EP 65Player development
The Role of An SAS in Professional Basketball with Tyler Yearby (Pt 2)
Alex Sarama interviews Tyler Yearby, a Skill Acquisition Specialist and Co-Founder of Emergence.
24 min
0:0024:10
Alex Sarama interviews Tyler Yearby, a Skill Acquisition Specialist and Co-Founder of Emergence.
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In this episode, Alex Sarama interviews Tyler Yearby, a Skill Acquisition Specialist and Co-Founder of Emergence. They discuss the role of a skill acquisition specialist (SAS) in basketball and how to overcome the challenges of introducing new ideas to practitioners who have been using a different approach throughout their careers. Tyler emphasizes the importance of transparency, open-mindedness, and collaboration in order to create a positive and effective working environment.
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Cette transcription correspond à l’audio original en anglais.
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We are running part 2 of the role of a skill acquisition specialist in basketball with Tyler Yearby. Tyler, it's a pleasure to have you on. You know, you and Sean have had such an influence on me and everything you and the team at Emergence do.
So thanks for joining the podcast.
Absolutely. I'm delighted to be here. It was awesome to have an opportunity to contribute to the new book, which is excellent, by the way. I'm really enjoying it, but I'm happy to be on, happy to chat.
Thanks so much, Tyler. So normally this is completely nonlinear. I took this from you guys in terms of not overtly planning for these, but I have some very specific questions because I know that coaches need to hear this. And this is related to the role of an SAS in basketball.
And I wanted to go deeper on the great section you and Sean wrote. So continuing, this is kind of part 2 from the questions. Sean kind of set the scene. And now I want to go even deeper with you, Tyler. And the first question is the challenges that arise when, as an SAS, you are helping practitioners who have spent their whole careers with a very different approach.
We can say that. And a lot of people say, oh, there'd be a lot of friction if we hire a skill acquisition specialist and they come in there showing, introducing these ideas. So what would you say to that for the decision makers in a franchise in terms of how you would go about this role while inspiring people and how you can do it without causing any of this friction that some people believe would present itself?
Yeah, I think that's a great question. I would say to start off with being as transparent as possible and having all parties come to the table with an empty cup. So one of the things that I've taken from Bruce Lee, Sean talks about it a lot, but just is the notion of having an empty cup whenever you come into a conversation to where we're both here to learn together, we're both here to grow together and to potentially push the skill level of the individuals that we're working with.
Whenever you enter into a conversation and you're having a true interaction, if there's no dominant party in it, I think that there's a lot of good that's going to come from it. So I think conveying that to decision-makers, that we're not here to tell someone that everything that they're doing is incorrect.
Quite frankly, they're probably doing some really good things, and it might just even be a small tweak to an activity to allow it to be more alive and allow for emergent decision-making to occur. So I think just starting there, conveying the message of, I'm not a know-it-all.
I'm not here to deliver all of these correct ways to do things. I'm here to ask questions, to maybe challenge some of what's being done, learn myself, and push the entire organization forward. But whenever you start from that place of an empty cup on both sides or multiple parties, I think that you can win in a lot of situations.
I love that, Tyler. So practically, what do you think this would look like? Would it be a lot of informal conversations where you are embedded in an organization, you're having conversations with coaches? athletic performance coaches, physios, and really reviewing these things? And, you know, not just the informal conversations, but again, I guess a whole spectrum of maybe some workshops.
What would it look like serving in this role?
Yeah, a whole number of things. I think to start with, it's a lot of just observation. It's myself or whoever it may be, Sean or, or you or others, being in a role where we're simply observing. We're, we are looking at the interactions that are taking place.
So I'm talking about from the coaches themselves and how they're interacting with the players, The design of the practice activities, the way in which constraints are being manipulated, whether they know that they're doing it or not. I think it starts there, and it's just kind of documenting some positives, documenting some areas of opportunity.
And notice I didn't say weaknesses, but just noting areas of opportunity. I do think there's going to be watching film, practice film, game film with the coaches themselves, and starting to maybe pull apart the performer-environment relationship and the interactions that are taking place.
On the court in order to learn more about why they're moving the way they're moving, and then how subsequent practice activities could be set up to afford them to maybe explore ways they could move differently. But I do think it is a lot of informal conversation.
I think it's a lot of time that the SAS would spend on the court. They're maybe not even saying a ton all the time, but then stepping in going, hey, coach, out of curiosity. And it might just be a simple question that's asked.
What's this task intention here? Remind me again. Okay, cool. And then stepping back and then maybe stepping over and saying, hey, do you think that we could nudge their exploration a little bit? Do you think that we could maybe change the numerical relations a little bit?
So in some ways, you're just a copilot with them. You're not leading the charge, if you will, but you're respected, your voice is heard. So I think there are a lot of other areas that an SAS would operate, but that's probably the first place that I would start.
