Athlete-Centered Coaching with Jesse Rawlings

This is the Transforming Basketball Podcast hosted by Alex Sarama. This is the podcast helping coaches and practitioners change the way we think about basketball performance. Our goal is to provide the ultimate resource for making sense of applying contemporary skill acquisition ideas within basketball.

Within this podcast, Alex and his guests unpack how an ecological dynamics framework Impacts our perspective of the game. If you're ready to join us in our quest to transform the basketball world, this is the podcast for you.

Would you like to learn about our unique player and team development strategies at Transforming Basketball? Well, this is why we've put together our free activities book. Inside, you'll find 50 unique activities with diagrams and text descriptions for you to use immediately with your players and in your practices.

Head to the show notes to access this incredible free resource. Welcome back to the Transforming Podcast, joined today by Jesse Rawlings. Jesse, great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me, Alex. Appreciate it.

So this was incredibly spontaneous. I just suggested to you 20 minutes ago that we should do a podcast. You're living in Liverpool right now, and you made the trip down to London. We spent a few days here. And from New Zealand originally, I think you've got a really interesting background.

Can you just kind of explain, you know, your kind of introduction, what you're doing in the sport of football, just for the listeners?

Yeah, cool. So moved to the other side of the world, from the other side of the world, where I was, yeah, a football coach at Wellington Phoenix, which is the only professional club Had a great 3 years there. And then as with all New Zealanders, we just go and experience life on the other side for a little bit.

So yeah, came to the UK, did some travel, settled upon Liverpool, and now trying to assimilate all of my ideas and experiences into who knows what next, you know? But yeah, so enjoying traveling, meeting people like yourself, and yeah, experiencing all the things that you can't do from home.

Fantastic, Jesse. So I'm excited because we get to show you a Lions practice tomorrow. And can't wait to get your feedback on that. But over breakfast this morning, we were just talking about forms of life a little bit, and we've got a good following, I'd say, of coaches in New Zealand who are really trying this, AKA CLA, and really in touch with us quite regularly.

We've actually had Sam Fennell and Joe Reddish, 2 coaches from FranklinBalls, come over here just a few months ago. Would you say there's some— it's a good time for sport in New Zealand? It definitely seems like contemporary skill-ack ideas are maybe starting to spread quite nicely over there?

Yeah, for sure. There's a campaign at the moment that's quite prevalent around Balance is Better, which is a Sport New Zealand initiative. And it's basically, how do we stop early specialization? How do we avoid unhealthy practices with youth athletes mainly? I say youth athletes, with youth participants, and trying to change the perception of young people as high-performing athletes and trying to keep them in the game and using participation as a means of success.

And so, I think that has lent nicely into where we are currently now in terms of looking for new approaches, fresh ideas in terms of how we can then influence athletes, not just to become more skillful, but to enjoy their sporting experience and staying in the game.

I think we have an awesome, well, capacity to be involved in multi-sports. From a young age, I played every sport, the son, all the way up until I became— started focusing on the coaching. And that just happens quite naturally, which is nice. And I think the more I've traveled and heard and experienced is it's a problem globally, but—

It is.

We're probably not a problem in New Zealand. We're just trying to make sure it doesn't become a problem.

It's interesting. Would you have any practical advice, Jesse, just for coaches who, or maybe parents? I mean, we've got a lot of European and American coaches who engage with us at Transforming and listen to this. And I think in the States—

I played every sport, the son, all the way up until I became— started focusing on the coaching. And that just happens quite naturally, which is nice. And I think the more I've traveled and heard and experienced is it's a problem globally, but—

It is.

We're probably not a problem in New Zealand. We're just trying to make sure it doesn't become a problem.

It's interesting. Would you have any practical advice, Jesse, just for coaches who, or maybe parents, I mean, we've got a lot of European and American coaches who engage with us at Transforming and listen to this. And I think in the States, it's a big problem because kids are being pushed more and more into just playing basketball year-round with AAU, high school, working with trainers.

And then I think with the club model in Europe, it's got its positives and negatives. And the negatives often is that kids just do basketball. And I'd say most clubs are not integrating other sports or even things like One practical idea I had in Italy was we began most practices just with a warm-up with some type of other sport.

So I think that's one practical kind of tool you can take. But anything else, like any other advice you'd have just while we discuss this topic?

Yeah, there's a little bit of research coming out around like donor sports and how, you know, some sports can donate skills to others. I reflect on my own experience, as I say, I played a little bit of everything and I'm from a very small town called Picton.

And I played football when I was young. All my mates played football. Then when we were 14, they decided to play rugby and I was left with no football team to play, but I still wanted to play and I was a goalkeeper. So I played in a men's football team who were very social.

Training took place at the pub. And so I trained rugby because it was all a ball flying at me and I had to catch it to then go and improve my goalkeeping. And I think... There's a famous coach, New Zealand's Steve Hansen, former All Blacks coach, and he talked about footballers having really good scanning and perceptual skills that rugby players don't necessarily have.

And that just comes through playing the game. And then on the opposite side of that, I see young New Zealand kids who have experience of playing rugby. When they come to playing football, they're so much more confident with defenders or other players in their bubble.

Yeah.

They can ride challenges. They're happy to dribble at people, you know, and be really aggressive with the way that they dribble and run with the ball. They're not trying to avoid contact because they're so comfortable with contact. Whereas if you just played football your whole life, you might not necessarily be comfortable with that contact.

So it's how sports can donate skills to other sports. So I mean, if you're fortunate enough to be in a position where you can encourage children to play multiple sports, then obviously that's great. I remember watching a presentation a couple of years ago.

Where Arsenal Football Club were looking at how they could incorporate multi-sports into their full-time football program. And so I can't remember exactly what the sports were, but off the top of my head, one of them was kabaddi, which is a—

I don't know that.

