He is now an author, having written the 2001 book Just Let The Kids Play: How to Stop Other Adults from Ruining Your Child’s Fun and Success in Youth Sports.

(Source: Wikipedia, See Bob Bigelow’s professional career stats)

How to make sports better for kids:

• Eliminate adult misbehavior
• Get qualified coaches
• Make playing time equitable
• Control excess travel sports
• Reduce overuse injuries

(Source: Bob Bigelow Website)

Donna O’Neil published an article in Wakefield Observer on November 14, 2008 based on the interview with Bob Bigelow. The idea is that…

…adults involved in the organization of youth sports who are living out their own sports fantasy through their children are sending the wrong message to kids.

Bob says in the telephone interview that…

…in a utopian world, I would take adults out of the youth sports equation altogether.

Maybe the best summary of Bob’s message is this paragraph:

Although not based on anything scientific, but merely on personal observation, Bigelow said, “If I could take 20 percent of the adults involved in youth sports, and that’s a multi-million number, and put them on a spaceship to Marks, never to be seen again, it would clean up 99 percent of the problems with youth sports. Too much of what is wrong with youth sports is their competition. Only about 20 percent that do get it. I would love to keep them around. I am fighting for the other 60 percent in the middle. That is the battle royal.”

Bob wrote a book where he elaborated on his ideas about youth athletic development and what needs to be changed to make the system work better. Quite a bit of the book is, surprisingly, given at Google Books, certainly enough to get a taste and make judgement if it’s worth buying. If you do decide to buy it from Amazon, here’s the link:

…becoming really, really good in a field is a grueling task for which many people are not willing to sacrifice their time and energy… or they are simply afraid to attempt.

Expertise at the highest degree, as in the elite, is something that has been nurtured through devoted training sessions, coaching, self-reflection, and hours upon hours of physical and mental effort. Yes, there may be natural aspects in brain or body type that allow the greatest to enhance potential, but those individuals still must have the appetite to eat away their days through focused and intense practice and preparation.

This article led to Deliberate Practice – Where Self-reflection, Work Ethic and Ambition Meet on OpenEducation.net, by certain Thomas.

…writer Geoff Colvin insists that the “conventional wisdom about ‘natural’ talent is a myth.”

“the real path to great performance is a matter of choice.”

In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians, and others.

Colvin goes on to note that current research of K. Anders Ericcson is providing a different rationale for success, something called ‘deliberate practice.’

The greatest performers have consistently combined these elements, sometimes just by luck.

…the idea of stretching one’s skills.

…‘before the work,’ ‘during the work‘ and ‘after the work‘ components…

Ultimately, this led to what seems to be the source: Why talent is overrated, written by Geoff Colvin, senior editor at Money Magazine (not really the source because it all leads to the original research performed by Dr. K. Anders Ericcson).

If we’re all wrong about high achievement, that’s a big problem. In particular, if we believe that people without a particular natural talent for some activity will never be competitive with those who possess that talent – meaning an inborn ability to do that specific thing easily and well – then we’ll direct them away from that activity. We’ll steer our kids away from art, tennis, economics, or Chinese because we think we’ve seen that they have no talent in those realms.

A number of researchers now argue that talent means nothing like what we think it means, if indeed it means anything at all. A few contend that the very existence of talent is not, as they carefully put it, supported by evidence. In studies of accomplished individuals, researchers have found few signs of precocious achievement before the individuals started intensive training. Similar findings have turned up in studies of musicians, tennis players, artists, swimmers, mathematicians, and others.

Such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist. But they do suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.

So if specific, inborn talent doesn’t explain high achievement, what does? Researchers have converged on an answer. It’s something they call “deliberate practice,” but watch out – it isn’t what most of us think of as practice, nor does it boil down to a simplistic practice-makes-perfect explanation.

1. Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance. The key word is “designed.” The essence of deliberate practice is continually stretching an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. By contrast, deliberate practice requires that one identify certain sharply defined elements of performance that need to be improved, and then work intently on them. Tiger Woods – intensely applying this principle, which is no secret among pro golfers – has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap and step on them, then practice shots from that near-impossible lie. It’s striking how many great performers had fathers who started designing their practice activities at early ages; Tiger, Picasso, and Mozart are perfect examples. So is the New York Giants’ Super Bowl MVP quarterback, Eli Manning, whose father, Archie, was a successful NFL quarterback. Archie was always ready with instruction for Eli (and for his brother Peyton, Super Bowl-winning quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts). Eli always seemed clear that intense practice was key. According to a new biography, Eli Manning: The Making of a Quarterback, ‘Eli never bought into the gene theory.’ In some fields, especially intellectual ones such as the arts, science, and business, people may eventually become skilled enough to design their own practice. But anyone who thinks he’s outgrown the benefits of a teacher’s help should at least question that view. There’s a reason the world’s best golfers still go to teachers.
2. Deliberate practice can be repeated a lot. High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real, when it counts. Repeating a specific activity over and over is what people usually mean by practice, yet it isn’t especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity just beyond our current abilities. The other is the amount of repetition. Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball’s greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than 30 years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night.
3. Feedback on results is continuously available. Obvious, yet not nearly as simple as it might seem, especially when results require interpretation. You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts. Or you may believe you played that bar of the Brahms violin concerto perfectly, but can you really trust your own judgment? In many important situations, a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.
4. It’s highly demanding mentally. Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate,” as distinct from the mindless playing of scales or hitting of tennis balls that most people engage in. Continually seeking exactly those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better places enormous strains on anyone’s mental abilities. Nathan Milstein, one of the 20th century’s greatest violinists, was a student of the famous teacher Leopold Auer. As the story goes, Milstein asked Auer if he was practicing enough. Auer responded, ‘Practice with your fingers, and you need all day. Practice with your mind, and you will do as much in 1-1/2 hours.’
5. It’s hard. Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we’re good at, we insistently seek out what we’re not good at. Then we identify the painful, difficult activities that will make us better and do those things over and over. After each repetition, we force ourselves to see – or get others to tell us – exactly what still isn’t right so we can repeat the most painful and difficult parts of what we’ve just done. We continue that process until we’re mentally exhausted. If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and no one could distinguish the best from the rest. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.
6. Before the work. Self-regulation begins with setting goals – not big, life-directing goals, but more immediate goals for what you’re going to be doing today. In the research, the poorest performers don’t set goals at all; they just slog through their work. Mediocre performers set goals that are general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome. The best performers set goals that are not about the outcome but rather about the process of reaching the outcome. The best performers are focused on how they could get better at some specific element of the work, just as a pianist may focus on improving a particular passage. With a goal set, the next step is planning how to reach it. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented plans. They’re thinking exactly, not vaguely, of how to get where they’re going.
7. During the work. The most important self-regulatory skill that top performers in every field use during their work is self-observation. For example, ordinary endurance runners in a race tend to think about anything other than what they’re doing; it’s painful, after all, and they want to take their minds off it. Elite runners, by contrast, focus intensely on themselves. Among other things, they count their breaths and simultaneously count their strides in order to maintain certain ratios. Even in purely mental work, the best performers observe themselves closely. They are able to monitor what is happening in their own minds and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition – knowledge about your own knowledge, thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more systematically than others do; it’s an established part of their routine.
8. After the work. Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. These must be self-evaluations; since the practice activities took place in our own minds, only we can know fully what we were attempting or judge how it turned out. Excellent performers judge themselves differently than most people do. They’re more specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies. Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great or poorly or okay. By contrast, the best performers judge themselves against a standard that’s relevant for what they’re trying to achieve. Sometimes they compare their performance with their own personal best; sometimes they compare it with the performance of competitors they’re facing or expect to face; sometimes they compare it with the best known performance by anyone in the field. Odds are strong that your experience wasn’t perfect; in fact, parts of it may have been unpleasant. In those cases, excellent performers respond by adapting the way they act, while average performers respond by avoiding those situations in the future. That stands to reason. Since excellent performers went through a sharply different process from the beginning, they can make good guesses about how to adapt. That is, their ideas for how to perform better next time are likely to work. So it’s hardly surprising that they are more likely than average performers to repeat the experience rather than avoid it.

