Volleyball Coaching Life-Choking

Generally, people talk about choking when a team or a player blows a big lead.  Worse than watching the act of choking in real time is to be doing the choking and experiencing that sinking feeling as the game get away. Perhaps even more excruciating is to be the coach as they watch their teams going through that process, because the coach knows that there is absolutely nothing immediate that he or she can do to affect the outcome, as the fundamental work should have been done in the weeks, months, and years before. They can only curse themselves for not having trained their players to better survive the situation.

As I sat watching my Illini lose to Nebraska in the national semi-finals, I had that sinking feeling. Nebraska showed great heart and unity of purpose as they processed the loss of the first two games and played as they were trained. Their highs were celebrated and their lows were processed and forgotten. As the tide turned, the Illinois players showed signs of wavering, not through their demeanor but through the series of unforced errors.

Two days later, the Nebraska team took on a Stanford team that had gone through their semi-final match with relative ease. Indeed, it was a championship match for the ages, this match went five as well even though the sequence followed was completely different than the Illinois-Nebraska semi-final. The first two games were so even that either team could have won, they ended up splitting. The next two games were alternating blowout with Stanford winning the third and Nebraska winning the fourth. The last game was tight all the way down to the wire, with Stanford winning the championship, but barely. The causal sequence of games won and lost was indicative that both teams were mentally ready to battle and they did indeed, giving us one of the best finals in years.

As I was watching the semi-finals, my coaching thoughts turned to how I can train my players to behave as these players are behaving, the Nebraska players losing first two games and then turn around and playing comfortably and confidently as the pressure mounted? On the other hand, I was also thinking about what could be done to help the Illinois stanch the bleeding and turn the momentum around back to their favor. There was nothing inevitable about any of the three games that Illinois lost. Each game was relatively even until it moved into the critical segment of the game. The officiating was even, except maybe for the last touch in the deciding game giving Nebraska the two-point turnaround.

For the finals, I wondered about how the coaching staff of both teams trained their teams to maintain their composure and executed with such consistency while so much pressure is on them. They went through the emotional roller coaster ride with aplomb and resilience without succumbing to the fatalistic spiral that is so attractive when challenged.

The real question to me is: how to train the cognition system of these players to survive and succeed under the circumstances?

I have never been in Nebraska, Illinois, nor Stanford’s practices or had the privilege of witnessing the coaches train and I won’t pretend to project any of my conjectures upon these three programs. I used this match as motivation to think about how I would do it and to research how people who are much more experienced than me are training.

One resource that I found is The Playmaker’s Advantage: How to Raise Your Mental Game to the Next Level by Leonard Zaichkowsky and Daniel Peterson. Zaichkowsky is a psychologist who has been working at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and sports performance for a long time, while Peterson is writer working in the same area. The book is fascinating and educational. They also give us a look at the latest in cognitive neuroscience results, rather than just conjectures, which helps me think about these questions. I consider the book a must read

In chapter ten of the book, titled: How to Compete: The Clutch and Choke of the Performance Engine, they delve into the states that they call flow, clutch and choke. Zaichkowsky and Peterson quote Dr. Christian Swann -  a researcher who had interviewed high performance athletes about their cognition during periods of clutch and choke - defines: “Flow as a state of effortless excellence, in which everything ‘clicks’ into place.”  Swann further states: “We perform on autopilot, are totally confident in our abilities and fully absorbed in what we are doing without actually thinking about it.”  

Swann further defines Clutch as:

“a state where athletes are much more aware of the importance of the situation, what’s at stake, the potential consequences, and what’s required to achieve a successful outcome. In clutch, athletes describe being conscious of the pressure, and feel the pressure, yet are still able to perform at their peak.”

He also differentiates flow and clutch by stating that: “Clutch states share a core similarity with flow, but are more effortful, deliberate, consciously controlled and intense.”

Choke then is defined as the opposite of clutch. Swann found that the key factor which decides whether the athlete is clutch, or choke is a matter of personal perspective. It isn’t the score or the objective measure of the performance that affects performance, it is the subjective perception of the performance which most affects their performance. In other words, how people perceive of their own performance is what decides whether they are in a clutch or choke state.

