EP 67Player development
Presenting to UConn's Eco Psych Department
In this live on-the-road episode, Alex and Gray Thomas reflect on their experiences at Brown University and UConn, where they explored the impact of an ecological…
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In this live on-the-road episode, Alex and Gray Thomas reflect on their experiences at Brown University and UConn, where they explored the impact of an ecological…
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In this live on-the-road episode, Alex and Gray Thomas reflect on their experiences at Brown University and UConn, where they explored the impact of an ecological perspective on sports and performance. They discussed the challenges faced by pioneers in ecological psychology, the importance of humility and openness to learning, and how the ecological dynamics framework can revolutionize coaching across various sports.
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Welcome back to the Transforming Podcast. This is a first in the podcast series. We're doing this live in the car. It's myself and Greg Thomas. Newly appointed Director of Strategy. And Greg and I have a host of topics to dive into. We've just spent a great few days at Brown University, part of a huge project where we are implementing the CLA across the whole Division I athletic staff.
And we've just spent the whole afternoon, evening at UConn. I had the great honor of presenting to their world-renowned ecological psychology department. And we wanted to take this podcast to just talk about the experience we've had today and over the last week. So.
Great. Thank you so much for being back on the show.
Of course, man. Thank you. This seems like all the podcasts that we do together seem to have good feedback. So I think it's natural that we continue this and it's important to continue to have conversations and talk about these things. But I think given our experiences over the last week at Brown and then being in Michael Turvey and Claudia Carillo's pub, Sweet Williams, and enjoying dinner there and you getting to see CESPA, the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action, is about as unique of a spectrum of experiences you could hope to have
in terms of viewing life, sport, activity through an ecological lens.
Absolutely. I mean, maybe let's start on the eco psych part. And I mean, I feel just after having spent the whole afternoon, evening with the likes of Claudia, Claire, and just the whole kind of eco psych department, it was incredible. Could you just speak a little bit more To that grade for the listeners so they can just understand the scope of just the incredible work this whole department has done.
Absolutely. So when we say the dominant approach, and when we're talking about, you know, the traditional cognitive perspective for information processing, we say dominant for a reason. It is, and I don't use this word negatively, it's pervasive in so many aspects of life.
And to go against the grain of something like that One, intellect. Two, rigor. But three, it takes a whole lot of courage to stand up for your principles and what you believe is a different way for going about life and understanding and studying the way that perception-action actually works.
And the people like Michael Turvey, Claudio Carello, Bob Shaw, William Mace, and all these people, and then passed down to the likes of, you know, William Warren, Jay Dixon. Alex Paxton, Stephen Harrison, and so many others at large, so many amazing professors. The lineage of that is something that I think is easy to be overlooked.
So taking the synthesis that Michael Turvey did with Gibbon and Nikolai Bernstein's work is no insignificant measure in the sense of not just finding 2 theories and pasting them together and realizing, oh, these might be cute, or these seem to make sense a little bit together.
If, and this is one of the things I talked to you about, Alex, quite a bit is, uh, sometimes from the academic side, I get a little ruffled, you know, when I realize people aren't, I guess, appreciating— you don't need to necessarily respect, but I think appreciate the effort that it takes to develop a theory like that and test it empirically.
And something I like to point out all the time is the thing that Gibson and Turvey and Bob Shaw and these guys were so incredible at, and Claire Michaels and others, they articulated the problem of perception-action. It's one thing to go forward and try and test things and look for answers within an existing paradigm.
Mm-hmm.
Or go looking for answers that you want. It's another to articulate the problem, actually go about testing every possible answer and trying to prove yourself wrong. And that's what these these guys did. And early on, Michael Chervy and Bob Shaw would be at conferences, traditionally cognitivist conferences, information processing, the cognitivist revolution.
And we were talking, you know, to professors tonight that explained to us. They used to have been met with such harsh feedback and there'd be yelling and not, not to the point of fisticuffs, but, you know, really close.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, into the point, you know, pointing in people's faces, yelling at them, telling them why they're wrong. It's the kind of pushback these guys faced to really see the theory through. And I think that gets lost in translation in a lot of what we're doing.
So that's why I get so up in arms about theory. So something I guess I want to turn and ask you is.
Yeah.
What was it like for you, given that you kind of found your way to ecological psychology from finding your own frustrations and then going to the place and seeing the continuity and the thread and the through line from James Gibbon all the way to the current cohort of graduate students today?
