Why Should All Coaches be Using Methods Backed by Science?
Alex Sarama delves into how basketball coaches and practitioners can inform their approaches based on contemporary skill acquisition research.
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Alex Sarama delves into how basketball coaches and practitioners can inform their approaches based on contemporary skill acquisition research.
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In this episode, Alex Sarama delves into how basketball coaches and practitioners can inform their approaches based on contemporary skill acquisition research. He highlights the gap that exists between the research and its practical application, providing some practical examples as to how this can be overcome. Within the episode, Alex emphasizes the importance of coaches understanding the essence of human movement in order to design coaching and organizational approaches based on an ecological dynamics framework.
Learn about player development with our activities book. Inside, you'll find 50 activity diagrams for your workouts and team practices:https://transformingbball.com/small-sided-games-book
Cette transcription correspond à l’audio original en anglais.
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 of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, then this is the podcast for you. Welcome back to episode 2 of the Transforming Basketball podcast.
In the first episode, with my interview with Adam Omiecinski, I outlined the vision behind Transforming Basketball. I want this brand to help practitioners working in any role in basketball be able to understand the research and most importantly be able to practically apply it in whatever setting they're working in all over the world.
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I think there's a big gap that exists right now in terms of some of the ideas being produced from the research world and then the ability to be able to practically apply that. And so that's really why I've started this and, and why I put this podcast episode together.
If someone was being introduced to these ideas for the first time, where would they start? And I think it, it can be very difficult. It can almost be overwhelming because there are a lot of sources and And navigating that and understanding it, it's no easy feat.
So in this episode, I'm really just going to take a deep dive into the potential of, of how evidence-based ideas, particularly focused on skill acquisition, can be applied in the basketball world, whether it's a coach working with beginners, a physiotherapist working with a professional team, a performance analyst, an athletic performance coach.
The whole aim is to show how this stuff applies to everything, but of course with a special focus on coaching. So I think I'm going to start this with an analogy to help make sense of this. So just in life in general, we've been surrounded by evidence-based ideas in many other fields, whether it's medicine, technology.
I think evidence-based ideas are a key part of life in the 21st century. And if we were to go to a doctor 50 years ago we would be treated in a very different way, of course, to what we see in the present day.
In fact, if the same methodologies were being used not just 50 years ago but even 10 years ago in some fields, and, you know, we were being treated in that way, we wouldn't want to be treated, you know. Yet in the basketball world, it's largely been immune to developments and the, the kind of introduction of evidence-based fields.
Now, some departments within the basketball world, such as sports science, naturally I think they're more grounded in empirical research. And all that is is information stemming from the research world. So some fields are naturally more embedded in that, whereas others such as basketball coaching itself, athletic performance, I think they're very separated from that.
And even in the fields where, you know, there's naturally an element of using empirical evidence, I don't believe that they're kind of grounded in the same shared theoretical framework. And critically, all the departments in an organization are typically not connected with the same framework.
So what we typically see is something known as path dependency. And what this is, is despite better or more evidence-based ideas existing and, you know, those ideas being readily accessible, Instead of these ideas being adopted, what we've seen in the basketball world is practitioners continuing to rely on traditional approaches.
Now, it's not the fault of individually— of individuals. Many practitioners are extremely well-intentioned, but there have simply been some very persuasive, very influential sociocultural constraints which have limited evidence-based ideas from being incorporated. So particularly for coaches, whether it's former experience playing, coaches when they start out, they learn from, they observe, they see what they do.
Social media, seeing the game through X's and O's, traditional coach education. There's a whole plethora of different reasons why evidence-based ideas haven't been adopted. And my idea is I just want to highlight these so that we have an awareness of them. And I think it's really important to overcome— we have to overcome path dependency because otherwise we're just going to keep relying relying on the same old traditional approaches.
So is there an alternative? Absolutely there is. The alternative is understanding that regardless of whatever role we're working within the basketball world, there's a readily accessible evidence base for us to access and learn and apply in whatever field we're working with. And ultimately, at the end of the day, the players are the ones who deserve it.
