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.
