. And we're not very well trained as coaches, as parents, to be able to understand how development is not just like this, like linear progression that the faster you move ahead, the longer you stay ahead.

Yeah. I was reading an article earlier today, actually on talent identification and how, like what we can use to Identify talent, especially at a young age. The article was arguing about the fact that we should look at players that stay in the sport longer.

And I'm paraphrasing here, but it was more just supporting the fact that they play other sports, but they stay with this sport, you know, the longest. And I thought it was an interesting point there as well. I do want to ask, you contributed to the True Athlete Project with your piece, 12 Ideas for Playing the Long Game.

Yeah.

Can you talk a little bit about that? And if you could translate those 12 ideas into maybe 1 or 2 that, you know, summarize 1 or 2 of those ideas that coaches could use, the ones that you think are maybe most important, what would they be?

Yeah. Thank you for highlighting that because that's actually how Alex and I got connected with each other. 'Cause he was doing a workshop one week and then I was doing it the next and we were like, We both like said CLA at the same time.

And it was like that scene in Step Brothers where it's like, did we just become best friends? No. In that I try to help, particularly from a parenting standpoint, help pull back the curtain a little bit to think about some of the common sort of traps and things that, that I see again, as I look at this from a more zoomed out perspective.

But if we're, if we're talking about translating that for, say, a coach, one of the Biggest areas in basketball is really because of AAU culture. There's a lot of, I've used this term already, but kind of like suboptimal practices that are going on around training to competition ratio.

Like in the US in general, our competition to training ratio is so different than the vast majority of peer nations around the world. We spend so much time competing. In structured, organized tournaments and competitions. And so little relative time training compared to what a lot of the athlete development research says.

And so we as coaches navigate this, like, how many games are we playing in a weekend versus how much we actually like practiced and focused on their development. The thing that I would inject. So one of the things that I, I brought up in that talk was inserting more play into it.

Right. So it's not just training or competition, but training, competition, and play. And how do we find a sort of golden mean there where we're giving kids a space where they can cultivate joy, where they can play, be creative? There's all sorts of research.

So I'm a play researcher in some ways when it comes to athlete development and what play brings to the table. And there's so much research Talking about the benefits of play physically, cognitively, socially, from a decision-making standpoint, a creativity standpoint. And so it's actually not like a waste of time for you to carve out 10 minutes at the start of practice to let the kids play in a self-directed, kid-led type of playful environment that actually there's research support that that's conducive to priming them to actually be ready to step into a more directed training environment

and get more out of it. So that would be probably one of my first ones. The other thing I might say is, how are we individually measuring growth?

Right.

We focus a lot because it's, you know, we have limited time and resources and energy. We focus a lot on kind of our team and how we're doing. But again, if you're coaching 10-year-olds, like how the team is doing doesn't really matter all that much.

Like what we really should be focused on is each player on their own individual trajectory, making the progress they need to make from the start of the season to the end of the season. And how are we measuring and communicating that? How are we creating individualized kind of developmental profiles and goals for those athletes?

I know it takes a lot of work. You know, so a coach who's listening to this may be like, dude, I got, I can barely like get the practice on time. I get that. I've been there. But if we are really focused on doing this right, quote unquote, a coach would likely see some really big return on investment from paying into a more individualized kind of growth development system.

that they could put in place. So that's a couple of ideas that sort of come out of that.

No, fantastic. And just to build on that last point, you know, coaches can, and that's why I think it's important to play small-sided games at practice. So, you know, you have your 2-on-2s, your 1-on-1s, 2-on-1s, 3-on-3s, 3-on-2s, because the players are going to get more touches.

They're going to get more time on the ball. And, you know, that's going to just equal more time, more decisions, more decisions being made, more learning ultimately. Right? If you can design those games. And then I think that the real trick is, especially when you get, you know, to kind of youth age group, there's a big discrepancy at times of like how good the best player is and maybe how unskilled that last player is.

And then it's like, how can we manipulate those constraints to make the game harder for that best player and make it a lot easier for the first player, just so that they're making the same decisions so that they can still learn how to make those decisions.