For me, it was just, honestly, I think it's a night that I'm gonna remember in 5, 10, 15, 20 years. And I think, you know, all the Just even when we arrived and we saw all those, all the research papers that I recognized, you know, a bunch of the papers I'd read up there and you just, you just realize, and then I really, I was more nervous about presenting to the minds in that room versus the NBA front offices I've spoken to.
Right.
That's, that's just how, just the incredible work they've done. And I think it, it was just seeing the, like you said, the lineage in terms of Just the whole department and, you know, from the senior, from, you know, Claudia, Claire, to the new like PhD, PhD students such as yourself.
And it's just the whole kind of culture and legacy of that program is so apparent. And I think it was just, we draw so many parallels to what we're trying to do now with Transforming. And I think even hearing about all the resistance in the early ecocide pioneers faced, right?
It's essentially the exact same as what we see in the present day with what we encounter on social media. We're transforming and everything. And I think it just goes to show, I mean, we're so— those experiences embolden us even more. And I think it makes us want to go even deeper into the theory and start to actually— well, that's what we're going to do now following this visit is actually looking at producing more empirically informed research papers where we can actually show a world that, yes, these ideas that we all advocate for are transforming.
Yes, they work. And we're going to go beyond the theoretical position papers to really show that.
Absolutely. And I think one of the interesting things that came out of tonight was we kind of articulated one of the things— it's not a criticism that we receive, but more of a comment that is pretty common or a question. And it's usually in the form of, how do you know what you're doing is working versus just giving good common sense advice to people who don't know any better?
Or doing something that's super obvious. Of course, that's the way it is. And, you know, I've kind of struggled with how to respond to that at times because it's really hard to compare the CLA to traditional approaches at times because traditional approaches have pretty easy, easy metrics to obtain.
And so I've kind of really wrestled with good way to test certain things appearing. And then Dr. Jay Dixon put it in a good way. And I forget who he was quoting, but essentially. When someone discovers something or you're pushing the theoretical limits of something or uncovering something new and people accept it, that becomes, well, of course, isn't that obvious?
And that kind of was a liberating feeling to realize. And we're not saying we invented the wheel or anything like that, but what it has done is empowered and emboldened us to continue pushing the limits of what's being done in the current coaching landscape and not be So afraid to put our empirical toe in the water and publish papers that may seem like low-hanging fruit or obvious ways to prove something, right?
The reason it's gonna be done is because it needs to be done. And I think that's a really important first step. It's easy to lose sight of these things because the kind of comments like that of, you know, how do you know it's not just common sense?
Well, if it was common sense, everybody would do it, then it wouldn't need to be tested any further.
Yeah, 100%. So, great. Let's dive a little bit into what was shared in the presentation. So we spoke at length, I mean, practical ideas in terms of how we are designing even affordances to practice environments with players in, well, in all sports, but obviously, you know, most notably basketball, of course.
And we really kind of went through the whole ecological dynamics framework. So obviously eco-psych is one very important path of that. We've obviously got powerful systems to And I think we had some great questions in the room too. What do you think were some interesting points that were raised just during the presentation, you know, by some of the professors, researchers in attendance?
So I think Stephen Harris brought up an interesting point when he was asking, so he referenced some work me and Dr. Dixon and I have been working on for a passing affordance model in soccer. He was saying, you know, it's a really difficult endeavor to define what it means, you know, to have the opportunity to pass the ball in soccer and what that looks like.
So he kind of asked what, what kind of list of affordances we've been able to create in basketball, not just in the sense of, oh, is this passable or not? Or is this shootable or not? Like, is the shot open or not? But really, how are you, how are you developing a list that you can go out and test and really kind of explore the solution space that, you know, The functional variability that's going to occur across these different physiological bodies, you know, these different action capacities.
So I thought that was really interesting. And I thought their fascination with how you had applied the term rate limiter was the most encouraging to me. To me, that reminded me of how it felt when I first understood what an affordance was. You know, what, what stood out to you?
Yeah, I think just For me, seeing how, showing just how it was really interesting to see, you know, a common theme was the, how the potential of ecopsych has been so untapped. And yet in sports, that's one field where ecopsych has huge, huge potential.
