Sports Ethics: Don't Try too Hard

It sounds counterintuitive—“don’t try too hard?” When we are struggling, shouldn’t we just try harder? I have been following the comments of Mariner’s players at spring training and all their comments converge on the same set of insights about high performance. A young Mariner’s pitcher Danny Hultzen spoke about adjusting during a game, “A year ago I probably would have even tried harder to just get the pitch there instead of just relaxing and calming down." Hultzen’s work involved a mind set change, and the rest of the game he excelled. Not trying too hard points to the importance of how top professionals work best and how to manage effort and practice in a productive way. 

Top professionals devote immense hours to practice and learning to achieve. Real masters have invested at least 5-7,000 hours at their craft. They constantly practice and more important learn from mistakes. Their lives reflect endless adaptation to changes in environment, changes in their own skill set and studying their successes and mistakes. High performing professionals adjust to people and environments.

I have talked about this before as one of the great strengths and dangers to athletic and professional excellence. Sometimes the problems with performance flow from failure of technique or erosion of skill, sometimes from adaptations of the other side. In the middle of a game and performance—players are tempted to “try harder.” Coaches and teammates exhort them, “just try harder.”

Trying harder is not exactly the same as another phrase “bear down” which demands more focused attention and being present to situational awareness. Trying harder usually means the player or professional has to step back from what they are doing, think about it and then “fix” it through exertion of energy.

Trying harder in the midst of a game erodes the entrenched expertise and pattern recognition of a high performing professional. Trying means a player willfully and self-consciously pushes him or herself. They exert more energy or effort simply for the purpose of exerting more energy.

This exertion can be mental in trying to overthink a technical adaption or in trying to outthink the opposition. Once a player enters this mind space, he or she has essentially lost the emotional mind game. They are no longer present to the situation. He or she no longer relies on the fine-grained pattern recognition and split second perception and skill deployment they have practiced. They tighten up mentally.

They also tighten up physically. Their self-conscious mental effort and internal command to try harder sends urgent messages to the body that launch high levels of cortisol and adrenaline that wrecks havoc on timing and rhythm. These responses narrow the perceptual field.

The mental reaction slows down reaction times with a mental screen interfering. A physiological reaction increases the response with too much strength or speed. Beyond inappropriate energy distribution, players over anticipate and commit too early on an action permitting the opponent to fool them.

Athletes use a large number of terms to identify the same phenomenon—players press or force actions. This pressing grows from trying too hard and ends up with a mismatch between energy/speed of a player’s action with the requirements of a situation.

When the Seattle Seahawks came from 21 points down to win a game, their Coach Pete Carroll addressed the very issue. He mentioned that the team and coaches had actually practices this scenario during preseason practice in order to focus the energy and words of coaches. Carroll then pointed out the danger. When teams are down and start to get anxious and press, execution and forcing it come into play.  "The problem," Carroll explained, " is they overtly and we need patience. Literally you are  going to have to go one play at a time." Cliched wisdom matters here for coaches and players who have to rein in their anxiety and focus. Carroll spoke again of how the coaches had to "direct our language in the right direction." This meant no panic driven emotional speeches, but concise and directive and strong places. As he said, "you can't win it on the first possession." 

Creating a culture where coaches especially have the knowledge and trust to build in patience and convey this is critical. 

Hultzen is a young pitcher and when he fell behind, he had the common tendency to try and “spot” or “overthrow.” This impatience leads  pitchers to miss their slots or lose rhythm. A player loses consistency because he or she tries to reinvent each pitch. Quarterbacks, basketball shooters, tennis serves all suffer form same response.  

Once players try too hard, it permits opponents to dictate the game. Players who are trying to hard become predictable and less quick. They over anticipate while having slippage in reaction times because they grow to mistrust their own skills. This permits opponents to dominate with feints and misdirection or even beat more talented or skilled players who are confused and off their game. Teams dominate another team when other players press and try too hard losing their rhythm and undermining skill. This creates a vicious cycle that undermines confidence, leads to more trying and even greater futility. 

Worse, trying too hard becomes a mental distraction for the players. Trying too hard turns mental energy into a spiral of self-criticism, failed experiments and loss of confidence. The spiral is hard to break. Ex General Manager Bill Polian talks about how critical this is to good coaches “In order to perform well as an athlete you need to be single-minded, focused on the job at hand, right down to the minute details. If that focus is shattered, if you're distracted, you do not perform as well.” The paradox becomes the harder a person tries the worse the distraction becomes.

Brendan Ryan who plays gorgeous short-stop for the Mariners but remains one of the most cringe-worthy hitters in the American league describes the cycle perfectly:

"My thing was, I have got to try harder. Get in the cage and spend more time there.”…"What I think happens most of the time is the harder you try, the harder it gets and things start to snowball. Maybe the biggest thing is confidence, going up there and believing something good was going to happen.