And then eventually, you know, their body will catch up to them. They'll grow and get stronger and they can make that They'll have the same action capabilities. And more importantly, they'll be growing hopefully at, you know, a kind of the same rate. Obviously learning is nonlinear, but at least we can help them create those environments for them where they can learn at that kind of same rate.

And you spoke about the AAU system. I do want to elaborate on that. Let's talk a little bit more about that. There's just so much emphasis on winning and like you said, playing in tournaments and then the practice environment. There's not enough time to play these small-sided games because We got to put in the defense and we got to put in the offense.

And, you know, we got all these things that we got to do in this short amount of time to prepare for these 5 teams. So, you know, where do you see the problem with that? Is there anything we can do as coaches, maybe even as parents to kind of, you know, tackle this?

Yeah. I mean, it's a big, it's a big issue. You can see, I mean, and I, I helped co-found an AAU program way back when, when I was younger, like I'm not, Like, I understand how and why it's sort of developed in the way that it has.

But when you see like the NBA and USA Basketball, like coming together a couple of years ago to put in a set of kind of like guidelines around training and competition loads and rest and recovery, that doesn't happen a lot in the US.

In fact, because of the way that we tend to approach, that's like a whole nother podcast when we look at like sport governance and policy in the US, we don't see a lot of that type of coordination and collaboration. And for them to come out with that, those official recommendations was their most direct way that they would be willing to try to address what's going on in AAU, where there's just so much competition.

And in part because AAU is built on financial incentives, right? Not, not really athlete development incentives. It's built on It's built on, you know, kind of the backs of this being a travel event industry where we get to throw our kids in there and then, you know, win some tournament that doesn't mean anything.

So it's not an easy fix. It's not an overnight fix. I think we don't have a lot of levers to pull to be able to really reel it in. I have a 12-year-old. Who has the potential to be a good basketball player as he continues to develop.

I've intentionally kept him out of AAU. The goal has been here in Texas, 7th grade is when they can start playing school sports, right? So for him, our goal has been like, play for your, your school, your neighborhood school, something that means something to the community.

And then like, you know, the way we've approached that has been to stay outside of the AAU.

path.

That's a difficult choice to make when you have a kid who has potential as a basketball player, who might even have pressures that are pulling him or pushing him towards wanting to do that. And so like, if I feel those pressures, if it's hard for me to resist that pull, it's got to be really hard for lots of people because I know, I know the research I have, like I have the ability to sort of step back and look at it with a little more detachment than most.

So it's, I don't have some grand solution. I think what it, in our household, we had to try to build our own world around how we wanted him to engage with the sport. And so, you know, that's finding some like-minded parents. It's dabbling with, you know, doing YMCA and I-9 and some of the basic kind of easy stuff while supporting a lot of like unstructured play and then mixing that in with some like focused, like training sessions with coaches who you philosophically agree with.

And so it's the only way to defeat this AAU monster is just to turn away from it. And I know that's hard because as good Americans, we feel like our kids should be competing at the highest level at all times in order to reach their potential.

And I get that, but I also think that we use that as an excuse. Like, again, if we're protecting this trajectory and protecting this potential, there's a lot more creativity that we can bring to how we do that.

No, absolutely. I think the kids love it, don't they? That's, that's the other thing about it. So it's like, you know, why would you want to deprive them of this joy and this fun and the excitement of traveling with your friends? There's a lot of things that go into it.

I do think it's like one of those things. It's not like the kid isn't going to play basketball if he really wants to play. So if he doesn't go to one of these tournaments, he's going to, like you mentioned, he's going to play unstructured basketball.

And maybe those sessions, because he's not getting those sessions, because some kids, they're training at school, then they're going to after-school sessions. So they're just not having time to just play for fun. So then maybe that might open up that opportunity. So it's just, You know, like you said, there's a lot that goes into it.

I think your points are, you know, very interesting and especially what you do with your son there as well. I do want to touch on esports and digital environments. You did some work with this. How do they shape identity and motivation? Do you see any lessons from those spaces that traditional coaches could learn from?