They deserve the best practices, and it's simply no longer good enough, in my opinion, to rely on things just because it's always been done that way. We have to look at a radically different way of working in the Barça world, and this is where we come into the introduction of skill acquisition.
So evidence-based research, I think, takes many forms. There are a lot of researchers working in multiple kind of producing research in multiple areas. But my main focus, of course, is on the skill acquisition space. And this is where I've been the most passionate kind of learning about over the last few years and taking some of the great research papers and ideas being produced by professors and researchers, and then looking at how we can practically apply it.
And on this podcast, we're gonna be getting a chance to meet a lot of the researchers who are contributing some of this work, and I'll be helping kind of put that into practical terms. So on the kind of podcast interviews I do, on the blogs, You know, we'll be looking at terms like what is an affordance.
That's obviously an ecological dynamics term, and I'll be putting it into a basketball context. So every step of the way, I want to help you kind of understand what these terms mean in basketball. So within this podcast, I've also done an accompanying presentation, which you can actually view on the Transforming Basketball YouTube channel.
So I've got some slides for this podcast if you want to check it out. And on this slide, what is skill acquisition? I've got a cool photo from one of my players last year, college prep. Our point guard Jamie, producing a really creative passing solution.
So if you're just listening to this now, you can kind of imagine it. He's surrounded by 3 defenders near the basket, really surrounded. I mean, they're basically wedging him in, and he's done a no-look pass, and his right hand has gone underneath and around one of the defenders who's basically got his arms around him.
And I remember this summer game, he produced an amazing kick-out pass. Right? So that was a great example of a skillful behavior. Traditionally, however, and one of the most important places to start in this whole space is understanding how that sequence may have emerged.
And the keyword there is emerged. So the term skill acquisition in itself can be a little bit misleading because I think when we first hear that word, we believe that skills are something to be acquired. So that very much paints a notion of skills being like techniques which a player has to develop repetitively, kind of store it within their body somewhere, and then bring it out at the right moment.
Whereas what we're going to be getting into and looking at contemporary skill acquisition is the idea that skill is not something that is possessed or owned. And this comes from a seminal paper by Keith Davids and Duarte Araújo, which I'm going to be putting on a blog post soon.
It's not something that's acquired. Skill is an emergent property. So this pass, the example of this pass, it emerged as a result of the environment that Jamie was in. So this has big implications for how we approach basketball, because if we understand that skills are not acquired, then we understand it whatever the setting is, you know, we should not be spending time doing all these on-air repetitive reps or even in a team practice, you know, trying to embed these patterns into players, because we understand that skills are emergent within the environment.
Everything that I'm presenting upon and everything that forms the basis of the Transforming Basketball approach, it comes from empirical evidence. So this isn't my opinion. I didn't just wake up this morning and decided I wanted to kind of state what I believe. This is grounded in empirical evidence.
And website, which is soon going to be launching, I've actually included a bunch of research papers. You can see where some of these ideas are stemming from and how I'm attempting to make sense of it within a basketball context. So key thing in terms of— we kind of— I alluded to what skills are, but to really get to the root essence of it, we have to understand human movement.
If we understand human movement, then as practitioners we can be more effective because we can design environments and approaches within our practices that align with the science of human movement. So this is where I'm going to introduce the term ecological dynamics, and I encourage you to just spend a few moments here.
Maybe you've heard this term before, or maybe you haven't. What do you think that ecological dynamics could mean if you heard that word for the first time? What could it mean? So I'm going to kind of give a brief overview, and we're going to actually have a whole podcast kind of solely dedicated to an ecological dynamics theory in the not too distant future.
So now I'm going to kind of give a condensed version and give it as much justice as I can in a few minutes. Traditionally, in the skill acquisition world, there are 2 theories predominantly. The first kind of theory, which has been dominant from approximately the 1960s when kind of skill acquisition first emerged as a field, until the 2000s was information processing theory.