Love it. So it's not just basketball, Tyler. It seems like this siloed approach is very common in all professional sports everywhere. Do you think the practitioners necessarily need an understanding of CLA to start integrating, or are there other steps that you could take to begin with to kind of meet them where they're at and start to bring everyone together and cooperate without necessarily immediately starting with all the theory and the language?
To make sure I understand, just to clarify, when you say practitioners, like the coaches or the individuals that are implementing The practice activities and designing the practice activities they would need. You're saying that they do or don't need— Exactly.
Like, would you say that they need— you think that they need to be given kind of all the empirical information, the research, understand what the CLA is first? Or do you think you could come in more practically, like through these observations that you've mentioned, and start to—
I truthfully think it can be attacked in many different ways, and it's going to depend on the individuals you're working with. Some are far far more open. They actually have that empty cup and they're willing to engage with some information they maybe are unfamiliar with.
And I think it's with those individuals that you would start actually with a little bit of the theoretical underpinning. I'm a firm believer, and if you've heard me on any other podcast or anything that I've ever said in just conversation, I'm a firm believer in elucidating the why at least a little bit, because when you do that, you have a solid foundation to stand on.
Now, I'm not saying It needs to be this complete unpacking of the theory for the whole first month before they ever start implementing anything. But I do think explaining at least a little bit of the why. Now, not all coaches are that way.
So when I mentioned the observations, if through my observations I had picked up on the fact that they wanted to kind of be the leader in that situation, I wouldn't necessarily start with a heavy theory hand, mainly because that might push them away and that might get them to cross their arms, their shoulders raised a little bit.
Right.
I actually would just be there and just ask a handful of questions. And oftentimes it would probably be directed in a positive way, like, Coach, I really like this activity. Out of curiosity, how did you come up with this? To get them to open up initially.
And then I might make a few suggestions. And then once I'd won them over, because I do care, then I would actually start to unpack the theory a bit.
I love it. I think that's why that relational side of this role is probably the most important.
And It is.
And the one thing I should add, the reason why I would attack it in multiple different ways is much like the notion of an ecological approach. There's not a one-size-fits-all to this. It's going to be meeting individuals where they are.
Most definitely. So on the court, you know, we've spoken a lot about how to create these more alive practice activities. I think there's actually some interest, Tyler. The more interest, from my just gut feeling, in CLA comes actually more from athletic performance coaches in the NBA, which is really interesting.
What would this look like in that realm? And, you know, how could an athletic performance coach listening to this use a more, more of an ecological approach with, with what they're doing?
Yeah, that's a great question. And honestly, it's a little easier to answer for team sports, and obviously basketball being a team sport, simply because you can have overlapping opportunities for action that emerge within activities that are designed by an athletic performance coach, S&C coach, athletic development, however that individual is termed or named.
And what I mean by that is, yeah, you're going to have your weight room application, which I can touch on that in just a second, how you can take a rep-without-rep approach in there to allow for exploration. But I think that whenever we're doing, let's call it agility activities, you don't necessarily need to have a ball that's there.
You can have an invasion-evasion type game that's set up, or you even could include a ball, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a basketball. It could be something where you're playing bucketball and you have 2 buckets on the opposite side. And when I mean buckets, I literally mean buckets you'd find at a hardware store or something.
And maybe it's 2v2 or 3v3. You can certainly offset the numbers. And they're maybe passing it in a similar way, but it's also, I guess, in some ways it's similar to what you would see with association football or soccer, where there's continual movement, similar to basketball.
And they're just trying to— one team's trying to make it in one bucket and the other team's trying to make it in this bucket. But what they're getting is they're getting a lot of interactions. They're getting a lot of changing of space, understanding interpersonal distances, relative velocities, bearing angles of individuals.
And so they're getting a go or having a go at something similar to the sport of basketball to allow them to become more sensitive to that information. But from a sport coach perspective, we're not stepping on their toes necessarily because we're not coaching them to shoot.
We're not coaching them in maybe the tactics, if you will. But my point is, is we are embedding these athletes as an athletic performance coach in agility games that are similar to what they may be doing in the sport of basketball to allow them to start to become attuned to That specifying information.
And real quick, and I can elaborate on this if you want me to, but for far too long, S&C coaches, athletic performance coaches, I think very rigid with how they periodized their training. And it was very rote. There was a one way to squat, a one way to lunge, one way to deadlift.
And there's certainly going to be some more, I guess, biomechanically advantageous positions to be in to where you don't injure yourself. But I called into question a while ago, Sean and I were actually talking about this on a road trip one time to a movement meetup.
And I said, hey, I have a question. If we're ecological and we utilize the CLA in our approach, and this time we were talking about American football players, with American football players on the field, why aren't we that way in the weight room?