Yeah, it's a really fun, a really fun question. So a bunch of years ago, I was giving a talk basically in front of the USOPC United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, all the kind of heads of their NGBs. And the talk was kind of about how, when we think about athlete development, are there lessons that we can take from video games?

And, you know, I remember somebody in that, one of the heads kind of was like, well, how are we supposed to compete with video games? You know, like, and they're sort of positioned as this like boogeyman, like if kids are Playing video games, then they're getting fat and lazy, and they're not playing outside with their friends and sports and all that.

And I just look at it diff. I look at a lot of things differently, I guess. But I look at it differently. I'm constantly trying to understand how we can create a motivational climate for kids that more organically allows them to take ownership over their own development and.

Step forward and want to be a part of that process rather than just they're thrust into it and they just have to receive whatever we throw at them. And I think what's interesting about video games is when you look at them from this sort of social psychological standpoint, there's a lot of lessons for sports.

It's like, well, why would a kid want to go play video game, go play 2K instead of going down to the playground? Like they're playing at the playground on 2K rather than down at the actual playground. And there are some real reasons for that.

So one is a video game environment kids are almost entirely in control of, right? They're fully autonomous. Like it's their world. They don't have their dad or their mom like standing over their shoulder telling them exactly like what they should do and how they should do it better.

It's the type of environment where the stakes are lowered. Structurally. So what happens if it's, you know, you lose in a video game, you just start over, right? Game over equals start over and you just run it back and you just keep going.

A lot of the sports environments and context we design for kids place so much emphasis on the outcome at such early ages. And then you as a kid, like, have to like live with and defend like whatever happened in that game. Like it really means something.

And video games lower those stakes so much where it's like, okay, you beat me. Like, let's run it back. Right? Like, and then you just keep, you want to keep playing and keep engaging with it. So when we think about the types of environments we design, it's like, how do we take some of those elements and learnings from, from video games, which are the most like market tested, like they're designed to be something that kids want to do.

Like, how do we bring that same type of thinking into our traditional sports setting? And I think that's a really fun challenge for us because it's going to force us to have to be okay with maybe stepping away at times from the way we've always done it, quote unquote.

And that, I think there's a lot of potential there, but it all comes from a starting point of focusing on How do we make this a better experience for kids that allows them to connect on a deeper, more organic level with their own development in this process?

Not just being able to play. Like, it's funny. It's like I haven't really— I don't really go into many environments where the score isn't being kept on like pretty much anything. It's like I remember growing up, you know, we would just play for fun.

Like we would just stay after school and just play basketball outside just for fun. No scores. Because there'd be no one coming on next. But like, you know, that's the point. It's like there's no pressure to win or lose. We're just playing for the, you know, to play.

Again, I think with video games, of course there is that win or lose, but nothing happens if you lose. So you just kind of, you play again. So it's almost the same thing. I think it's important to kind of get that into your practice environment as coaches as well.

So, you know, I always have scores in my practice sessions.

Yeah.

But I do think it's important. Like, as soon as someone wins or loses, just the next game. It's not like this or that. It's just next game. Let's not spend time next game. So I think that helps too.

Well, and that's it. It's like the immediate pushback you'll get sometimes from ideas like this is like, well, without the score, then they won't know how they did. And without, like, I'm not saying don't keep score. I'm not saying scoring is evil. Like, feedback is good.

But we have an unhealthy relationship with the scoreboard. And we have to reckon with that, that like the way we currently utilize it in our tournament settings, in our training sessions is not necessarily the best way to use it. And it doesn't mean throw it out, right?

It doesn't mean never keep score, never hold kids accountable. Like, that's not what we're saying here. It's thinking about how do we Kind of like you said, George, like in a practice session, how do we— yeah, the kids want to know, like they want to compete.

Humans are hardwired to compete. Like we love that. We love social comparison. That's what drives us. But how do we roll that out and deploy it in a way where it doesn't have an oversized impact on how they feel about that training session or whatever it might be?