It's like an Indian— well, it's huge in India. It's like, it's not an invasion game, but it is.

Oh, wow.

It doesn't have a ball, but they're attacking. It's fascinating.

I'll have to check that out.

You have to check it out. And it was to sort of develop these movement skills. They did Australian football. Which is, again, just a totally random sport, but my takeaway from that was that there's some obvious dangers in terms of learning to head a football at a young age, to practice headering all the time.

And that's now being linked to CTE and those things. Oh, of course. And they use Australian football where the ball is always in the air, you have to jump towards it, you let it come sort of— so perception-action-wise, but you just catch it instead of headering it.

And because you're in the air with other people around, you might get bumped into, so you've got your landing side of it. All of which will transfer to having a better technique at headering the ball. So fascinating.

It really is. And while we're talking, it's a great example that kind of struck me was one of the last games of the season I had with the Rip City Remix G League team. We played against the Warriors G League team, and they had a player called Pat Spencer who played lacrosse collegiately, and now he's a 2-way player in the NBA.

And great example, like so many Like even in lacrosse, so many similar movements in terms of you even have picks, dodging, so similar to basketball. He had like 30 points against us, killed us, and he didn't even play college basketball. So great example.

So I think this is always interesting. What was your background to how you first came across CLA and why you made the decision to really go down this path in your coaching?

Yeah, I mean, it started with playing. And I mean, people on the podcast can't see me, but you can. I'm not an athlete. And so I was never going to become a professional athlete, but I did always want to be involved in sports.

You know, that's the thing I'm most passionate about. If you're looking for me on the weekend, I'm probably on the couch watching any sport under the sun, really. But I knew if to get into coaching, particularly in football, there is a bias towards people who have experiences of playing the game.

Yeah, it's the path dependency I wrote about in the book.

And so, and that's fine. And I don't think that's wrong either. I think there's people who've played to a high level have so much to give back.

Absolutely.

And I just knew I wasn't gonna be one of them, so I sort of thought, well, what is the thing that, you know, I can become really good at? That thing to me was just studying, basically. Reading, listening, writing, and studying. So I went to university, I studied a Bachelor of Sport Coaching.

I was introduced to a theory called Game Sense, which is a teaching games for understanding—

Mm-hmm.

It's born from teaching games for understanding. And the guy who designed the theory and created it was a guy called Richard Light, who was an Australian rugby coach. He was lecturing us 2, 3 times a week, running workshops, and it just opened my eyes, not necessarily to game sense being the correct way, but to it being a way, you know, a different way.

And it was all based around the principles of being athlete-centered. So—

What does that mean? Just sort of coaches this thing, athlete-centered. What would you say, Jesse?

For me personally, it's, is the athlete enjoying their experience? Are they empowered to drive their own development? And then as a coach, are you in the best position to support their needs? So everyone wants to win, right?

Yeah.

There's coaches who prioritize winning, which is fine, but the players want to win as well. The players also want to develop, they want to get better. They want to know that as a coach, you have their best interests at heart. That's athlete-centered coaching.

If you're just rocking up and saying, we want to win, eventually you're going to end up with your worst player sitting on the bench for the whole game, not getting minutes. You're going to end up with probably the best players playing in a fixed position, to make sure they either score goals or keep goals out.

I'm sure in a basketball context, it's finding the player who's as big as possible in youth sports and making sure that they get the points. And so it's not moving away from being competitive or wanting to win or things like that. It's just making sure that you have the needs of your participants.

Yes.

The people that you have the privilege of helping, you have their best interests at heart. So yeah, that really opened my eyes. I also, at the time, had a really good coach as a player called Joe Hall, who was very much down the nonlinear pedagogy.

He did a PhD in neuroscience, and so he was really interesting because he was applying theory to practice.

And on that note, Jesse, I mean, I've rambled about this for a while, so I don't want to weigh in, but I'd like to get your perspective on it. What would you say are the differences between game sense or a games-based approach and a constraints-led approach?

Okay, I was thinking about this the other day because I've been— when you've been sort of mentioning it on the podcast, it has got me thinking. And I think when I first started coaching, I was just like every other coach, very direct, very much, this is the way.

And, you know, and we were— it was because I'd been coached that way, but also coach education, those sorts of things like, what's your game model? What tasks do you want your players to do? I didn't know who my players were, but apparently I needed tasks for them.

So it's very like black and white. And I started like that.

Yeah.

Then I started reading a lot about game sense, teaching games for understanding. And I wouldn't say I went the other way, but you know, there's this potentially unhealthy term of like, let the game be the teacher.

Yes, absolutely.

You know, put 2 teams of 11 out on the pitch and watch them go for it and then go home and hope that they get better. And they might, but they might also get better if you're in a highly structured environment too, either way.

So I think CLA marries them 2 things together so nicely. Because you're— it's funny, so you're not using a games-based approach, but CLA is based on the game. So you have to have enough, and this is where I love the work around representativeness.

So does your environment represent the game? It's not an 11v11 or in basketball, it's not 5v5 full court and we're playing 4 quarters of 10 minutes every day. Because again, you're leaving it up to chance. So it does have interventions.

Exactly.

It does have means of teaching. It does have means of learning, it has means of communicating. You've mentioned in the book, I'm not going to give any spoilers, but around—

No, feel free to.

Analysis and how video analysis can link to, well, ecological dynamics, CLA, nonlinear pedagogy, physiology, sports science, all those things can link. Whereas game-based, again, and I love games, I love playing games, I love watching games, but if you're just purely game-based, again, you're leaving it to chance.

And it's just the practices, that's it, it doesn't apply to anything else.