And he said, what do you mean? And so my point was maybe you're encouraging stance changes. You are actually offloading the bar a little bit, 2.5 pounds, 5 pounds, to where it's not the same load and there has to be a different type of a deep activation through the spine in order to stabilize yourself.
Maybe you're producing forces in different ways, in different angles. Maybe you're leaned up against the wall. You're doing a lot of partner work where you're actually working against a partner shoulder to shoulder. Think almost like a triangle and you're pushing against them. You're creating these battles basically, which would be similar to what you'd be doing if you're in the paint.
For sure.
But my point is strength is developed in many different ways. It doesn't necessarily have to be always with a bar on your back or a kettlebell in your hand or a dumbbell in your hand, although it can be. But even in those situations, it's changing the grips, it's changing the tempos.
You're actually trying to nudge exploratory behavior in that way, no differently than you would whenever you're out on the court and you're trying to open up their search so they can pick up more information. And I could expand on that.
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So on that note, Ty, with the athletic performance coach, that's a great intro for how we could do it a little bit differently. How would they better integrate with the basketball team? Because what we often see in basketball would be a strength coach does a warm-up and it's the same routine every practice.
So the players kind of just go through the motions and it's like lunges, dynamic stretches, all of this. And then they typically do nothing else kind of in the practice. And it's kind of their job is literally only weight room and all the activities are in the weight room.
They're never kind of on the court. And then the warm-up. So would some of the ideas we've talked about today and just your contribution in the book change kind of how we, I guess, view and conceptualize that athletic performance coach role?
Well, I'll start off by saying with an SAS, an SAS would certainly be partnering with player development coaches, strength and conditioning coaches as well to do exactly what we're talking about. Not saying you can't do maybe some of your more rigid type movements, but nudging that coach to nudge behavior in a different way, in a safe way.
So that's number one. Number 2, and I want all performance coaches out there to really ask yourself this question. If you're doing the same warmup over and over on a regular basis, okay, cool. It's maybe creating good synovial fluid secretion. It's maybe warming the temperature of the body up a little bit.
Can you do better is my question? Let's be honest with ourselves. Can we do more? Can we do better? And the answer should be yes. And what I mean by that is one of our jobs as a performance coach Because I was one for many years and still operate in that role a little bit still to this day, is I want to immediately create interactions between players.
And I actually am fine with it being on the court. Why not? Especially with a movement prep. And notice I said movement prep and not warmup because it goes beyond just warming up the body. It's about creating sensitivity to information, much like the game I had mentioned.
So expanding on what's traditionally done, even if it's just a small tweak. So let's say it is just lunging down the court. Can we ask that athlete to make each lunge different? So as you're moving from half court to the baseline, I want you to lunge in as many different ways as you can.
I'm going to nudge you by saying I want this to be about a 50% ownership speed, so it's relatively controlled, and you're just exploring. And then I might say it could look something like this, and I actually would demo variable-type lunges, and then I'd have them have a go at it, and then so on and so forth.
Right.
My point is, is what you're doing is you're actually encouraging them to open up degrees of freedom. You're getting them in positions they're likely going to find themselves in, in the game itself, and you're allowing for them to experience those positions. But it goes beyond just that same perfect lunge on a regular basis.
And it's also not boring, let's be honest, and players enjoy it.
Love it. So obviously, the SAS would be key in this link between both athletic performance coach, basketball coach, and all the practitioners. And I think one theme that keeps coming up in order for this to happen is a shared language. and maybe an understanding of some words, Tyler, but even things like an affordance or aliveness, you know, not— it's not only obviously a term from a research paper, but it's something that resonates with a coach or a practitioner.
So do you think that's really important to try and embed this shared language within an organization if a team is going down this path?
I do think it is. And I have thought about this question quite a bit. I have a friend that's conducting an experiment right now with part of his research, and he's asking— it's about a department of methodology— and he's asking some of these same questions.
And I filled out his research study, of course, his survey, and I, quite frankly, I strongly agree that there is the need for it. I don't know if it necessarily needs to be shoved down people's throat right off the bat. So go back to the question you asked just a little bit ago.
There are going to be some organizations that maybe the decision makers have made the decision that we are going to implement this role or these roles.
Yes.
But then once I'm in there through observations, I've noticed that some of these Coaches are a little bit resistant to it. Well, I'm not going to start throwing terms at them like degeneracy and affordances and so on and so forth. I'm going to actually use words like, how can we turn up the aliveness a little bit?
Partly because there's not really the need to explain what the heck that means, because most coaches just realize like, oh, okay. Now the question may come up, what does that mean? And then you can explain. But my point is, is you're using softer language that's still espoused by ecological dynamics.
Yeah.
Maybe you're terming things like, let's see if we can explore here. How can we change this from rep to rep? So you're already starting to touch on some of the stuff that you're going to delineate later, but it doesn't necessarily need to be shoved down their throat.
