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.

Life with Mom-Living a Fear Filled Life

My mom is 93 years old, and her entire world is driven by fear.

Some background, she was on one of the last boats that came to Taiwan in 1949 just before the relations between Taiwan and China was shut down, so she was one of the last people to leave China. She came to Taiwan, alone, not own anything outside of what was on her back and in a little suitcase. She came to be with relatives and managed to get work and survive. This was quite a change from her youth. My maternal grandfather was a local banker and she grew up with 14 brothers and sisters in a large house, with servants waiting on her. As with most women who lived in feudal China at that time, she never went to school beyond the secondary school, and yet she managed to make a living. Working as an assistant principal of a middle school in Taiwan, and then a bookkeeper for USAID.

She married my father and had me, after three miscarriages; we moved to Honduras for my dad’s career as an engineer and then to the US. Our finances were not great at that time and our family struggled. Mom sacrificed, scrimped and saved, and even managed to work as a book keeper when they lived in Salem Massachusetts. She did all of this without complaint, toughed it out in the US and outlived my father.

All the above is to say mom is a survivor.

Back to the present, every decision my mom makes in her every day life is driven by fear. Fear of the unknown mostly but fear all the same. It is the prime mover in her life.

She is afraid that anything that she does will result in more pain and suffering, she is afraid that every decision I make is a bad decision which would result in pain and suffering for the two of us. She is afraid of leaving the house whenever it rains or snows because she is afraid that we may get into a car accident while driving. She is afraid when I go on long trips and she is afraid when I go on short trips. She was afraid when I started coaching volleyball because she thought I was wasting my time on frivolous non-essential activities, i.e. something isn’t central to my identity as an engineer. She is afraid of being late to anything, so we spend a lot of quality time in waiting rooms because we are so early. She is super generous with gifts for people who helps her, it could be the receptionist at the doctor’s, the bank teller, the lady who helps her at the church she attends, because she is afraid that she would be looked upon as someone who is ungrateful.

At first dealing with this world view was agonizing for me, the insecurity grated on me; but as I stayed home and spent time with her, it came to me: she did not live a normal life. She lived in extraordinary times and her circumstances were extraordinary. Her fears came partly from the times she lived in: the Japanese invasion of China, the division of China and Taiwan. The periods of stability in her life came while she lived in Taiwan during uncertain times, for her and for Taiwa. It came during the cold war between the East and West. She’d moved to two different countries where she had to learn different languages and navigate the very different culture and society that surrounded us. It was completely foreign to her cultural and economic background. And yet she persisted. The key to her survival is because of her persistence, all driven by that fear fear. As I remember our home growing up, she has always been the one who fretted and worried, driven by fear of the unknown.

Her fear has multiplied as the years wore on, her ability to understand the English language diminished, her ability to navigate her way around our modern society is hampered by the erosion of her senses because of old age, and her confusion with the world around her deepens because she just can’t keep up with the changes. Add atop of all that the fact that all of her friends, as well as my father had preceded her in passing on, she lives in a lonely and very scary world. Things that I take to for granted is not so simple for her. Which further amplifies the fear that she feels.

Our clashes since I have been home had, thankfully, receded, partly because of her  and partly because of my slow realization of how difficult living in the modern world is for her. Alas, the biggest problem is that she can’t adjust to all the changes, not that she wouldn’t, but she just can’t. Of course, why would anyone ask a ninety-three-year-old to make changes to accommodate our needs, it seems to be too much to ask and too impossible to accomplish. It would be sheer folly to even try, as the explanations and the process of seeking to understand is counterproductive.

So I have come to learn that it is I who should adjust and conform to her need. It hasn’t been easy, while we still clash, we don’t do it as often nor as intensely as we did before. I still have a tendency to lose my temper, we have the same temperament so it is inevitable that we clashed.