Exactly. CLA just marries those 2 things together. It's not taking all the control away from the players and making it coach-centered. Games-based can be just throwing players in at the deep end and expecting them to swim. And a really rigid traditional—

That's it.

Can be, you know, teaching people to swim on dry land. Some of those things, you might get some swimmers out of those things.

Yeah.

But if you can put them in a pool that's the correct depth for their needs, you give them the tools that they need, some equipment to help them along, And you progress from being in the shallower end to the deeper end, and then into the ocean, and so on.

I get quite— I like my analogies.

Jesse, that's one of the best analogies, and I am stealing and quoting you in my next coach development workshop. That was awesome.

You can have that one.

That was really good. And I think it just makes so much sense because, A, what I often see in games-based practices, like coaches sharing on Twitter, or just my experiences in the past, is players are not picking up new information that they need to attune to because it's just the same every time.

They have some very stable attractors and movement tendencies which they go to, you know, quite frequently. And we've got to destabilize that and get them moving in different ways, but it doesn't happen.

Yeah. If I was to relate that to coaching as well, obviously, so that underpins ecological dynamics, the part that I enjoy the most is perception-action. And so as a player, as a coach, we're trying to build environments that connect perception-action, or as Rob Gray says, keeping coupled, which I love.

But as a coach, it's the same thing. So if I've got my set of exercises and sessions, my really highly structured game model, those things are all actions. And I go out and I train them every day. And I might use really heavily repetitive— I use plain language— boring activities that don't necessarily have all the information that you need.

And as a coach, you could do that for your entire life and win some things and lose some things, and that's fine. The key skill, much like an athlete, is the perception. So as a coach, do you have an eye to see that player's just a little, or that swimmer is in just a little too deep?

So what am I gonna change? What tasks, environment—

Yeah.

Can I change to get them to that level one day, but not today? So do I bring them back into a shallower end? Do I make the task easier for them? So as a coach, you've gotta have that perceptual skill as well. You can't just say, throw them in the deep end, it's worked before, it'll work again.

What you're seeing, you have to act upon it, and then you have to perceive again. Is this challenge too easy? Is it too boring? Is there enough representativeness?

Yeah.

I'm not going to throw a bunch of sharks in, which might create one speedy swimmer, but it leaves the other 9 as shark bait. So you've got the perceptual skills, I think. As a coach, it's the same as an athlete. We're trying to develop athletes who have a really good perception-action coupling.

As a coach, we have to understand that We require those perceptive skills as well.

It's so good, everything you're saying. And I think it's funny because the most resistance I'd say we get at Transforming is from coaches who say that we've invented just the new language. And obviously it didn't come from us, it came from Keith Davids and all the pioneering researchers.

And a lot of coaches are saying we invented new language and what we're showing has already been done in countries like Spain for many years. And I think everything you've just spoken to is a great example of how, yes, they've done games-based things.

I'm sure this is the same in Spanish soccer and football, obviously your sport. Some great coaching in Spain, and I'm just using Spain as an example, right? Because it's got a lot of— they had a lot of basketball success, proud tradition. But often, yes, we've seen games-based stuff which could be CLA activities, but often the constraints aren't changed, so it's the same version played every time.

And it's often done after technical— I think it's called tecnificación or something like that.

Yeah.

So it's like what we are saying is, A, you don't need any of that stuff. And B, the analogy you gave so perfectly with the swimming pool is it's like we need to be looking at where the athletes are, every athlete. And to do this well, I think it requires such good observational skills, which take time to really build.

And then practicalities of knowing how to change a constraint while you're doing it. And it is so— I really think it's—

Yeah.

Yes, it looks similar to game space, but it's so far apart when you really go into it.

Yeah, I'll throw another analogy at you in a minute, but just on that one around— and I can't remember exactly who said it, so I'm not going to try and guess, but I remember listening to a podcast. It was a football coach who was working in foundation phase, sort of 9 to 12-year-olds in Qatar at a club there.

I can't remember too much about it, but one thing that stood out for me, he mentioned at the time, because of just the way it was, there are a lot of Spanish families, a lot of Dutch families out in Qatar working, and their children were coming along to his academy and learning.

And he was trying to teach these skills and whatnot, and that's not the point, but he was getting questions from the Spanish parents, why don't you do more rondo? Which is a very Spanish—

Of course, yeah.

—possession-based football exercise. And then he was getting a lot of questions from the Dutch parents, why aren't you doing more one-on-one, more 1v1 practices? And so, and that straightaway struck me as, I mean, 2 incredible football countries.

Of course.

I'm only from New Zealand, so I can't judge too much. But it struck me straight away as, okay, well, why are we so black and white? But why do the Spanish just supposedly do rondo? Why do the Dutch supposedly just do 1v1 or small-sided?

Are there ways that we can link that? And so it just, it kind of got me thinking. But the analogy I was going to use is around like the chef and the cook. So I can give a bunch of session plans to a bunch of coaches and say, do that, and they can do it.

I might be given a session plan and, you know, I read off it, do this, do this, progress at this point. And again, you might be producing skillful players, you might not, you don't know. But that's a cook, right? I've got recipe books at home and I am a cook.

I love to cook, but I'm not a chef. You couldn't send me to the market and say, right, go out there and purchase all the things you need to make dinner for this evening. That's going to be, you know, world-class in the same way a world-class chef can.

Yeah.

As a coach, we need to understand, you know, how do we get to that level of being a chef? Not just reading and prescribed sort of things, but okay, when do I change this constraint? There's another one is like, I mean, it's massive here.

It's not so big in New Zealand, but Nando's is big on this side of the world. And you can obviously go and pick the level of how spicy you want your chicken. And I like a bit of spice, so I'm in the upper echelons.

