GRAY THOMAS – TRANSFORMING BASKETBALL RESEARCH LEAD – EPISODE 962

Website – www.transformingbball.com

Email – gray@transforming-sports.com

Twitter/X – @GrayFThomas

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Gray Thomas is the Research Lead for Transforming Basketball.  Gray is also a PhD student at the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception Action in the Ecological Psychology program at the University of Connecticut.  Gray’s interests and expertise include applying the principles of ecological psychology to analyze basketball and drive skill acquisition. The aim of Transforming Basketball is to help individuals and organizations make sense of skill acquisition research across a number of domains within the basketball landscape. Transforming Basketball exists to break down the complexity of these ideas by bringing the theory to life in a highly practical manner that can be applied by coaches at all levels of the game.

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Get ready to take some notes as you listen to this episode with Gary Thomas, Research Lead at Transforming Basketball.

What We Discuss with Gray Thomas

• His original plan to become a lawyer
• Getting into the music profession promoting rap music in Oklahoma
•  “I immediately just started thinking how applicable it was to what I experienced on basketball teams or in pickup basketball.”
• Meeting Alex Sarama at a conference and building that relationship
• Traditional coaching vs. the Constraints Led Approach
• “We have these three interacting constraints at all times. There’s environmental constraints, there’s individual constraints and task constraints.”
• “You don’t just get the skill of shooting and then it’s done.”
• “You’re actually trying to diverge as much as possible, but arrive at the same destination.”
• “Maybe I don’t have to figure out everything like it’s a chess match and move every little piece, but really what I need to start training is my level of attention. Am I paying attention to the right things?”
• “You kind of have to stop trying to figure out the perfect thing and the exact right answer and actually sort of embrace the chaos and messiness of what’s actually going to happen.”
• “Empower the kids, the athletes in the teams that you’re working with to be able to respond when someone prepares to take away what they’re good at.”
• Why coaches should microdose adversity
• The changing definition of a good practice
• “What are you comfortable with letting go as a coach?”
• Instilling environments that are going to facilitate autonomy
• “The hardest habits to change are the ones where you don’t see the immediate results.”
• Ways to introduce pressure in practice
• “Even if you’re using the same road, the traffic’s going to be different every single day.”
• “You perceive to act and you act to perceive”
• Changing even tiny little things constantly in practice makes players more engaged
• “Variability is the major thing to lean on and the best place to start for anyone.”
• “Skill is, can you get the thing done in a variety of contexts, in a variety of ways.”
  
  

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THANKS, GRAY THOMAS

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TRANSCRIPT FOR GRAY THOMAS – TRANSFORMING BASKETBALL RESEARCH LEAD – EPISODE 962

[00:00:00] Mike Klinzing: Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast. It’s Mike Klinzing here with my co-host Jason Sunkle tonight. And we are pleased to be joined by Gray Thomas from Transforming Basketball, the research lead at Transforming Basketball. Let’s start with that. What’s research lead mean, Gray?

[00:00:18] Gray Thomas: Oh man, that’s a hell of a question, isn’t it?  Right off the jump. So that’s right. I’m that, and I’m also the director of strategy. So the research lead aspect of it is Alex and I are really interested in. There’s a lot of talk about the CLA and applying it to basketball. There’s not as much research done in that aspect. So we’ve wanted to kind of leverage my situation at UConn where I’m getting my PhD.

And try and just rattle off a bunch of studies so we can also have the empirical backing to what we’re talking about as well, because we know the science is there and it’s been shown in other sports more so than basketball. So we want to kind of take the lead on that. So that’s kind of my role is to come up with some of those ideas and really think deep and hard about the directions we can take on that front.

[00:01:00] Mike Klinzing: We are going to dive into all of that and what Gray is doing working with Alex Sarama at Transforming Basketball, but let’s start by going back in time, Gray. Give us a little idea of your background, sports as a kid. What kind of led you down this direction of being interested in sort of the, again, the mechanics, the science of sports?

[00:01:21] Gray Thomas: Yeah, so I have a very roundabout path to where I ended up. So I’m from Oklahoma City born and raised, was there for a very, very long time. I initially went to the University of Oklahoma and I was on a path to be a lawyer. I was pre law kind of a full, they had what’s known as like a classics major.

So it was kind of like philosophy and different things like that. They didn’t really have a pre law track and that was the one they told me to do. I always did debate and different things in high school. I also played varsity basketball and varsity baseball. I played some AAU basketball for a while as well.

I ran into the likes of people like Blake and Taylor Griffin, Epe Udo, and then Oklahoma quarterback legend, Heisman Trophy winner, Sam Bradford. He was a hell of a basketball player too. So, I realized pretty quickly that my future was not necessarily going to be in collegiate or professional sports as a player.