But I do think that there is the need relatively soon to start to have some shared language because it's going to be better for the players. Because we have to keep in mind, that's who this is for. This isn't for me. This isn't for the position coach, the head coach.
This is to help make them a more skillful mover, limiting the, the chance or the opportunity for injury to occur and helping them win games. That's what this is about, you know, maybe having some fun while they're doing it. So I say that only because if we have a common language, or at least similarities, we're going to get more buy-in, number one.
It's going to be easier for us as a staff to communicate and design activities, and the players will benefit.
Fantastic, Tyler. So last question I have, and this is actually something I hear a lot from personnel in the NBA, is they say to me, so Alex, how do you know it works? And say we got our GM, we convinced our GM to do this and go down this path, hire an SaaS and integrate these departments, use the CLA.
And in the NBA, it's obviously very data-driven.
Exactly.
So they say, is there a way we could attach KPIs to this to show that it's working? And I don't know what you think of that because something I've been thinking about is how can you work within the constraints of the system? So I don't know what you'd say to that, Tyler, but it's just an interesting one because it might convince people that, yeah, there's a way we can actually track this and we should be doing this.
Yeah, I will say it's hard to do it accurately or perfectly currently. I do think that with technology and how things are improving and with the receptiveness of the ideas that we're discussing, I do think it will continue to get better, but there is not a perfect way.
It's actually something that all decision makers, when asked, how do I know this 100% works? And I typically will very kindly say, how do you know what you're currently doing 100% works? Because you're measuring something out of context oftentimes, and it makes you feel good about it.
And someone's numbers may be going up, or their test is improving, but that test is done in an isolated force plate situation, and they're improving. So to attack this, I think there are a number of different ways. Number one, I do think that we want to lean on some of the actual stats.
We do want to see, are they improving here? We don't want to lean entirely on that, because they actually could be improving as a skillful And their points go down, but their assists go up maybe, and they're contributing to the team. But we do want to look at their stats, you know, whether it's rebounds, points, assists, whatever it may be.
Yeah.
And then I do think that the reason you want to have more than one person that is at least understood with how we're going to harness the performer-environment relationship is we can look at similar unfolding plays, whether it's, you know, at the elbow and it's a 2v2 type interaction or a 2v3.
And look at these overlaid together and see, are they solving problems or similar behaving problems in different ways? So it's very qualitative in that way. But what we're doing here is we are actually looking to see what we can glean from similar movement problems that are emerging on the court, even though the constraints are different, because it may be in a different arena.
It may be different, you know, obviously different defenders, a little bit different interpersonal distance. But are they getting better there? Are they more creative with their movements there? Are they making the shot? Are they—
Yeah.
defending the player, whatever it may be. So everybody can do it a little bit differently, but it could be a point system, 1 through 5. That was a pretty skillful movement and they made the bucket, that's a 4. So we're just trying to see, is their skillset continuing to evolve?
So that would be one way. We certainly look to use things like maybe eye-tracking goggles, glasses to see where their perception is. But I guess slippery slope there is the fact that we're not capturing auditory pickup, we're not capturing— their changing intentions necessarily.
We're just maybe pulling apart or opening the curtain a little bit more to see what's actually or potentially going on. We can also talk to the players, just out of curiosity, how are you feeling with your movement? How are you feeling with your grip on the field of affordances, on the field of opportunities for action?
And not that we have to take their word 100% and everything they say is the golden truth, but I do think hearing from them is important as well. So Unfortunately, that's not a perfectly packaged answer, but what it does is it starts to allow for a team to look at behaviors and analyze interactions for what they are.
It allows for us to lean on some of the stats and go, you know what? We are scoring them out at an 80% or a 4 on a scale of 1 to 5 on a lot of these similar behaving problems, and their point total is going up just a little bit, like they're becoming a more skillful mover.
Tyler, that's a great answer because, you know, I think the complexity of this, it's not like analytics where you just see a number and it's about so much more. And I think you really covered that in that response. Really exciting. This was such a practical episode, but just imagining the future of where professional basketball could be through some of the ideas you've shared today, it excites me.
So thanks so much for joining the show and for everything you guys are doing at Emergence. Much appreciated and really looking forward to talking more.
Absolutely. It's, you know, it's a pleasure to be on. And I will say that the excitement for me is the fact that we're able to take maybe some dense theoretical language and make it usable for coaches. And there is obviously a huge growth and the adoption of contemporary approach to skill acquisition, and coaches are seeing the importance of it.
So I'm excited as well, not just for basketball, but for many sports, of course. And thank you for having me on. Thank you for the kind words about Emergence. And obviously, thank you for giving me an opportunity to contribute to your awesome book.
Absolutely.
Thanks again, Tyler.
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