And that's why it was fascinating to me to see the ideas and just the conversation that arose during the presentation, et cetera. That was sparked. And for me, it just kept the quality of the conversation we had. I just kept coming back to this, like, why have an NBA team not hired just, you know, as consultants, some of these individuals and just the ideas and the quality of research that would be produced would be unprecedented.
I completely agree. And I think there's a lot of resistance from coaches to build the bridge, so to speak, seek that help or seek that research or from academia, maybe out of fear, insecurity, or something non-negative to not, to not want to work with them.
It could be the time constraint. They don't have time. But really what encourages me every, every Friday when I'm at the Perception Action Workshop at SESMA is how genuine people are in taking every aspect of applying this theory Seriously. It wasn't brushed off as, oh, sports are just a game, you know, who cares?
This isn't hard science. What they did was they took what Alex and I have been doing, what Alex has been doing for a long time, and how can we help make this even stronger? We help make it bulletproof and really take what you're doing and tighten the screws to it in a way that other people can point to and say, see, this is the proof that you're looking for.
You know, another— and then that goes to another controversial point that, well, there's no CLA studies specifically in basketball, and there are, uh, they may not be referenced as constraints-led approach, but that's usually said by people who typically don't understand the theory. Because if you understood the theory, you would be able to read things and realize that all that's missing there is the language.
The application is absolutely—
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And let's dive into this a little bit more, Brandon. And I want to go back to the affordances, kind of the descriptions of affordances and all that. I think when coaches ask to see ecological papers specific to basketball, they're really missing the whole point because ecological dynamics is a framework to understand movement in, for things from Humans to animals, to cells, to every single form of life.
So it's really missing the point when you ask to see a study. Now, if you do want to see a study in basketball, one I often reference coaches to, and I signpost them towards, is the one by Gorman and Maloney, who did a great paper on representative design in the jump shot.
And simply in that paper, again, the results are very conclusive, but just adding a defender Changes multiple components of the jump shot. And I think that's a great paper, but yeah.
Why is that not good enough for critics? But when we presented PhD directors of departments of the leading departments in the world in ecological psychology who have conducted research in distributed structures and non-biological systems, they're blown away at that kind of evidence. Why is it good enough?
lame, not good enough for critics who honestly, if they were given a paper that said CLA and basketball, still would find something wrong with it. I think that is an important point that the critics really need to look introspectively at. Is that going to be enough evidence or not?
Sorry to cut you off.
Oh, absolutely. And I think this is the hard thing because people are not approaching this with an open mind. So for instance, I know that people are going to be reading my book and reading research papers, not with the mindset of curiosity, but simply to poke holes in it.
And you know, I'm actually pleased somewhat that that's happening because it allows us to come back with responses which clearly rebuke the arguments they're raising. But I think it's so important to approach this with an open mind. If you're already biased in your thinking, then there's simply no point engaging with any of the material we share at Transforming.
It's just a moot point. Not going to have an impact. That's where it's so important to try and approach this stuff with the lens of curiosity. Absolutely, it shouldn't be an echo chamber. You should absolutely think of things which maybe don't make sense yet, or things which aren't clear to you, which you can help explain.
To simply go in with that closed-off mindset, it's really a shame, I think.
I think the difference here is I would welcome a hole poked into the theory because you know what? That's an opportunity to learn. That's an opportunity for growth. And for some reason, the whole, the whole castle came falling down, which I, let's just say, I don't think that's going to be the case.
Guess what? That's not going to make me go crawl back in the hole and never want, never want to pursue this again. It's going to make me want to go figure out what is right. What is good about the, you know, what can we use?
What can we learn? Not going to make me want to defend this blindly. I welcome The criticism, I welcome it. You know, and I think that is the difference, the particular approach. So, I know with a lot of, I think I get particularly worked up about it because I know how hard you work, just the blind criticism you face.
So, it's hard for me sometimes because I have done the work on the theory side, and I, you know, it doesn't behoove me to go into a Twitter spat and try and defend something indefinitely because I've been. I think it's the Zimmerman principle.
It's the bullshit principle where it is much easier to throw out misinformation and you can do it at a quicker rate than you can debunk it. And I think that is a lot of what's going on with a lot of the—
It is. And it's pretty scary because we're seeing people taking papers from— that have kind of shown the clear benefits of an ecological approach and people trying to misinterpret it completely and using ecological language in the complete wrong way. And that's what's quite scary to me, just seeing how that— and the problem is it's just many coaches don't know better because they, they don't have the time to look at the stuff that they don't have the time to really read and research.