And even in the present day, a lot of professors, a lot of researchers, even if you studied physical education at university, you probably were lectured with information processing theories. And information processing suggests that the human brain is essentially like a computer where we have to process things, where we have a stimuli, we process it in our brain, And then we produce an action, an output.
So that would be a basketball movement. So there's kind of like a 3-stage process model known as Schmidt's theory in information processing. But, you know, it's very Terminator-esque where seeing humans as kind of machines where we have to kind of embed, you know, learn these techniques to acquire them, store them, and then supposedly we're able to bring them out at the right time within the game.
So information processing theory is naturally very different to an ecological approach. Ecological dynamics is based on 2 fields, and we have to understand these fields in order to make sense of ecological dynamics. So these are dynamical systems theory and ecological psychology. I'm just gonna start with dynamical systems theory, and that's looking at how kind of movements are coordinated or controlled within complex systems.
So that includes basketball players and teams as a whole. A key part of dynamical systems— and again, like I said, I'm going to do a whole episode on this shortly, I just want to give you the summary— a key part is that movement is self-organizing.
So what that means is it's not a top-down approach to movement in basketball. So the brain is not controlling movement. Body parts self-organize in the face of different constraints. So whatever we face in our environment basketball players will self-organize and the body will just take care of itself to move and solve the task at hand.
Okay, so that's really important because what we have traditionally seen in the basketball world is environments which don't promote self-organization. In other words, coaches attempting to give all the solutions to the players, to the athletes. So as opposed to players being able to self-organize and respond more naturally, because obviously every player is so different, they're going to move in different ways.
We try to give play— we believe that as coaches we've always known the right techniques, and we're trying to make everyone kind of move in very similar ways in a one-size-fits-all approach. So key part of dynamical systems: movement is self-organizing. We're going to get through a deeper dive on it very shortly.
Ecological psychology. So very important, and this obviously inherently complements dynamical systems. And a key part of this is perception of affordances. This is where I'm gonna start. An affordance is simply an opportunity for action. I wanna give one example. Picture that we have Steph Curry, Nikola Jokic, and let's say Giannis Antetokounmpo, all in possession of the ball in the top of the key.
And we're gonna imagine there's 7 seconds left in the game and all their teammates are in like optimal spacing. Really inviting a one-on-one opportunity. Well, the affordances that each of those 3 players— Steph, Nikola, and Giannis— the affordances, the opportunities for action that they perceive in this situation are gonna be very different.
Why? Because they're all very different individuals. Every player perceives affordances differently. So let's say they're perceiving space. In this instance, Steph Curry might see space as an opportunity to try and shoot the ball and shoot a 3. Nikola might see space, he might try and use the space to be really deceptive and create an advantage through some type of deceptive behavior, whether that's a pass, some type of fake, whatever.
And then of course we've got Giannis, you know, he might take advantage of his very unique action capabilities in terms of his quickness, his vertical, and his unique individual constraints, and he might see space as an opportunity to drive. So affordances are highly subjective to every individual, and within the course of basketball, players are constantly perceiving affordances during every moment of the game.
A player might act on one affordance, and the affordance landscape is constantly changing. So they act on one affordance, for instance, they see an opportunity to drive by a defender, and then new affordances will present themselves. These are all relative to every individual within the course of basketball.
This is the essence of perception-action coupling. So players are constantly perceiving affordances, and then they're acting through self-organization. And these processes, we cannot split them apart. It's a continuous process. Perception-action coupling, you know, in daily life, it's continuous until we die. So traditionally, action has been separated within the traditional approach.
And as coaches, practitioners, we're very much predominantly focused on action. An ecological dynamics approach, it informs us how important it is to create environments where perception-action are coupled together. So therefore, this means that we've got to consider as coaches, how can we be designing in some of these affordances into our practices which provide opportunities for self-organization to occur, as opposed to us always giving the answer.