So, I went to the University of Oklahoma, planned on being a lawyer, and while I was there, I started a music blog and started promoting rap music in Oklahoma, which just sounds like an oxymoron. But we actually had a lot of success. We did like the first Kendrick Lamar show, magic Mac Miller, different things like that.

I’m actually in a Kendrick Lamar music video. I’m one of the dead white guys on the ground and rigor mortis. Yeah. And rigor mortis. So if you ever go back and watch that, that’s, that’s one of my claim claims to fame. So I started making some decent money doing that. Thought it was, there’s no

[00:02:45] Jason Sunkle: There’s no way Mike knows that song by Kendrick Lamar.  No, we’re talking to you. There’s zero chance. We’re talking 2011, you know. Mike, there’s no way. Right, Mike? I’m not wrong, right?

[00:02:55] Mike Klinzing: That post dates my rap. I go back to the, His rap goes to the 80s, 80s French Prince of Bel Air. That’s where he goes. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

But I, I’m, I’m not, yeah. Once my kids are born in 2004. That’s when my daughter was born. Oh yeah. You want to give, you want to give me pop culture references and music and whatever before 2004. I’m golden. You want to talk movies, TV shows, celebrities. Since 2004, I got nothing, man. I got nothing.

[00:03:24] Jason Sunkle: So Mike’s probably really enjoying the rebirth of Eminem because it’s going to be like the same exact album as 2001.There you go, Mike.

[00:03:34] Gray Thomas: Yeah, so that’s that actually started like going real well. I was making some money and I realized, Oh man, making money is really cool. I don’t really enjoy school that much anymore. And being a lawyer was one of those things that I had just kind of picked when I was like 12 years old and didn’t give it a second thought. And so I was kind of coming into myself and kind of finding these different passions. And so I managed a handful of artists from like Houston, Chicago, Oklahoma, and some different places for about six or seven years. We traveled a lot, did a lot of different things and Towards the end of it, I kind of found myself less personally fulfilled.

I kind of stagnated. I kind of noticed I had gone a while without reading anything. I felt like I hadn’t learned in a while. And so I kind of just I, I, I actually went to therapy for the first time in my life at like 29 years old and I found it to be kind of a really transformative experience. And there was a lot of reflection done on what I liked about my time with music, what I wanted to do, maybe moving forward.

And the common thread was I was always really, really interested in helping people and helping them get from like point A to point B with either like a creative project or whatever, what have you, right? So I don’t know if it was arrogance or ignorance, but during these therapy sessions, I thought, man, I think I could do this.

I think I could do what this guy in this room is doing right now and I would really like it. And so I went back to school to try and be a counselor. And I did not get into the counseling program because what happens when you leave your initial school with about 20 hours left your grades kind of fall off.

And so they weren’t too impressed with my undergrad. So I had to go back, finish that. I had like 20 hours left. I blitzed through a minor. I took my first psychology course when I was 30 years old. And so that was humbling, but also it was exactly what I was looking for. It was really inspiring. I loved hitting the books, getting back into reading.

I took statistics for the first time ever. And like I said, I didn’t get into the counseling master’s program. It was a pretty competitive program at University of Central Oklahoma, where I was trying to go and my statistics professor, she was the chair of the experimental program and she, we’d always had a good relationship and she just kind of saw something in me I don’t think I really saw at the time.

And so she took a chance on me and was like, Hey I know you, all you need is just to get in. So why don’t you just apply to the experimental program? You’re good enough. Just pay the application fee. You’ll get in do a semester, see what you think. And if it doesn’t go well and you want to transfer, you’re just going to be a semester behind your cohort, the rest of the people that you’ll be with for counseling, because you’ll easily be able to transfer over if you keep your grades up, which I kept my grades up. But that first semester during the experimental program, I had taken different higher level courses. So some cognition courses and different things like that.

And the statistics professor, the head of the experimental program, she also taught an advanced perception class. And she had kind of started feeding me these planting these little seeds for like dynamical systems theory and kind of a different approach than traditional cognitive science. I also started working for the FAA as a research support.

So I would help out with some literature reviews on, on projects that were looking at drones trying to regulate the airspace, airline safety and things like that. And that really just opened my eyes to what’s possible with research. You know, I ignorantly thought, Psychology was just therapy.

So I kind of had my brain cracked open in that sense and saw that there was a lot more opportunity to make money reading and learning, which was like exactly what I was looking for going back to those therapy days where I was a little bit unfulfilled at the beginning. So that opened some things up and the same I decided not to transfer to the counseling program and really stayed with the experimental track.