And my partner, who won't mind me saying it, she doesn't like as much. She's more of a medium to mild. As a coach, you've got to be able to move up and down in your session design. Okay, can I make this really spicy?

Because the players need something a bit more spicy. Okay, actually, do I need to go back? I think the most, you can have plain, but you can have lemon and herb, I think is the other one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So okay, actually, they need lemon and herb today.

And it's always that scaling and that moving. So that's the skill, that's the perceptual skill a coach needs. You can't just go in and say, oh, I'm going to change all of these conditions now because I think it's the right thing to do.

You need to understand how's that gonna help your athlete or your athletes, your team, your individual, whoever you're working with.

Love that. Your analogies are excellent, Jesse. I'm really enjoying them.

Sometimes they do go too far.

No, man. It's stories like this which really helps coaches, I think, grasp it. I've used that cook-to-chef one before, and I think that's a really good one because it's like, and that's basically what we're trying to do with Transforming, creating master chefs where it's not just giving them a set play and saying, go run this.

Here's a small-sided game. Here's a constraint. No, it's giving the tools to learn how to do this. And I think it appeals to a certain type of coach because a lot of coaches just won't engage with our stuff because it actually requires more work to intellectually engage with it and learn it.

And a lot of times, People just want easy. It's like, here's an offense, go put it in. Great, but it's, I think, anything good, any success, like anything hard, it's not going to be something like in one day that you fix. And it should be a process of engaging with the material, thinking deeply, trying it out, adapting it.

And that's, I think, is the process of becoming a really effective coach.

Well, that's, I think, back to the, like I said before, I realized pretty early on that I wasn't going to be elite athlete. or an athlete or anything close, but I did know I wanted to be involved and I knew that was gonna be in coaching.

And so I feel like maybe if you meet coaches who have a really extensive playing background, they probably feel, and in most cases quite rightly, that they've served their time as a player.

Yeah.

They've learned everything they need to know about the game, and therefore they can go and teach it. Now, obviously they probably need to do a little bit of work around how to teach, but who's gonna have more knowledge of the game, me or the pro?

It's always gonna be the pro. So when you mentioned there around, it is on us as coaches to do our own research, our own reading, that's what I realized quickly. That's going to be my superpower. You've got to have something. I think you do have to have something.

And for me it was, okay, I need to read as much as possible, but I also need to apply as much as possible. Fail a load of times. And you could speak to, you know, a graveyard of footballers that I've worked with, who I have coached and I have failed, and they will probably give you some quite detailed experiences of the failures.

And that's fine. But yeah, to your point, some people won't engage with it and that's fine as well. There'll be some brilliant coaches. There are brilliant coaches out there who haven't picked up a book in their lives.

Exactly.

They're still brilliant coaches.

Exactly.

There's people who are naturally everything. And this is the thing, you know, we look at elite athletes. Some of them have just, not naturally, but they rely on an incredible amount of natural ability. The poor practice that they've been put through just hasn't quite broken them.

It's the same with coaches. There'll always be great coaches, but to get a mass of good coaches, some people need to do more. And I know that I needed to do more. I need to read more, listen more, meet people like yourself, move to the other side of the world potentially.

And that's not right for everyone, but I just feel that, that to become more skillful, to learn more, that's how I've chosen to do it. It resonates with me.

That's great. Let's shift the convo to maybe the football landscape, because something I hear a lot and I don't necessarily agree with it, is people keep saying, especially in this country, in the UK, football is so far ahead. And they often reference the kind of the Premier League academies.

And yes, I'd say it's far ahead in terms of resources. I'd say, you know, the Premier League academies just in this country have better resources, especially when it comes to things like sports science, than probably high-level professional clubs in the EuroLeague, I would say.

But I'd say there's, in terms of academies widely applying the CLA, I don't know, maybe I'm speaking out of turn, I don't know if there's one. I know there was a project with Southampton with a learning lab. I don't know what the status of it there is, but some really good researchers working there.

So what would you say just about the current landscape? Are there teams here in the UK or maybe in Europe all in on CLA? And I think the program that often comes to mind is AIK in Sweden, obviously Marco Sullivan and Dennis, the whole team there, James Vaughan.

Yeah.

been really an inspiration for me. But what would you say, Jesse, just in terms of setting the scene? Back by popular demand, we have just re-released our first course, the Youth Conceptual Offense. This is the ultimate guide for you to install a conceptual offense with your team or across an entire program.

The course contains 25 unique modules containing everything from transition to dominoes to triggers and much more. You'll be able to access over 200 small-sided games to develop the offense step by step. Head to www.conceptualoffense.com to learn more.

Yeah. Well, football does have some advantages where it is ahead, I think, in the UK because it's so culturally ingrained.

Yes. It's like basketball is in America.

It is, exactly. And rugby in New Zealand has been like that in the past. Growing up in New Zealand, the best athletes, they played rugby. And football and basketball and all, they were left to play. The rest of the kids like me were left to play those sports.

That's changing now in New Zealand. Because I think rugby is seen to possibly be too dangerous to play for children. So you're getting those more athletic children, the children who are really passionate about sport, they're becoming passionate about football and basketball in particular.

And the traditional sports, netball and rugby, are sort of losing those people. Whereas here, yeah, the football is so ingrained.

Just as it helps, you know, just because more kids will often play football as the first sport, more resources, they see it on TV. Their role model. I remember at primary school, the teachers would say, what do you want to be? I'd say, a footballer for Chelsea.

Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's just, that's England. That's what it's like growing up here.

That's the way it is. And which is fine. And well, it's not fine, but so you obviously have the Premier League, which is, you know, an incredible level of globalized football. It's not just English. And we have this really sad situation, I think, where if people don't, you know, get signed to these contracts, these professional contracts, they drop out of the sport.

