Volleyball Coaching Life-Counting

 

I'm counting out time,
Got the whole thing down by numbers.
All those numbers!
Give me guidance!
O Lord I need that now.

“Counting Out Time”—Genesis

Counting is an instinct for humans. Counting played an essential and useful purpose in our daily survival and evolution, so we humans have persisted in quantifying everything that we do.

In our zeal to applying the numbers we collect, it is also natural that we occasionally misapply the results from the counting; sometimes the misapplication is harmless, but sometimes the misapplication works towards our disadvantage.

Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, the 10,000-hour rule is cited repeatedly as a heuristic for attaining expertise. (Gladwell 2011)  Unfortunately for Gladwell, the person who did the research, Anders Ericsson, very publicly refuted Gladwell’s interpretation of his research, which led to misapplication of the 10,000-hour number. (Ericsson 2020)

Yet people continue to misunderstand and misapply Ericsson’s conclusions, taking Gladwell’s attempt to popularize as original research.

Thinking about the continuing reliance on the 10,000-hour rule made me think about how we use counting in our coaching. For example: we give our players numerical goals as a quality control measure. For example, we can have them pass 20 balls, or we can specify 20 good passes, the good passes caveat is our way to introduce quality into the exercise. We assume that the players can make the connection between counting good passes and how to make good passes. Of course, that connection should never be assumed, but that is why coaches get paid big bucks, right?

As I started thinking in terms of system as I understood it, it occurred to me that most of our counting involve taking snapshots of a continuous flow of action; it is a snapshot taken at a specific time in a specific location. Sports — as with all of our reality that we experience— is a continuous chain of actions. We use Markov Chains, to be exact, to model sports as a chain of discrete events, even though it all looks like a continuous flow of events (Wung, Stats for Spikes-Markov Chains 2021). We count and make the assumption about the counting that we do because we need to simplify the reality so that we can understand what is happening in front of us. We do this by freezing the action at the time when a countable event happens. The drawbacks of that approach are that we cannot  possibly count every single touch all the time so that we can create meaningful sample space of statistics; counting discrete events creates an incomplete picture and does not capture  all the intangible qualities that characterizes the continuous reality. Yet, since counting discrete events is the only reasonable thing that we can do to capture reality, we continue to insist on counting. Most people understand this difference, but we have become so intent on the counting that we forget the reason for our counting. The tail is truly wagging the dog.

The motivating reason for Ericsson’s research, as well as the reason for Gladwell to write his book Outliers, (Gladwell 2011) is to distill the process by which people who do what they do well —much better than anyone else in the history of what they do—into a concise formula, another example of our brain’s need for formulas. Indeed, the problem with Gladwell’s writing is that he sometimes over distills and oversimplifies the academic studies in his zeal to explain the complex research results to the layman. Distilling and simplifying the complicate process of achieving excellence is what Gladwell does very well; indeed, better than most other popularizers. The point of his work is to show how someone can attain mastery— a word that is fraught with nuances— of a craft, a skill, a game, or a sport. It is indeed difficult to describe mastery, but it is easier to describe mastery than it is to describe how to attain mastery. The purpose to his writing is to point out the salient features of complex process that experts employ to achieve mastery. Part of the problem with distilling to the essential nature of the mastery process, however, is continuity. The path to mastery is a continuous process, an iterative journey full of failures, adjustments to those failures, and ultimately success. It is not a path that can be streamlined into a recipe or a formula. This is why the 10,000-hour rule is not only an erroneous and harmful misapplication, but it also does not directly address the bits connecting the numbers that we count to the process of how to master the subject that we wish to master; it only measures the byproduct of the mastering process, the number of hours of practice.  Some have amended the idea of the 10,000-hour rule by making the rule the 10,000-hours of Deliberate Practice. It is an improvement, but it still does not address the essence of How to do, it just addresses What to Do.

Returning to the more basic volleyball example. Do we really want our players to pass 20 perfect passes in a drill? Or do we want our players to take the opponent’s wicked serve and convert it into points for our side? I want the latter than the former. How does that happen?

It takes the convergence of the discrete parts of the playing experience to achieve this; a discretization that we coaches impose on the act of passing so that our players can internalize the disparate parts of the integrated action. We cannot, however, make the player learn how by throwing them to the wolves by immediately exposing them to the reality. We cannot coach by  hoping that the players can understand the action of passing by facing what they will be facing in game play. Some players can and they do this naturally, but for the rest of us, it takes years of experience, analysis, ability to self-analyze, and autodidactic learning to achieve. Unfortunately, most of the players will get frustrated and quit the game before that happens.

The act of teaching skills by parts and then teaching the players to make connections between the  disparate parts of a skill and then integrating the skill back into an integrated whole has become unfashionable. Even though teaching the whole prematurely has its own deleterious results.

One of the effects by focusing on the 20 perfect passes is that we are forgetting and neglecting the result we desire. This is not to say that we should stop counting, but we should emphasize that the counting has a monitoring function rather than a goal setting function. The conversation should be: 20 perfect passes in three minutes or passing 2.4 in the last drill; rather than using the counting results as goals: the goal is to get 20 passes in two minutes, or the goal is to pass 2.4 in this drill.

Rather than saying that 10-000 hours of deliberate practice is what will guarantee mastery, we need to say: continuous and focused deliberate practice is what is necessary to achieve mastery, do not let the amount of hours set your limit, take as many hours as you need.

Goodhart’s Law is once again at play here:

Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” (Wung, Stats for Spikes-Using Statistics as Goals 2021)

We need to stop using the intermediate measure from the process of learning as a target, we need to use it as a check on how we are doing.  The difference is nuanced but there is a clear difference.

Players will often make the same assumption, they will ask about what the goal is, it is only natural. This also a chance to include the growth mindset into the discussion.

Another problem with using the intermediate measures as the target is that reality is nuanced and depends on the context of the situation. In the case of the 10,000-hour rule, the context has to do with the attributes we are born with, physically, emotionally, mentally, and intellectually; as well as the circumstances surrounding our attempt at mastery. This is not to say that talent is a constraint that cannot be overcome. This is saying that not everyone requires the same time and effort to achieve mastery.

In terms of the simple passing example, the context has to do with the serves that is being passed, the skills of the server, the skill level and physicality of the team, the practice environment, and so on. Passing a 2.4 against the USA Gold Medal winning WNT is different that passing 2.4 against the players on your own team.

The point of this article is to remind ourselves that we must never lose sight of the prize, to focus our sights on the real result rather than on the byproducts of the process, whether it is to achieve mastery or to achieve better first touch while playing, rather than achieving 10,000-hours of practice or 20 good passes in a drill. This is a common problem, losing sight of our end goal. As Daniel Kahneman, the author of Thinking: Fast and Slow (Kahneman 2013) states: When forced with a difficult question, we often answer the easier one instead, usually without noticing.

Works Cited

Ericsson, Anders. "Anders Ericsson: Dismantling the 10,000 Hour Rule." The Good Life Project. 2020. https://www.goodlifeproject.com/podcast/anders-ericsson/ (accessed January 17, 2022).

Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Back Bay Books, 2011.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. NYC: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Wung, Peter. "Stats for Spikes-Markov Chains." Musings and Ruminations . March 21, 2021. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/03/stats-for-spikes-markov-chains.html (accessed January 17, 2022).

—. "Stats for Spikes-Using Statistics as Goals." Musings and Ruminations . March 6, 2021. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/03/stats-for-spikes-use-of-statistics-as.html (accessed January 17, 2022).