There is nothing more illustrative of the uncertainties involved in life than sports.
Players and coaches understand that. A micro touch here, a
close in or out call by mere millimeters can affect the outcome of the game. In
fact, they could decide the game decisively and unconditionally. So it is with
some wonder that I see people —coaches and players — at all levels who enjoy, the
Games of chance. This is particularly noticeable in the professional level as
their wins and losses are reported in the media. I also wonder if these are trying to replicate
the thrill of beating the odds in their gaming decisions much like they had on
the field or court; whether they are reliving the thrill of winning an
improbable game or making an improbable play.
I couldn’t do that; I
am a coward when it comes to games of chance because I learned about
probability and statistics, and I understand the odds of winning in these games
of chances.
On the other hand, as I observe the training and decision
making habits of some fellow coaches, I see a contradiction. This is especially prominent in the context of
the team sports, where a large number of people, players on the field, coaches,
bench players on both sides of the contest — as well as the officials — they collectively inject an uncountably
large amount of uncertainty into each sporting contest. We know that a single
variation of a single variable could disrupt the ebb and flow of the game goes
away because of all the interlocking moving parts.
There are coaches who explicitly understand the randomness
that permeates sports, who understand the uncertainty that is intrinsically a
part of the games who choose to plan their training and execute their decisions
in the training gym as well as on game play as if they are operating within a deterministic
model of sports. Unknowns are usually ignored, or their effects are minimized.
Maybe they do not have a limiting a set of blinders as I imagine, but they
sometimes act as if there is no room for the unknown.
I believe that most of us have a deeply held belief about uncertainties.
We believe, as Michaelangelo once said of his sculpting, that there is a statue
sitting under all those layers of marble
just waiting for the artist to remove the extraneous parts. We believe that there
is a reality, a pure state of deterministic reality, buried under all the
uncertainties: measurement errors, noise in the system, unexpected actions, and
reactions, all those things that obscure the true nature of reality. We also
believe that these layers can be successfully removed, filtered, and overcome
through diligent understanding of the sources of uncertainties; that we can
make the system, in this case, the games, more predictable, so predictable that
we as players and coaches can actively create the outcome that we desire in an
orderly and procedural way. In the case of mismatches of skills, abilities, and
expertise, that is indeed true. Any top 20 college volleyball team can indeed thrash
any middle school team handily, but in terms of closely contested games, there exists
so many uncertainties that we are fooling ourselves into believing that we can
predict the outcome. We are also missing the point of playing the game. The payoff
moments of sports is to ultimately triumph despite our doubts about the outcome
of the contest. This is the reason why we play the game. But this belief in being
able to peel away the uncertainties keeps us from accepting uncertainties as a
part of the greater scheme of sports, and as a part of life. We work instead,
to remove uncertainties, which I believe is foolhardy.
Indeed, the nature of training involves the teacher to show
the players, what they need to do in order to have technical success, this
needs to be done without equivocation. The
major unknowns in the technical training of the players are the variability of
the players abilities and their skill levels. Yet, there are not a lot of room
in the training activity for the What ifs, especially during the initial
learning phase for a low skill level, low experience player. Introducing
uncertainties will confuse the delay the skill acquisition. But when highly
skilled and highly experienced players are being trained, players who have an
extensive database of knowledge and experience to call upon to improvise solutions,
some coaches will still follow the list-making approach, creating a check list
of contingencies of what might happen. This
is not to say that those contingency lists are ineffective, they just won’t
allow the player to improvise and learn. By training the players to solve discrete
problems in a list, they are missing the gaps in the list, and they become reliant
on their list of experiences. This approach will frustrate everyone involved if
the exact contingent situation does not manifest itself, the diligent coach
will create yet more contingencies in order to cover all the situations. Except
there is no end to the list.
Mike Hebert, in his book Insights and Strategies for
Winning Volleyball, wrote about his realization that most teams’ proclivity
to practice in system at the expense of practicing out of system, contrary to
the rate of occurrence for those situations. While we all nod our heads in
agreement, most are employing the same logic, that if we worked long and hard
enough at removing the uncertainties, we can get to the underlying
deterministic base reality; rather than working on going with the flow, training
ourselves and our teams to accept uncertainties while learning to improvise and react effectively
to the uncertainties as it happens rather than identifying, categorizing, and
systematically creating bailiwicks for an infinite number of possible
situations that can happen in sports.
Even as we train out of system, we will also create order to
tame the chaos, we create rules for situations: setter passes first ball,
errant passes, etc. and we create rules of the teams to follow. Again, I am not
saying this is a terrible practice, but there will always be circumstances when
those rules won’t be productive. A better philosophy is to train a team to be
able to act and react to the contingencies in a unified way; their movements are
coordinated as one body, reacting as one mind. This is the goal of training a
team, the holy grail of coaching. Something that happens rarely, but a noble
goal. It all starts with understanding uncertainties are an integral part of
what we are trying to do, that we need to integrate that recognition into our
thoughts when it comes to planning, training, and game day coaching.
I often wonder if I could be more successful in the win/loss
column if I had more skills and athleticism and had played at a much higher
level; that I had the same belief as the best players in my ability to turn the game to my will, maybe
I would be more daring in my decision making because of my recognition and
acceptance of the uncertainties in the sport. I usually ponder this in the
context of my coaching. I see other coaches who dare to make decisions that I
would never make, and I wonder about my own bias against taking chances,
whether I am being overly cautious. I can change all of that, but it is
different, because I am coming at it with a conscious effort whereas the
coaches who were top players have that belief ingrained in their thought process.
It is a mental struggle for me. On the other hand, their decision making is hampered
by their own blind spots and biases, much different than mine, but at least I
am doing something about it.
