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Practice Makes Perfect?

May 19, 2013

For years, leaders of educational athletics have been critical of sports specialization, citing the physical, emotional and financial price that is often paid by young people and their families as young athletes (or their parents) chase unrealistic dreams.  The weight of evidence I’ve seen has made me conclude that sports specialization is good for some, but a multi-sport experience is better for most young people.

Recently I’ve read about a new challenge to the sports specialization myth.  It’s called “interleaving.”  It posits that “mixing things up” is a better way to train; that brains and muscles get a better workout by mixing tasks.

This is getting national attention at thedanplan.com which chronicles a 30-something commercial photographer, Dan McLaughlin, who quit his job in Oregon with the goal of becoming a top-level professional golfer.  He had read in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers that 10,000 hours of practice would gain him international expertise.

Along the way on this quixotic journey, Dan McLaughlin not only has been testing the 10,000-hour theory, he’s been testing interleaving – mixing lengths of putts during putting practice, mixing different types of shots on the driving range, etc.

Time magazine reported in April that this has the attention of UCLA’s Learning and Forgetting Lab which is testing the Florida State University theory popularized by Gladwell, and is searching for “the biological sweet spot.”

FYI:  McLaughlin has not yet qualified for the PGA tour.  But on the other hand, he still has about 4,000 practice hours to go.

In Others’ Words

August 22, 2014

I’ve read and heard multiple times – so I’ve come to believe it’s at least partly true – that one of the techniques that marketing departments or agencies use when developing campaigns to promote a product or service is to look at it from the consumer’s, customer’s or client’s perspective.

The point is often brought home that if management would use this technique as much as marketers, then management would be more effective and would label itself, rather than marketers, as the “creative team.” It chafes me to hear a CEO say he or she wants to know what “creative” has to say about a sponsorship initiative before the CEO will offer an opinion.

Thinking about what our customers want doesn’t require that leaders suspend their personal beliefs or reverse experience-based opinions. It merely asks that we look at things from a different and sometimes even opposite point of view. And to be truly revealing, it asks that we try to put into words where other people stand on a particular topic.

It asks us to actually try to describe what our customers see from where they stand and what they say they want. For example, in our work, it would ask administrators to think about and actually describe what coaches want, and vice versa. And it asks both coaches and administrators to think about and put into their own words what student-athletes want, and what their parents want.

This has been an ongoing part of my life, provoked I suppose by my marriage of 42 years to a woman whose political views often point 180 degrees from my own. And this approach has been especially enlightening on school sports’ most troublesome topics, some of which we are tackling at this time, like ...

  • Out-of-season coaching rules
  • Junior high/middle school programming
  • Health and safety mandates