"It just felt all year I would get the count to that pitch, I would get the pitch and just miss it. It might even turn into a walk but you don't even feel good about that because you knew you should have hit that pitch and you should have been standing on second. The frustration just kept building."

Mike Morse a new Mariner teammate gets at a basic point of professional high performance, “Guys are more relaxed, and when you’re relaxed your talent comes out.” 

No one suggests not working or practicing to refine expertise or adapt to changes. "if at first you don't succeed, try try again," still carries real weight, but what matters is how a person tries and the mind set of learning and integrating learning, not just pure effort. It all depends upon the mind-set of the effort. Relaxing means not placing the mental screen in place that slows reaction and induces inappropriate levels of effort. It requires a letting go and being present to permit the well trained and refined expertise to be released.

It reduces to trusting the work you have done prior to the moment in the game. Trusting that skill, trusting to micro-adaptions in the moment and trusting to the trained situational awareness you have developed.

As Danny Hultzen stated so simply, “just relax.”

Sports Ethics: Grind it Out

We all have bad days. I mean really bad days, you know, the ones where nothing goes right. Our normal smooth skills just do not seem to work; our reactions feel sluggish and the simplest actions we have done by rote for years take concentration and thought. It feels like forgetting how to ride a bike while careening down a hill.

Athletes have a term that all of us can draw upon—grind it out.

Athletes grind it out when their reliable skill sets flounder. Grinding it is the antithesis of being in the zone and requires a different kind of mental focus and discipline. Grinding it out draws upon experience and will power. Young athletes and professionals who are used to winning and performing at the highest level tend to freeze or panic when their reliable expertise set fails. Learning to grind it out requires learning how to keep calm and disciplined when facing adversity and really bad days.

It happens on those days when we are not at our best; we don’t have our A-game, heck we don’t even have our B—game. In life or sport, these are the days when we come to work and our reactions feel slow. We do not read the situation or the other people quickly or comfortably. We feel sluggish. Our dependable skills falter. When we deploy a skill, we execute it awkwardly or not well at all. These moments always arise, but when they happen in competition the player is exposed to the opponents who will jump on the struggling athlete and exploit their weakness.

On bad days a player loses flow or smooth efficiency on their skills. This can happen to doctors, lawyers, teachers, brick layers, carpenters. Our craft or profession does not matter, we all have really bad days.

A struggling baseball pitcher illustrates it clearly. The pitcher may lose their best pitch or maybe two pitchers. The pitch loses something, speed, movement, accuracy, maybe all threes. Batters know this and wait out the pitcher to sit on their troubles. The pitcher then loses close calls because the umpire will not give them the benefit on close calls. The pitcher then self consciously starts to aim the pitch and it best worse. Then they get frustrated by the bad pitches and bad calls and lose focus or turn on themselves in self-recrimination.

A good pitcher has to draw deep on his or her  experience and remember they can get through this. Don’t get angry at oneself or at one’s pitches. On the mound and with the catcher, the pitcher has to re-remember basic mechanics. Go through the motions and concentrate harder to get the pitch over. It takes conscious mental effort to recall and consciously pull up what is normally unconscious and flowing. You see it most in the pitcher because they are all alone out there and facing combat with each pitch and the slightest mistake the leads to hit. You can watch them struggle and overcome anger and doubt. But the pitcher like any of us cannot get in the habit of self-consciously aiming, it guarantees failure. So the pitcher has to balance just doing it, failing, letting go and then doing it again until some approximation of professional execution occurs.  Like a good professional, they simply concentrate on one pitch at a time and getting it done.

Good professionals and craftsman know how to grind it out.

When we grind we are must rely upon will and knowledge. Individuals re-envision in their minds the complex skills and mind-set called for and call them up. They have to force the right angles, the right words, the right attitude toward the fore. As important when we are struggling, panic and paralysis and giving up all tempt us and we have to hold them at bay. At the same if a person starts to overthink, their actions can stagger and lose smooth efficiency. 

The metaphor tells us a lot. Gears grind when they are slightly misaligned. The parts don’t integrate well or smoothly. Grinding increases friction and slows down reaction time. Each action takes more work and harder focus to get it right or offset the misalignment. The scraping surfaces not only increase friction and inefficiency, they produce unpredictability as actions stagger and lurch. The task at hand devolves into a grind, drudgery where any fun or joy leaks from the work. In another take on grinding, a person needs to grind in play and practice to recover the edge of their skill and focus.

Grinding takes away the fun and the smooth naturalness of flow. We have to work at everything, and I mean work hard. We have to recall and will what comes naturally on a good day. We have to force our mind to work and our perception to focus and remember the skills that seem to have abandoned us.