So it's, there's just so much misinformation out there. I think like one example is without being overly critical, but we have whole books on coaching, like Coach's Guide to Teaching, which are basically mostly pseudoscientific. And they've been kind of adopted as gospel in many circles.
And that's why it's really important that coaches understand the theory properly behind skill lack. And like we said, I don't wanna go too off topic, but even looking at constructs such as working in long-term memory, which obviously we don't believe in, in the ecological approach, that that has no relevance to motor movement.
And yet we've, you know, we've had whole books kind of being based on that premise, which coaches are buying into. And this is why it all comes down to, you know, understanding ecopsych, understanding dynamical systems, you know, ecological dynamics of the field. Is this will stop the recurrence of, of such themes continuing.
Absolutely. So to shift it back to, uh, you know, the positivity from the night and the week in general, I guess I'd like to ask you a question. What was, not your biggest takeaway, but I think what, what is the thing that you think you felt somewhat changed that you're going to take with you and it might change the way you look at things or what you want to go doing then?
What is the—
You know what, Grant, I think the, just, I really focused today on observing just the interactions and how like these world-leading individuals behave. And something we've always been intentional about is humility. And I haven't really met anyone within the ecological dynamics community who is not a humble person.
I think something that's just inherent to this approach is I think when you really commit to an ecological framework, you understand just how much there is to continuously learn. And naturally, principles like values such as humility, I think, mean a lot more. And for me, like, first thing we said after the workshop was, I think, you know, no matter how big Transforming gets, we always want to maintain this humility and this openness to learning and learning from everyone and continuing to just pioneer new things.
We never just want to remain stuck doing the same presentation, like copy-pasting the exact same clinics. It's, I think it just goes completely against with where we're at and just the lens through which we're seeing the world.
So to build on that a little bit, I think one of the cool things that you did with your presentation Today at CESPO was you opened it and essentially said, yes, I'm here to present, but I'm mainly here to learn. Like I'm going to update you all on what we've been doing, what I've been doing for a long time.
But really, I want to know how to be better. I want to know what the next steps are. What are, what am I not addressing? What am I addressing incorrectly? That takes that level of humility that you're talking about, the willingness to grow.
And that's not easy, right? And I think, again, I think that's something I've learned. Just a little bit with age. I've never been the smartest person in the room at UConn, and especially when those— during those workshops, I sit back and sometimes I'm amazed at the level of conversation and the depth at which these people have gone to apply this theory in corners of the universe that are so impactful and so deep and have such deep implications.
So sometimes I take a step back and I'm like, I get to research this and talk about this with basketball and sports. Like, this is so fun and so cool. And, and never one time have I felt from them that it wasn't serious or it wasn't good enough.
It was always encouraged. And if anything, implored to go further and take it further than anyone else has. And I think that's one of the greatest things to take away from, you know, nights like tonight and weeks like this is we can make an impact, even if it is on the playing field, you know, or in a practice setting.
People have opportunities to learn in every walk of life.
Absolutely. And I just want to shout out to Chris Guandalini.
Big time.
Great, great. Very committed to all the ideas we share here at Transforming. Made the effort to come down. He saw we were presenting, you know, basketball coach in the local area, came and learned it. And I think there's much respect for coaches doing that.
That's the level of humility, right? Like realizing, you know what, I'm going to take time out of my day. It may have been, it was at the end of the His workday came to a place. Yes, he went to run a while ago.
Came to a place he hasn't been in years, and he wanted to learn from someone much younger than him. And that's something I'm doing right now in all of my conversations with Alex. He's curious and he was engaged, and it's so cool to see.
It's the kind of stuff that's the most inspiring to me is the kind of impact that human Alex are like having on people in so many different areas of coaching and It's easy, like, I think we've already spent enough time on the detractors, but I think it's easy to pay too much attention to that and get caught up in that when there's people like Chris out there, when that's like really the impact we're looking for.
Definitely. I appreciate that, man. Always learning, of course. Let's swing it through the work we've done at Brown. So we haven't really spoken about this at length much, but really kind of excited about a huge project we have going on with Transforming at Brown, where we are introducing the constraints-led approach to the entire Division I athletics program.