Any of those can make sense; the key, as in all deliberate practice, is to choose a comparison that stretches you just beyond your current limits. Research confirms what common sense tells us, that too high a standard is discouraging and not very instructive, while too low a standard produces no advancement.

But where does the cycle start? Why do certain people put themselves through the years of intensive daily work that eventually makes them world-class great? This is the deepest question about great performance, and the researchers do not offer us a complete answer. We’ve reached the point where we must proceed by looking in the only place we have left: within ourselves. The answers depend on your response to two basic questions: What do you really want? And what do you really believe?

What you want – really, deeply want – is fundamental because deliberate practice is an investment: The costs come now, the benefits later. The more you want something, the easier it will be for you to sustain the needed effort until the payoff starts to arrive. But if you’re pursuing something that you don’t truly want and are competing against others whose desire is deep, you can guess the outcome.

The second question is more profound. What do you really believe? Do you believe that you have a choice in this matter? Do you believe that if you do the work, and do it with intense focus for years on end, your performance will eventually reach the highest levels? If you believe that, then there’s a chance you will do the work and achieve great performance. But if you believe that your performance is forever limited by your lack of a specific innate gift, then there’s no chance at all that you will do the work. What you really believe about the source of great performance thus becomes the foundation of all you will ever achieve.

Josh Childress

In my daily basketball readings certain things stick out. Over time they may become teaching points. Today, I read an interview with Josh Childress about the start of his European career in Greece. The interview was published at B92, a leading Serbian news source. Among other things, they asked Josh who was his favorite player of all time and his answer was Scottie Pippen. The reason is that Scottie did a lot of little things right. Then Josh said this sticky point: “Scottie was a born winner, he had capability to take over a game without scoring a single point.”

My first reaction was, hm, I heard people say this so many times, is it really true. Then, I thought, there are many aspects of the game, other than scoring: rebounding, assists, blocks, defense. I am not sure that’s what Josh is talking about. I think he is talking about intangibles. I’ve seen players whose quality transcends the stats. They make shooters on their team more confident, they toughen their team’s defense just a notch, they make opponent’s determination shakier – just enough to WIN. One European player who never played in the NBA was a Serb Zoran Savic. His stats were never great, but every team he played for was a winner.

Good luck in Europe, Josh!

Doc Rivers / Copyright 2006 NBAE (Photo By Kent Horner, NBAE via Getty Images)

Doc Rivers, in The Boston Globe of October 20, 2008, puts an emphasis on the value of the ball, aka cutting down the number of turnovers. He mentions the 2008 Playoffs in which the Celtics lowered the number of turnovers by  one and a half, which contributed to their victory:

The Celtics are stressing limiting turnovers, Rivers said.

“We’re starting to understand the value of the basketball but we haven’t exhibited it,” Rivers said. “I think they get that – what turnovers do to your team. But I don’t think we’ve put it in play yet. Our young guys are starting to understand how we want to play every night. They don’t have it yet, but they are playing with a heightened sense of urgency. I don’t think we were great last year in that department.

“In the playoffs, our turnovers were cut down by a turnover and a half. The speed of play was slower in the playoffs, that is part of reason for that. We want to score, we want to run, we want to push it up, and we want to value the ball. We play so hard defensively, it’s a shame to get it back and give it right back to the other team.”

Per Friedman, the main reasons why this is difficult are:

• Various eras had different rules, different styles of play and different challenges
• A player’s statistics are influenced by the position he plays and his role on his team
• Greatness can be defined in various ways

Link to the original article: Examining Dr. J’s all-time best