Like the struggling pitcher, athletes look at other pitches, other skills. They compensate and find replacements actions. They find other ways to stay contribute in the game and help the team. A team member passes better or a scorer steps up their defense or passing. They rely on other members to cover for their limits and use the team rather than fight themselves. They rely on teammates to support and encourage them as well as position better or play better defense or offense. Nothing brings out our interdependency then having to grind it out.

People and athletes who know how to grind it out never accept “it’s just one of those days.” It may not be fun. Everything comes hard. Your best skills abandon you. Nothing comes easy. Everything takes more effort and outcomes feel random.

Good athletes and professionals grind it out.

Sports Ethics: Have Fun!

Several weeks ago the University of Washington football team struggled with a three game losing streak. A season that commenced with great promise teetered on the verge of collapse. The players held a players only meeting, a rare and important event for any team. After the meeting, several players announced that the team had reached a remarkable conclusion. The players needed to “have more fun.”

I believe this is a vital insight into how players should carry themselves in sport competition. Remember that in English we are quite honest about sports; we “play” sports. Many modern sports emerged not from practice for warfare but exciting and challenging activities that pushed the athletes and provided deep satisfaction in accomplishment and winning. You can see this with your pets playing or better yet when you coach or watch kids’ games, before the AAU and Select coaches get to them.

I remember coaching T-Ball for my six-year old kids. We’d set the ball on the T and someone would whack it with her bat and the ball would skitter towards second base.  Seven kids would run to the ball laughing and shouting. Of course no one remained on first to catch the ball. We had to remind the hitter to run to first base, and the kids would flutter around second jostling for the ball. Someone would emerge from the six-year old scrum with the ball, but of course she had no one to throw it to at first. All the parents laughed, and as coach I swallowed my irritation and could only smile as all the practice we had gone through disappeared in the thrill of actual play. Now that was fun! That is sport. The joy, thrill and enjoyment of moving, learning, acting together grounds the fun of sport.

I don’t think the football team meant fun as in funny where people tell jokes or do hilarious and silly things that make us laugh. Laughter is an aspect of fun, but it narrows the concept to a particular aspect of fun. In the origins of the word this refers to fun as a form of hoax or silliness but the other fun suggests looseness and enjoyment.

I believe the football team meant, “we need to play loose; we need to play with abandon and experience the ferocious joy that lead them into the sport to begin with.” To have fun empowers athletes to commit and act upon their trained experience and fully perform without holding back, second-guessing or hesitating. Having fun reinforces and supports all the habits of mind and body that players develop. Neurologically when a person is unconsciously engrossed in an activity that engages and satisfies them, their brain lights up in a very different way than when they are worried or hesitating or thinking about what they are supposed to do.

The counterpoint would be the reminder that so many coaches and players will tell you that the NFL means the “No Fun League,” just ask Bill Belichick.

When a player is NOT having fun; they are playing tight. The tightness degrades cognate and physical efficiency and subverts trained habits. They may be thinking too hard about what they are doing; this act of thinking slows them down and complicates reactions. These nanosecond gaps give a competitor a significant advantage in challenging that player. An athlete might be trying to remember the correct response or the options that they have. Either way, it wastes time and reaction giving opponents significant advantages. Worse, when a player plays tight and worries and think it undercuts speed and confuses pattern recognition.

Often the thinking revolves around judging and assessing oneself. The slightest mistake or the concern over making a mistake leads to hesitation or misguided attempts to change on the fly undercutting efficiency of response even more.

Another variation will be when a player is constantly looking over their shoulder to the coach. They feel judged and evaluated, which they are, but they become so fixated upon what the coach might be thinking that they sacrifice their own training and reactions and lose speed and performance efficiency. Even when they may be learning to internalize a coach’s schemes or learn better ways to perform, this transition takes time, hurts performance and slows them down.

When a player is not having fun; they play worried. They hesitate; a hitch develops in their swing or throw or hit. Too much second-guessing spins out into tinkering in the middle of a game and what might become a singular failure turns into a self-reinforced slump. This attitude gets contagious as others pick it up or adjust because they cannot trust the slumping player, then they get out of sync or they have to think because the pattern training falters because the other play is not performing.

Psychologists speak of the moments of flow when a person literally lives the skill. They lose track of time but their mind, body, and emotions converge upon execution of what they are doing. This moment exists for all of us in any endeavor. When an athlete enters “a zone,” we mean they are experiencing flow.

Achieving flow and high performance especially under conditions of stress and competitive counters is allied with having fun. Fun links high performance, neurological efficiency and speed and efficiency of pattern recognition and action. Fun buttresses playing loose, trusting preparation and training and the satisfaction that derives from a job well done.

When the Seattle Marines turned around their awful 2012 season, Kyle Seager their young third baseman talked about a basic truth of performance, "We're loose....any time you're not stressing and not tight, you are going to play the best you can." 

The Washington players were right; having fun matters to perform well and reach your highest potential.