And it's the same in rugby in New Zealand. I went to a school which the First XV rugby team was what everyone went and watched, you know, on the weekend. We had a player at the school called Damian McKenzie, who's now an All Black.

He is an incredible player and he was amazing at school, but I don't know if there's many other people in that team who still play rugby. Same with NFL, you know, if they don't sign—

Yeah.

They stop. I don't know, is there an NFL social league? Probably not. Football's the same here. So, okay, it's ahead supposedly, but show me the over-50s football league here. Show me the 50-year-old men and women who are running around still loving it every week.

Mm-hmm.

They're playing squash, they're playing tennis. And so that's what success should be judged on. So I think to answer that question around the state of football, And the state of other sports, we're judging it on the very highest, the highest sort of level.

Football, yeah, the Premier League is incredible. The fan bases, I watch football from all over Europe. The Premier League's the only one that has full stadiums every week. I watch games in Spain, I'm thinking, God, if I was in Spain, I'd be there tonight.

Yeah.

And I look and the stadium's a quarter full. So I see why it's perceived that way. But the Premier League is not football. The Premier League is a football league. Football is how many people are still playing, passionately engaged, or coaching, or whatever.

Yeah.

And being a fan to some extent. So yeah, financially it's ahead. In terms of academies, again, I can only really speak from my experience, but I suppose some of the people that I've met so far along the journey, they don't appear to be the most open-minded places.

Potentially similar in the way that education ironically isn't always the most open-minded place. To talk about education, sport academies and youth development programs are just an extension of education. You're just trying to educate people to do, rather than doing maths and English, trying to educate people to become as good as they can be at a sport.

But do those institutions, do those places look at current trends, contemporary research, and apply it? And I don't think they—

Yeah.

I think they rely on experiences and—

Yeah.

what they've seen in the past, and if it's not broken, don't fix it. Exactly. Without realizing that potentially it's broken.

I love that. What actually— a term before I move on, a term that I wanted to introduce on the podcast because I haven't spoken about it yet is the race to the bottom. And obviously it comes from football, specifically in the Premier League, and I think it would be very useful for basketball coaches and practitioners to know what it is.

Could you touch on that a little bit, Jesse?

Yeah, so The race to the bottom, again, probably in the context of European football is a real issue. There's a number of studies out there around how many, the percentage of young footballers that go on to play professionally is obviously really low. The problem is not that they don't go on to play professionally, it's that they then drop out of the game completely.

And the impact that that can have on someone, you know, the fact that our young people—

Hmm.

view themselves through the lens of how successful they are as an athlete is really sad. And if they don't achieve the goals that they've set, or probably more realistically their parents, coaches, and club have set, because they're, you know, the ones who want them to, or see the bigger picture or whatever.

Exactly.

It's the impact that it has on those people. And that's what I mean when I say that, you know, the impact of football being a good thing is how many people are still playing it at 50. Or at the moment, how many people are dropping out because they haven't achieved the level.

And potentially we only look at football, like I said, in that Premier League of, okay, can we get players in the Premier League? I think it was Marco Sullivan who mentioned it in a podcast that I love the reference, it's a bit dark, but like the graveyard.

Yeah, I was gonna, I was thinking of that. I was thinking of Mark's talk about that.

Like the graveyard of like—

Talent is the graveyard of their bodies, right?

Exactly. Like that's the people who haven't made it, are just chewed up and spat out, and they're in the graveyard. And all we hear about is the one or two who do, I'm doing quote marks here with my fingers, who do make it.

And they're the ones that—

Are held up as success stories.

Yeah, so we'll hang our hat on that individual because they're achieving. 24 players that were in their age group no longer play the sport, or they've fallen out of love, or it's had a massive impact on their mental health. It doesn't matter because one made it.

It's so funny. And it's like a comment yesterday made me really laugh on social. Someone said to me, evidence-based training is the players right now in the NBA who have made it with traditional models. How can you say it doesn't work when they're the evidence?

The ones who survive, survive the practices, survive the systems.

NBA players are incredible survivors.

Yeah, they are. Literally, they just survive. And again, we generalize a little bit because there's obviously a lot of good work going on.

Of course.

So I used to have examples of like players when I was working in the academy in Wellington. And I would coach, if I could draw the picture, there's the men's sort of first team, so the professional side. Then there's the reserves team who play in New Zealand's National League.

There's a team below them and then a team below them. And so they're sort of 15, 16-year-olds. And we played men's football, so, you know, which was great. And I would talk to players individually, sort of And they'd be sort of saying, you know, I really want to get into the next team this year.

It was called Cap Prem, was the league they played in. So, I want to get into the Cap Prem team this year.

Mm-hmm.

And just trying to think like, that's not how you should approach it. Because they're approaching it in the same way that coaches have always traditionally approached it. We just want to move you through the system, get you to the next team, tick that box and move on.

And so, I'd always say to them, okay, if you have a really, really poor week at training, and that team in the next level has a number of injuries or something happens, there's a COVID outbreak and 5 players can't play.

Yeah.

And you make that team, have you succeeded your goal? Even though you've had a poor couple of weeks and you know your standards haven't been high.

Exactly.

Vice versa, if you've been absolutely smashing the door down for 6 weeks, really high level, really driven, really competitive, and you don't make that team, are you gonna consider that a failure? And so again, in this race to the bottom, how many players can we turn into professional athletes, and that's all we care about.

Some clubs have tried to, you know, look after the players and have player care systems, and I understand that, you know, there is some work going into it. But if we just put all of our energy, time, and resource into creating professionals or first-team players, and, you know, they're all worth money.

This is one thing, like, can you name another industry other than sport, and specifically football, that sells people that's legal? Yeah.