Now, to really kind of make more sense of basketball performance, so we've looked at an ecological dynamics approach, and this informs the constraints-led approach. So ecological dynamics, it's not something that's only specific to basketball. It's relevant to— it applies to just movement in daily life.
In any task in human life, ecological dynamics makes sense of how we move as human beings. The constraints-led approach is a little bit more specific as a coaching methodology we can use as practitioners in basketball, which is informed by an ecological dynamics framework.
According to Karl Newell, we have 3 categories of constraint, and this is Newell's constraints model. So we have task constraints, individual constraints, and environmental constraints. So task constraints extend to the rules of basketball itself. So things like shot clock time, the boundary markings, the rules and violations that a referee may call, the actions, the interactions of teammates and opponents, where they're moving, how they're moving, defensive coverages.
Something like a shot spectrum could be an example of a task constraint. Feedback given by a coach, and then of course offensive and defensive concepts. Now, task constraints are very important because this type of constraint, as practitioners, these are the ones we can manipulate most readily within our practice environment.
So for instance, maybe there's a practice activity such as a small-sided game where, well, we can manipulate the number of players within that. We can manipulate how much— what the shot clock is, what the scoring system is, how the players are, what the defensive coverages are.
So these would all be examples of manipulating task constraints. Individual constraints— these are things which change either over relatively short or longer time scales. So things which could change, uh, very quickly could be things like fatigue, confidence, anxiety, whereas things which could take longer to change would be wingspan, height, weight.
So of course, an athletic performance coach You know, one of their jobs is to manipulate individual constraints and positively impact action capabilities of a player through, you know, what they may be doing in the weight room or on the court. And the last category of constraint is environmental constraints.
And these are physical and sociocultural considerations. So physical considerations could be things like the surface that we're playing on, could be the temperature in the arena, crowd, friends. But then we've also got things like the impact of Friendship groups, family, and forms of life.
And we're gonna do a whole episode of forms of life. These are sociocultural things which I believe have been very much misunderstood and not really considered within the Barça approach. So for instance, to understand forms of life, let's use the example of Brazilian football players.
You know, what makes Brazilian football players so skillful? Well, there's a very kind of— there are a number of unique environmental constraints within Brazil. Which lead to some of those skillful behaviors emerging. So basketball example, a great example of forms of life could be streetball in New York.
All right. It could be maybe there's one country, let's take a country like Lithuania where basketball is very much a national sport. And the typical Lithuanian player, they see within the culture players who are great shooters. They, you know, they play a similar way and naturally players grow up and they see role models who are playing that way.
The way a Lithuanian player plays is going to be very different to a Spanish player. And the reason why is forms of life, environmental constraints. So the key thing here is that these constraints are always present, affecting every single possession, whether that's a practice or a game.
And it's the confluence of these constraints which leads to the nature of how skills emerge. So going back to that example, the pass that I gave with my player Jamie passing against a triple team. Well, how that pass emerged was a result of these 3 constraints interacting in it with perception-action coupled.
There's a great quote here from Rafael Nadal. It actually comes from Rob Gray's book, How We Learn to Move. We're gonna have an episode shortly with Rob, and I'm just gonna read it out. So this is what Rafael Nadal said. So he said, you might think that after millions and millions of balls I've hit, I'd have the basic shots of tennis show up, that reliably hitting a true, smooth, clean shot every time would be a piece of cake.
But it isn't, not just because every day you wake up feeling differently, but because every shot is different, every single one. No ball arrives the same as another, and no shot is identical. So key message here is it's this continuous interaction of constraints shaping the emergence of skills.
So my question to practitioners at every level is, if we know that this is how performance in basketball occurs and, and kind of what dictates whether performance a player is going to be successful or not successful with whatever task they're performing. Why are we not considering and designing practice environments where these constraints are present?
And this is kind of the whole message behind Transforming Basketball and understanding just how we can go about this. Because what we see traditionally in terms of how we coach, it's not respecting the role that these constraints play in shaping emergent skills. We see feedback by coaches which is very internalized, focused on where specific body parts should be.