And I think this is the first kind of project of its kind in the whole US and the NCAA college landscape ever. And it's an ambitious project. And, you know, I think we've got to credit the visionary work of the athletic director, Grace Calhoun, who really sees the value in this.
So we're working with over 16 different Division I athletics programs at Brown to help coaches implement constraints-led approach and, you know, various other ideas based on everything we share at Transforming. So Greg, do you want to speak a little bit about the last few days that we spent at Brown?
And obviously we shared some of that at the presentation for UConn.
Yeah, I think so. This was our second trip there. The first was almost a diagnostic observation, just kind of get the lay of the land and see how these programs have been operating. We introduced a lot of the theory, it was very theory-heavy the first time.
Came back a couple months later. We really wanted to make it interactive and focused on what they need and what they want to understand further. I was blown away that so I always say that it's easy to get excited; it's very hard to follow through.
And with that, I mean, it's easy to have a fun conversation or get excited, but it's harder to show up for the conversation. Sometimes even harder to show up for the next conversation prepared with questions, willing to engage, willing to try think. And we had that nearly across the board at Brown, and I think that is a huge.
Very game situation. So things from trying different warmups to changing game plans in the middle of a season when you're about to go on a run, taking it, changing the way you run your practice. And so like, for example, Paul Cook.
Oh, incredible. Some of the best coaching I've seen in any sport.
Brent Brody with field hockey, the presence that she has, it's unbelievable to see these people in action at the highest level. And these are people seeing success at all levels. We get to go in there. And they're open to having conversations with us because they want to do better.
So, and just the impact it has on the athlete and the kind of curiosity that they foster across the board with student athletes at Brown, it's a really unique environment and a really unique opportunity for us.
Yeah, absolutely. I think just with the coaches, the difference between the first and second visit, I mean, we saw straight away, even after that first visit, coaches trying some new ideas. We saw some different warmups. We saw some more intentional constraint manipulation. I think that's the thing a lot of times.
It's coaches of all levels use constraints. The difference is the extent to which you're doing it intentionally or not. And that's what we've really just tried to ramp up and understanding why you might introduce a particular constraint in response to something you were seeing, a principle of play, a rate limiter, et cetera.
One of the most interesting sessions for us was we got to go out on the river with Men's Crew. And I think, and I've done this rowing in, you know, outside of North America and Paul Cook, the coach, did an incredible job. Just, he applied some differential learning ideas, which we covered in one of the workshops, followed by a bunch of constraint manipulations.
And he started having the rowers use different grips where every minute they would be changing their grip. And then he had a whole series where they would be rowing at different stroke rates and altering kind of time length and using external feedback. We followed along on a speedboat.
And, you know, I just thought the whole time as we were seeing that, if Paul can do this in rowing—
And let's, let's be clear real quick. Paul is a national champion in his own right. And he is—
Incredibly smart guy.
Incredibly smart guy and experienced the highest levels of success. So if there's anyone who has the right to these types of ways, it's someone like Paul.
Exactly. If, you know, if he's doing it, then why can't we do it in basketball? Right. In an environment with opponents and defense and Far more chaos and unpredictability.
Complexity and all of those things. No, I 100% agree. It was a really eye-opening and just cool experience in general. Seeing women's rugby, that team is incredible with how they've just implemented so many different ways, different activities that are opening up their degrees of freedom, you know, to explore new solutions and get their team going.
And we've gotten feedback that since doing that, they've just been dominating people, you know, and that's not a direct representation of necessarily us, but it's a representation of them and their willingness to try things and be open to this approach. So that's just like a very small anecdote of the power of being open and having humility and what that can do for you as a coach.
Absolutely. I also got to shout out Jamie Monroe. Jamie helped us deliver all of this. She had some great ideas, some great videos, some masterclass in constraint manipulation. So stay posted. I think this Brown project is a really unique one just for everyone and all our listeners who are interested in an ecological approach.
And, you know, not just basketball coaches, but I think it's in the best interests of all of us who want to pioneer this approach to see, especially the North American sports landscape change and just embrace some of these ideas. So I think it's a really positive sign that world-class institutions like Brown see the value to something like this.
Very encouraging. And I'm really looking forward to what the future holds. They, you know, they combining that experience, you know, along with the experience we had with us, but really paint a beautiful picture for what the future can hold for this approach.
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