We actually, we have that in basketball too with youth development to a much lesser extent. But that's why I'm so critical of pretty much all the quote unquote leading academies in Europe because they're literally just, it's quite controversial, but they're literally taking players from like other countries and just treating them as financial properties.

And there's no thought that goes into their holistic development and care. It's shocking.

Yeah. I'll throw a really crazy analogy at you. But in New Zealand, we don't have nuclear power. When nuclear power came around, everyone was like, oh, that solves the problem. And New Zealand just went, hey, hang on a minute. No, no, no. So we have other, we have hydropower and stuff.

And to be fair, we're not a big country, so we don't need nuclear power. But again, nuclear power is just, right, let's just build the biggest, ugliest power plant and we'll power everyone. That's those academies and clubs that are going out and getting all of the best players and just popping them into one spot with no care.

Yeah.

I think of like 5 academies in Europe straight away that come to mind.

Exactly. And I'm thinking of the same, but people will realize I'm quite pro-New Zealand. But it's the clubs that will actually do something a little bit different, work with what you've got. You don't need to go out and get all of these amazing things.

And the best thing, you just need to have a really good program that suits you. So in New Zealand, it just suits us that we have hydropower and wind power and those sorts of things. If I was to give an example, currently in the New Zealand league that the Wellington Phoenix play in, they're currently top of the league.

They've never been in this position before, it's crazy.

Yeah.

And hopefully, and I'll be up early tomorrow to watch them, we'll win tomorrow and we'll be in a position to win the league in a couple of weeks, which is just unheard of. And they've cut the wage budget by heaps of shit, it's all been sort of in the press and those sorts of things.

And the players who are now playing in there are young academy players. So we used to bring in players from all over the world, We had Steven Taylor there who played hundreds of games in the Premier League, came, played for Wellington for 2 years.

And that's fine. We're trying to build little nuclear power plants. It didn't seem the right thing to do. And now we've gone, we've got a couple of really good experienced professionals who are from overseas. They've played hundreds of games. They have a really high standard.

And we've got all these young New Zealanders and a couple of young Australians now playing in this team. And we're about to win the league. And you'd look at the team on paper and think they'd come last.

That's awesome.

And it's not some beautiful romantic story. It's just the fact that, again, we talk about the race to the bottom. We're putting value in different areas. How can we create a team that represents the people who turn up and watch us on the weekends?

And it's leading to success. So that's an example of, okay, everyone's building a nuclear power plant. We're just going to focus on some more sustainable forms of energy and see where that gets us. Doing something different. That's it.

So what this leads into is we spoke before we recorded this about an interesting statistic in the Premier League here where A lot of defenders and attackers played at lower leagues and didn't come through academies, I believe. Right? And in basketball, I'd actually considering making this some type of study and doing it empirically, but I think a lot of point guards in the highest level of European basketball did not necessarily come from high major colleges.

Mm-hmm.

For instance, a great example would be someone like Mike James. One of the best point guards in EuroLeague. And TJ Schwartz, the MVP of EuroCup this year, he's 5'9. He didn't have any Division I offers. Played JUCO.

Right.

And it's really interesting. I'm kind of going through EuroLeague rosters, seeing the number of point guards who came from these supposed high major programs and then smaller schools. And it's really fascinating. And it's obvious because they just had opportunities to actually play, have the ball in their hands, get loads of touches.

So I wonder if there's a link there to what we're seeing just in the Premier League, and maybe you could talk a bit about that stat, Jesse, and why it might—

Yeah, remind me quickly, who's the OKC— no, was it OKC? No, Golden State. When they were really successful, who was the 2nd round draft pick and he was the incredible defender?

Draymond Green, exactly.

Draymond Green remembers the name of every single player who got drafted before he did, which I find fascinating. Yeah, I mean, it was interesting because I've been talking about this recently. And I actually read an article this morning, I can't remember who wrote it, so I'm not gonna mention it, but it backed up what I was sort of looking at is, if you look at the England men's national team, the players that play, that are in that team—

Oh, is this right, yeah, the national team.

Haven't necessarily come from top 6 academies, or what they call Category 1 academies. So top 6 clubs, the best 6 clubs in the Premier League supposedly, and then Category 1, Category 2, Category 3, Category 4, is sort of how they characterize their academies.

And if you look at the players who are making that England team and their experiences, I mean, talk about nonlinear. You've got guys like Ivan Toney, who's come through non-league, and then he's come through lower levels. He's scored a bunch of goals for Peterborough, got signed for Brentford in the Championship, did really well in the Championship, got promoted into the Premier League.

Now he's England's second choice striker.

Yeah.

He's competing to go to the Euros alongside their other second choice striker. Ollie Watkins, who came through, if I remember correctly, at Exeter. So a tiny club who, well, I say that, there's no disrespect to Brentford.

No disrespect, of course, but in relation to, you know, the Chelseas, Man Uniteds, Man Cities of the world.

Exactly. And so he came through at Exeter, he signed on again to Brentford, I think it was, and now he's at Aston Villa and he's doing really well. You know, they're not playing in top 6 Premier League clubs and they haven't come through these highly rated academies.

Jared Bowen. I'm a West Ham fan, so Jared Bowen's a player we've got at West Ham.

You can see the West Ham stadium from here.

Yeah, see it right now. And he came through at Hereford, who were a non-league club. He was playing non-league football at 15.

I watched Hereford versus Woking once, I remember, as a 14-year-old in like the, what was it, the, what was it called back then? It was like the Conference something. I can't remember the sport. Yeah, I remember the Conference South.

Yeah, something like that. And he was probably playing, but he was playing there at 15. And then he, as 15, 16, he moved to Hull. And eventually West Ham spent £25 million on him and he's now, he's making the— he's in the England squad.