We see a belief in the fundamentals, which I believe there's no such thing as a fundamental skill. And then we see coaches very obsessed with— instead of players acting on affordances that might appear within the offensive or defensive end, we want players to just follow patterns as opposed to acting on the natural scoring opportunities within their environment.
And there's a great quote here from one of the leaders and one of the pioneers of an ecological dynamics approach, Professor Keith Davids, and he says, you can't adapt to an environment you don't inhabit. And this is really important because I think any of us would agree that a skillful player is an adaptive one, regardless of whether they're passing, finishing, shooting, They need to be adaptive because the constraints are ever-changing.
Okay, so if a player does not receive opportunities to adapt to those in the practice environment, if we're just leaving those reps up to the game, we're really just leaving player development up to chance. So this is where, you know, these evidence-based ideas have enormous potential to be incorporated into player development environments across the world.
So let's look at some practical implications of what this means, and, and this is where I'm going to spend a little bit of time on because the most important thing of everything I'm sharing is I want practitioners to leave every podcast with a few takeaways of something you might be able to try in your environment.
So what are the implications of everything I've shared? Well, firstly, we've heard a lot of talk about blocked versus random practice over the years, and I think that can be potentially a useful starting point to understand some very basic skill acquisition terms. But blocked versus random comes from an information processing era, so I would argue that with an ecological dynamics approach, it's not even that relevant.
And you might have wondered, you know, in all my kind of clinics and everything, I, I don't speak— I haven't spoken about blocked versus random for a number of years. And the reason why is because take an activity like a 5-on-0 rehearsal of a motion offense or a set play, whatever.
Technically, that would be random practice, whereas from an ecological perspective, I would see very little value to a drill like that. That, you know, I think my key message is we have to move past blocked versus random as a framework because for me it's just very simplistic.
And again, if, if we're explaining these ideas to a coach for the first time, great, I think it's useful to understand blocked versus random. But, you know, I want to move beyond that and get coaches and practitioners understanding the CLA, and it's just simply not relevant within that framework.
If you're not sure what blocked versus random is, Very simple. Blocked practice would be when a player repeats the same technique over and over again. Picture spot shooting as an example, where it's just shooting and it's not blocked variable in terms of the player isn't just shooting but doing it in different locations with different passes, etc.
It's blocked constant where it's always the same every time. So there is a difference between blocked variable and blocked constant. I think the blocked constant is definitely more of the evil than blocked variable. Random practice is simply, you know, a combination of different techniques.
So maybe a player does a combination of passes, dribbles, shots in a more random manner. But again, for me, it's not that relevant when we get to the CLA. Second part, variability is an essential component of our practice environments. We have seen variability as being something that's traditionally been seen as undesirable noise, as something we don't want.
And I would encourage you as a practitioner, whatever, whether you're a coach, physio, whatever, in your next session consider how you can encourage and promote as much variability as possible in your practice. And it could be making the smallest changes. So as opposed to doing spot shooting, changing the range and location every time, changing the pass type, you could just have some type of defender who every time not only do they pass from a different location But they close out in a different manner.
And it's not a passive contest. It has to be a contest which can actually impact self-organization. So the player must sometimes have the threat of their shot being blocked. And that's one super easy change that you can make to drastically improve how your players shoot at any level of basketball.
And, you know, I think this whole essence of skill work, quote unquote skill, it's not skill work, it's technique work. And that is where, for me, just adding variability into those settings through having some type of guided or live defender is critical. You know, whether from an ecological approach, there's simply no need for any of that stuff.
And I'm not saying that technique isn't important, but any technique that doesn't emerge in context has to be relearned in context. And technique can be developed playing against some type of constrained defender, whether that's a coach at the highest levels of the game, or, you know, more the youth levels, a live defender.
I even then, I think at the highest levels we can easily create environments where we're playing live against other players instead of doing an hour workout of traditional practice. Simply doing half an hour of more representative practice is going to be far more beneficial.