This is all very instructive, and Zaichkowsky and Peterson goes in depth in explain the difference, but what mattered to me is: how do I train my players to perform in a clutch state and avoid the choke state. How do I get from understanding the explanation of the states to executing effective training to promote clutch performance? How do I put all of this knowledge into practice?

Zaichkowsky and Peterson delve into two interesting theories. The first theory is that the pressure is taking the athlete’s attention away from our task at hand, causing the athlete to be distracted, therefore disrupting their flow state. The alternative theory is that the pressure is causing the athlete to focus too closely on the task when they are under pressure, they begin to overthink their task, the paralysis by analysis idea. The alternative theory is based on the idea that any motor skill become so ingrained in the motor control system over time that the athlete does not need to pay attention because they can do it in their sleep, but the breakdown in performance comes when they have to focus and pay attention to what they do.

Not happy to have just theories, Zaichkowsky and Peterson found various large studies testing those two ideas together. The testing was done by other researcher on high level athletes and the result is that the latter theory, the over focus on the task theory, is the main cause for the most erosion in performance. They asked the athletes to perform familiar and ingrained tasks under two conditions: one is to introduce disruptions like noise and visual disruptions, and the second is to ask them to an addition unpracticed but simple task as they do their familiar task. The former tests the unfocused attention idea and the second tests the idea that focusing on a task causes the athlete’s mind to not do as they are trained but think about what they have to do. The practiced and well-trained athlete would perform at less than optimal levels if they had to think too much about HOW they do what they do and they would interrupt their flow state to focus too hard on WHAT they did, which inevitably cause them to make errors and spiral downward into a choke state. In other words, when the athletes start to turn their attention inward and try to FOCUS on the mechanics of their skill, they accomplish the exact opposite of their intent. Interestingly enough, I had read this same idea in Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis.

How does this translate into training? According to the Zaichkowsky and Peterson, one key aspect of training is to teach skills in an integrated whole rather than in a step-by-step manner, keeping the skill performance automatic and keeping the skill acquisition process as continuous as possible and limit the mental processing during skill acquisition. The reason is that if the athlete learned their skills in an integrated whole, they wouldn’t try to break it down into progressive steps when they are under pressure. I had to think about that for a bit. While I agreed with this in general, I keep thinking about the process of teaching skills to the youngsters and knowing the confusion caused by their minds trying to absorb the entire skill in one shot, especially dynamic skills like jumping and hitting or transitioning to the pins from the middle and blocking. On the other hand, I think about how long it takes for the athletes I have trained to break away from the if-then thought process and how difficult it was for them eventually overcome the mental process of the progression steps. I have tried to minimize the progressions when I teach skills, but I can’t get away from that paradigm when introducing beginners to volleyball. I am still thinking about that.

A productive way to think about the clutch performance is to define clutch performance as being able to perform as expected while under pressure, that is, treating performing under pressure the same way as performing under no pressure. Which sounds difficult knowing human nature, but if you train the player deliberately de-emphasize the mental pressure within the scheme of the sport, become acclimated to playing under pressure, and expect the players to be performing in the flow, regardless of the situation, then it seems possible. The ideal is the train the athletes to treat every action on the court as a natural and expected part, there are no surprises. It also follows the idea of preparing your team to be anti-fragile, that is, prepared to handle anything rather than preparing to be ready for specific things.

Of course, the problem is that we don’t know how our athletes will react while under pressure while in training, we don’t know what we don’t know about them. We can only hope for the kind of performance that we want when they are under pressure because we can’t possibly put realistic kinds of mental pressures which could alters their reaction in a practice. One thing that Zaichkowsky and Peterson suggests is to train them while altering the space and tempo of the training regimen, working deliberately in small spaces and with overspeed to make the players problem solve while under artificially created pressure situations; to be completely un-gamelike but erring on the side of overloading their cognitive capacity. They will fail and then they will learn while under space and speed duress, they will expand their cognitive capacity and learn; that is, create new capabilities in the system 1 or hot cognition response. This allows the athletes to learn to perform automatically without overanalyzing their situation and attempt to slow down their reactions or the game.

So, having thought about this, I have a blueprint of how I am altering my training plans this year, even though I am already a big fan of going overspeed, I will try to up the tempo even more and working in the space restrictions this year. This should be fun.

Much thanks to Len Zaichkowsky and Dan Peterson for checking my interpretation of their work and making sure I did not misrepresent their work.