He plays up front for West Ham alongside a guy called Michail Antonio, who's South London born and bred, never come through an academy, and now he's playing in the Premier League. And if you look through this, the England team at the moment, it's the goalkeepers who have come from clubs and academies where they've probably faced the most shots.

Well, those aren't Chelsea, Man City, Arsenal. No disrespect to goalkeepers who are currently at those clubs, I'm just saying, if you get an offer from a club that's gonna concede 1,000 shots, then maybe take it. Defenders the same, John Stone, incredible player.

Such a good player.

My favourite player to watch. Come through at Barnsley, the amount of defensive actions that he would've had to do at Barnsley.

The affordances that he presented to him.

The opportunity to play in the first team much quicker than if he'd come through at Manchester City. to then play against, I call them strikers with sharpened elbows. They're the big strikers who throw their elbows around and he has to get used to that physical contact.

He's playing alongside Harry Maguire, who come through, I think at Sheffield United.

Yeah.

And then went to Hull, but they're not coming from the top 6. Now there's some outliers. So there's Marcus Rashford, and there's a lot of stories about him playing 3 years up and playing in cages with older children. So he probably had that affordance landscape challenged.

But probably not on a Saturday when he was playing in his age group against others. It was when he was 12 years old playing in the cage with Paul Pogba, who's 4 years older than him, and getting battered. And it's Paul McGuinness who talks about that quite a lot, for those who are interested, around Rashford's development.

But he's one of those, you know, sort of golden, 'cause he's always been at the same club. Bukayo Saka's another one here at Arsenal.

Yep.

I mean, incredible player. And he's never gone on loan, he's come through, he's the best player in the best team in the Premier League. So again, he's an outlier. Phil Foden is the best player in one of the best teams in the Premier League.

He's an outlier. So there's always the outliers. That's not all 23 of the England squad. That's 3 or 4. It's the Jude Bellinghams, the Declan Rice who got released from Chelsea at 15 because he wasn't big enough, who's now a physical beast. James Maddison come through at Norwich, not a particularly big club in terms of how it's perceived.

So you've got this case study of players that are now playing at the highest level that have overtaken the players that at 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 were maintained in these elite academies.

It's insane. I'd be intrigued to see if a Premier League team catches onto this and really is intentional about it. It strikes me as being very similar to the NBA, where it's, we are so far behind and the first team to do this the competitive advantages they'll access, it would be such a benefit.

It's really interesting. It's so much too, just on the practically what I'm just listening to you speak, Jesse. It's like, I wish front offices would be, I'm not saying I wish, but I'm saying I think they would get an advantage if they were more unorthodox in recruitment.

Yeah.

So maybe taking more of a chance sometimes. And I know job preservation comes into it, but I think there could be some intriguing, especially for teams on If you don't, in my opinion anyway, especially in Europe, if you don't have the top 3 budget in a league, you know you're probably not gonna win.

Probably. So why don't you just do something radical to really— because to get that number 1 spot and win, you gotta do something different. And it's no difference between, often between being 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, all of that. So why not try?

Well, and there's examples of that again in football. So Brentford, They were under their own— it was Regis Stinkerson who was there, who did a lot of research around, I suppose, where are the environments of which talent is developed. I remember he went running in Africa and he went playing football in Brazil to try and understand.

He wrote a book about it. I can't remember what it's called. And so Brentford shut down their academy. Of course, yeah. I think they were a League One club. Shut down their academy because they're in London, which is probably the biggest football city in the world and has incredible amounts of Talented players, and also massive clubs that are releasing players that are still very good at football.

And so they set up a B team, they would—

Put all the resources into that.

Put all the resources into— when Chelsea, Arsenal, Fulham, Tottenham, West Ham, Charlton, Crystal Palace, Reading, Watford, all these clubs that spend millions and millions on their academy each year, when they start releasing these players, Picking up the one or two who might move in and become Premier League players.

And so they did something different, and they were the first one to do it. The money saved helped them spend money on actual players who could go straight into the Championship. The likes of Benrahma, they have Neal Maupay there, Ivan Toney, Bryan Mbeumo, all these really talented players.

It seems like their recruitment was excellent.

Yeah, and they had more money to spend because they shut down their academy. But also, they had this now B team of almost players with a chip on their shoulder. I've been released or I've been rejected. They've come in, they're looking after me.

They train them side by side with the first team and the B team. And so they produce players in a slightly different way. And they would sign players out of non-league, the real lower levels, to come in and to try and get them through this B team.

That's cool.

So it's, again, did it work? Did it not? The anecdotal evidence is that they have never been a Premier League club, and now they, for the past 4 years, have been a stable Premier League club. The players that they've sold have sold for massive profits.

So has it been successful? Probably. And now, funnily enough, they're reopening an academy.

Let's see if one European basketball team ever does something similar. I doubt it, because we are behind, but I'm sure someone out there in the future, in the next 10 years, will be brave enough to To do this stuff.

Just do something different.

Yeah, absolutely. So I want to finish, Jesse, with talking about independent problem solvers, because we spoke about this a little offline, and you read the Vision of the Future chapter in the book, and you kind of made the connection there. So could you just speak a little bit about that?

I think it's a really nice way to wrap up all the things we've spoken about today.

Yeah, so I think in my experience, if someone had asked me when I first started coaching, you know, what are you trying to achieve, I'd say, well, win as many games as possible, or In that case, when I say coaching, it's don't get relegated, compete, win, all these things.

And now if I was to be asked, what are you trying to achieve as a coach? It would be to try and develop as many independent problem solvers as possible. And I just like the fact in your book that it wasn't coaches who were saying that, it was general managers and it was physiotherapists, stuff as sports scientists.

So there's a shift, and I think this is where CLA and ecological dynamics as a wider theory sort of sit.

Yeah.