Implication number 3, how can we design affordances into practice? So that has to be something that we are constantly thinking about, and it's a case of what affordances do we need to amplify, do we want to expose players to more within player development or team practice.
And this is what informs the activities and the small-sided games I create. So I'm not just using kind of random small-sided games, I'm creating my own activities based on what affordances I believe my players need to be exposed to. And then, you know, they're going to self-organize and they're going to act on those affordances in unique ways, right?
There's no such thing as, okay, I want to design an environment and I'm going to teach a technique and I'm going to hope that the players use that technique to act on affordance. That is not what this is about. And that's something I'm seeing a lot nowadays where we're seeing drilling and techniques being taught and then coaches are creating a small-sided game where there's an opportunity to use that.
That's not what this approach is about because that's Obviously implying to the players that there's one way to solve the problem, and movement is a problem-solving activity. Every player is going to solve it differently. This leads into implication four: How can we change an activity by manipulating constraints?
So this is where it all comes down to. You know, maybe within the activity, the players are successful, and it's too easy, or maybe they're not successful, and it's too hard. The optimal challenge is too difficult. All the affordances that we wanted to amplify, maybe they're not appearing enough.
Okay, so these are the reasons we're in. Manipulate constraints. And this is the biggest difference between the CLA, the constraints-led approach, and a games approach. So we're not just going to set up a small-sided game and leave it for 5 minutes and not do anything.
We're constantly observing and manipulating constraints purposefully for a reason. So if we believe that we want to, you know, have one affordance appear more enticing or emerge more in that environment, we've got to change the constraints. So an example could be in a pick and roll Maybe we want players to act on, to perceive the affordance to reject the pick and roll more.
Very simply, within a 3-on-3, we could offer double points for a reject. Okay, and that could be one way we do it. And obviously there's so many different ways and almost an infinite number of opportunities to manipulate constraints. And obviously I'm going to be sharing lots of practical examples through the Transforming Basketball brand.
And the last implication I want to leave you with is How can these activities and constraints be manipulated around principles of play? And this isn't just for a coach. For me, any practitioner working in any role in basketball, the principles of play, aka how a team plays offense and defense, should shape everything else.
So what an athletic performance coach does, the way they work and the activities they design through the CLA, should be impacted by how the head coach has their vision for the offense and the defense. And I think this is one of the biggest problems between the traditional kind of training industry and what we see in player development.
There's a huge silo between player development and team development where players are doing things in player development which has kind of no relevance to how the team actually plays basketball when it comes to game time. So these principles of play, I think it's key to understand how your team wants to play.
And this is conceptual offense, conceptual defense. And, you know, that framework then kind dictates somewhat how you manipulate constraints and the activities you design. I think that's really important because then it creates a lot of synergy between the player development environment and the team development one.
And what this leads to, obviously, if you're following on YouTube, you'll now see 5 silos on your screen. And the whole kind of traditional approach in the basketball world we're seeing is this siloed organizational approach where we have the front office, coaches, athletic performance, analytics, biomechanics, and any other relevant departments.
What I want to do at Transforming Basketball is show how we can eclipse this path dependency, which is impacting our game. And instead of working in silos, create a highly integrated and unified organizational approach through using evidence-based ideas. And the CLA is a shared theoretical framework.
And that's going to be the goal of Transforming Basketball over the next few years. That's it for this episode. I'd like to leave you thinking about what are your main takeaways from this? What are some things maybe that you didn't understand, which I could have explained better?
And what would you like me to talk about in a future podcast to help make sense of these ideas? So you can just send us a message on social media. I'd love to hear your takeaways and also use your feedback to shape the future delivery of Transforming Basketball podcast episodes.
Stay tuned for a bunch of exciting episodes coming up as we take a deeper dive into these ideas. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you would like to learn more about the work we do, head to www.transformingbball.com to access our free resources and help spread these ideas throughout the basketball world.
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