It's just the drive. It's like the vehicle to get us there. It's not the, like, Yeah, absolutely.

And I also think that's another reason to always celebrate the right decision versus the right outcome that, that we wanna see. You know, coming to the end here of our conversation, I do wanna ask you if looking ahead, what gives you hope about the next generation of coaches and sports leaders coming through your program at the University of Texas?

Our guy Alex being at the Cavs gives me hope, right? And you didn't pay me to say that. But like the fact that we have, you know, when I was a young grad assistant back at the University of Florida, working with the women's program there and working with around great, incredible coaches, you know, Carolyn Peck, national championship winning coach, incredible human.

Across the hall was Billy Donovan and his staff, like putting together back-to-back national championships, like, you know, amazing people, amazing coaches and teachers. Back in that era, like analytics were just kind of getting started. Like the idea of really bringing more, more scrutiny and thought to how we understand the game was new.

And I would, like, I've confessed right at the beginning, I'm a nerd. Like I want to like challenge things. I want to know how stuff works. And even with those incredible coaches, it's not a shot at them in any way, but like the environment in basketball back then was one that was really like, there wasn't as much space for an Alex to bring in a CLA approach, right?

Like it just wasn't really receptive to that. And so what gives me hope from a basketball standpoint is that we are really seeking more aggressively ways to like create better experiences and outcomes for our athletes. We don't always succeed with that, but I think we're engaging with it externally in a way that that we didn't in the past.

And, you know, being at a place like the University of Texas, I'm fortunate to work with incredible students who I think, you know, one of the things that's a big focus of our sports management program is like sports is a human endeavor, right?

So how do we anchor and orient ourselves around making sure we're serving the good that we can do for humans, for people, for communities, As we think about how we win games or think about how we make money or think about how we do the things that we do.

And that's something that is very well received by our students. And I think that gives me a lot of hope that like they view basketball or sports or whatever as this, this really powerful context through which we can connect with each other, through which we can explore who we are, who we want to be.

And that really does give me hope. So I feel like we're in an interesting space. All sorts of challenges in all sorts of ways everywhere. But like, there's a lot of opportunity to continue to try to bring that human piece back into like how we think about developing athletes and teams.

Absolutely. It's like there's this relentlessness to improve and improve as quickly as possible. And to your point, it might just be by collaborating with each other And that means coach to player, player to player, coach to coach. And this is one of the ways we can do that really effectively.

Matt, I want to thank you for your time. It's been great chatting with you. Really enjoyed it. I want to ask you one last question before I let you get back to work. I know you're a busy man. What is one piece of advice that you would give to coaches that would instantly improve their practice environment?

Yeah. Find the fun, right? Like find ways to make, like whether you're coaching kids or you're coaching adults, like people are driven by the need to like find fun in what they do, find purpose in what they do, find meaning in it and identity in it.

Sure.

But like so much of that derives from the fun and we so quickly turn play into work. for kids as we train them. And those things don't have to be like play and progress are not mutually exclusive, right? So figuring out ways to bring fun into what you do is the easiest way to make some impact, right?

So as you're like planning out your practice session for the day or for the week or whatever, like figuring out how to inject some fun, some play, some autonomy. for the players is not wasted time. It's not you phoning it in. It's actually could have the potential to elevate what you all are capable of doing both individually and collectively as a group.

And then, and then I would add to that, find your basketball village, right? Like find the people who see things philosophically similar to you and let that be a safe haven. Right? A place where you can bounce ideas. Coaching can be really lonely, right?

Like you're supposed to win. You're supposed to have every answer for everything. Like find a group of people that you can connect with, you can lean on, you can bounce ideas off of and do so in a way that is like philosophically aligned with what you're really trying to do.

And I think, you know, because what ends up happening is because coaching is so pressurized and lonely, You end up getting pulled towards the things that have those sort of shorter-term returns on investment. But if you can cultivate a community, a village for yourself of folks that can help you stay grounded to that bigger mission, that kind of longer-term objective.

So yeah, it's about growing the game in the end. It's important to have that perspective. Matt, once again, thank you very much.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

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