If I go back to that example of why aren't you doing rondos and why aren't you doing 1v1s, is we're trying to develop people who can solve problems in any given environment. And I used to work with a coach, the coach who used to coach me when I first started, Joe, and we used to talk about this whole concept of independent players.

And we always used to take the mickey a little bit and say, you know, we want our athletes to come off the pitch and walk off into the woods and live there for a week and survive because they're so independent and they're so skillful, which is always a bit of a— It's always a joke, but the notions of that are true.

You want your athletes at the highest level. If we're developing skillful, adaptable, independent problem solvers, you can't develop them in sterile, closed, blocked practices.

Yes.

And that's, again, having a vision as a coach of what you want to achieve. If I believed that I wanted my team to go out and win every week, I might not necessarily use the CLA. I might dip in and out of it, which is probably the worst thing you can do.

Yeah.

So, but because I— my own vision, how I believe, what I believe the role of a coach is, is to develop these independent problem solvers. The CLA marries to that so nicely.

It's like, and I think it's so much coaching for the long term.

Yeah.

Like you really—

Developing them for the game of the future.

That's it.

And we don't know what the game of the future looks like. If we want players who are going to go and play at the highest level, you know, Premier League, Or international football, NBA, that's like, that is the wild. It's not a zoo.

And if you develop all your lions in the zoo and drop them off in the wild, they wouldn't survive 5 minutes. They're still lions. We've got these footballers or these basketballers or whatever, they're not actually footballers, they're people who play football and basketball.

Exactly.

And they have an ambition to play at the very highest level. Well, how can we then support them to do that? There's so many ways that that plays out practically. Like, I think basketball maybe less because basketball appears to have become positionless in a way.

Certainly, I remember playing 2K when I was a kid. You pick your center, your power forward. Yeah. And it doesn't look like basketball's like that as much anymore. And football's the same, but I always use the example of fullbacks in football. So Jamie Carragher made a comment one night on Sky Sports that no one grows up wanting to be a Gary Neville, who was a right back who played thousands of games of football and was very successful.

And that's probably true. And now, even if you ask Gary Neville, he probably wouldn't make it because he played right-back. That was his position. The right-backs now who are coming through, midfielders have been converted to right-back, or wingers have been converted to right-back.

That's not necessarily the point.

Exactly. Even Keith Davids, on a Zoom, he was speaking to me about how goalkeepers are playing like midfielders, right? With some of the skillful And that's it.

So we used to have this quite traditional, right, we're developing players for positions, whereas now it's, what are the fundamentals of the game that they require to be independent problem solvers? So if the coach says to me, you're going to go and play right back today, I have enough tools in my box, enough experiences.

And so this is where we're sort of getting to the CLA, is football requires you to have A fullback. You couldn't say to a team of youth players, just go out and play. I mean, you could, but you might— again, that's going really chuck them in the deep end, and it's not preparing them for the game.

What's the point of telling a bunch of youth players to go out and play, and then they're going to go and play professionally for a—

Yes.

You know, in a system. So at some point, people do have to understand how to play in systems, what we would call teamwork. So where I'm getting to with that is, if we just pick someone, we put them into a position, They spend 5, 8, 10 years playing in that same position.

The minute that they go and sign a professional contract and ask to move somewhere else, we've failed that individual. So can we create environments where positions are still a thing?

Yeah.

Tactics are still a thing, techniques are still a thing, all those things still exist, but we're moving people around the spectrum.

That's it. And I think we're always going to have positions in basketball, but like you said, it's just the lines are going to be blurred more.

Yeah.

And players are going to be doing far more things.

You're seeing to shoot 3s now.

Exactly.

And I'm sure there was a time where a center wouldn't be seen dead outside the—

Absolutely. That wasn't too long ago.

Yeah. Rugby's another one, the same. You know, I watch rugby players now, they're so incredibly skillful. My family are all rugby players, and my uncle played for the All Blacks. And he wasn't particularly big, but, you know, I've watched film, this is in the '70s and '80s, of him playing for the All Blacks.

And everyone is so different. You know, there's big guys, short guys, I mean there's— and when I say short, they are short.

Short.

And now rugby's become professional and everyone's kind of the same size. Everyone's powerful. Everyone's skillful, you know, props, which has always been, and I listened to a podcast the other day on this, youth rugby coaches think that you need to develop props who can scrummage, which is quite a technical thing and quite dangerous.

Yeah.

From a young age. And then he was looking at the current England men's front row, the props in there, and they all started specializing as props at 16, 17, 18 years old. They were first 5/8, second 5/8. Now there's a lot of people on this podcast now who are going, what on earth is he talking about?

And I'll say to them—

I know what you're talking about.

I'll say to them, that's the same when I listen to you talk about dominoes in basketball. I have no idea. But that's not the point. The point is that people think those skills need to be developed really early. If you get someone at 13 in a rugby environment and say, you're going to play a prop, the statistics would now tell you that they're never going to play professionally.

You're more likely to be fly half, first 5'8, second 5'8, and become a prop because that's just what now the evidence is telling us. So again, independent problem solvers, not pigeonholing people into things like positions or skill sets, but making sure that they have this wide variety of skills.

Jesse, thank you so much. That was a fantastic podcast. I personally really enjoyed this. The start of many future conversations. It's crazy to think we only met about 3 hours ago. Yeah, this was great. Thanks so much for the time and making the effort to come down to London.

And yeah, really excited to get to know you more, man.

Thanks, mate. And all the best for the book. I look forward to reading the other 10 chapters.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Transforming Basketball Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about the work that we do, Head to transformingbball.com to access our free resources and spread these ideas throughout the basketball world. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform.

You can also connect with us on Instagram, X, or YouTube with any questions that you have from the episode. See you next time on the Transforming Basketball Podcast.