And my thesis at the time was around perspective memory, which is remembering to fulfill a current intention in the future. So kind of along the same lines of habits, but less frequently less frequently occurring, that is. So yeah, I wrote that thesis up was working on that for a while, and I was encouraged to apply a couple of different places.

I applied to Arizona State and UConn. UConn was able to offer five years funding. This was 2020 going into 2021. And Arizona state could only do one year. There was a lot of funding being cut at the time. So, you know no harm, no foul. I was like, all right. My girlfriend who was about to meet my fiance at the time, we made the decision who’s now my wife.

We made the decision to move to Connecticut and I didn’t really know what ecological psychology was. Until I got here and I’m actually at the only ecological psychology PhD program in the world. The only one where you can when they hand you the piece of paper that says you got your PhD, it says in psychological psychology.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that was kind of my roundabout way here. And then I immediately fell in love with kind of a different approach to everything. And I immediately just started thinking like how applicable it was to What I experienced on basketball teams or like pickup basketball and just how dynamic it was and all of these different things that really spoke to me in a non linear kind of non prescriptive way, I just immediately started thinking about how I could apply these things to sports.

And I’ve been here for three years now and just kind of started cobbling the pieces together, found people like Rob Gray, Alex Sarama and kind of found my tribe, so to speak. And it is just fueled a passion that I didn’t even really know was there, but the common through line was I’ve always wanted to help people and that goes hand in hand with skill acquisition and development.

[00:09:02] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, I think that fascination with learning, right, I think is something that when, and this is, I know that I’ve had this conversation with lots of people in my life and right now I’m teaching elementary school phys ed and I taught fifth grade for a while and I taught third grade for a while. So I’ve been doing it for 29 years.

And as Jason will attest. There are many days where I feel like I’m just about at the end of my line. I have a couple more years to go to be able to retire, but nonetheless, I think one of the things that I always find outside of my day to day is kind of like you, like I want to learn things and be around people that are pushing me to think in different ways.

And so I’m always looking for challenges, projects, interesting things to do, usually typically centered around. It usually comes back to basketball and sports for me. So hence, hence we’re in our sixth year and 900 and whatever 60th episode of a podcast that we kind of started out of, out of nowhere. So it’s you know, I can relate to all the things that you’re saying that kind of lead you down a certain path, which is all kind of fueled by.

Your desire to learn new things, your ambition, just to try to kind of challenge yourself. So I, I completely relate to that road that you’ve traveled on. And so as you get into this from an academic side, and then you start thinking about, okay, how does this apply to what I’m doing? As you said, in my everyday life, when I go up and I play pickup basketball, how are the things that I’m learning in an academic standpoint?

How does that impact You know, what you were doing when you’re playing pickup basketball. So give me, before we dive into the more science y part of it, just give me sort of the lay, the layman’s terms of like, okay, you’re out there playing. How do you, how did you think about what you were studying could apply to what you were doing on the pickup basketball court?

Just sort of the high level view of it.

[00:11:03] Gray Thomas: Yeah. So I think it’s funny, I started the sentencing, I think because I realized I tried to outthink my way in everything I was doing. I tried to think about what moves I was going to do I like if I got the ball or who I was going to pass to and where I was going to go before I would even let a situation play out.

So I’m like six four. About 250 now. I was a little lighter in high school, but I was always a big guy, but I had somewhat guard skills. I could shoot. I didn’t, I wasn’t explosive. I couldn’t really jump high. So I kind of had to learn to play a little bit differently than most of the people I was matched up in high school.

And people would always get really, really pissed at me for like fading away. They were, I was always told if you fade away, we’re going to pull you. If you shoot a three pointer and miss, we’re going to pull you. I remember a junior varsity game as a freshman, I hit three in a row. I missed the fourth one and they pulled me immediately.

And it was things like that where I was like, man, what the hell? Like, I guess there were times where I was like, I’m just not thinking about the game the right way. Or different things like that. And I realized in retrospect, I was looking back on it. I was doing what I was capable of and what the game gave me, right?

I couldn’t jump high. So what I would do is I would use my height and I have kind of long arms. So I would fade a little bit away and kind of kick my leg out, not full on Novitski, but just to create space in a different way, instead of vertical, kind of using a little bit more horizontal and using it that way.

So, I started noticing that that was actually a strength and I was leaning into those things in terms of the style that I played with. And then, again, I was just overthinking stuff and I would try and do specific things in advance, I would think about them in advance. And now I just kind of just it, it feels so much more freeing and it frees me up to not think, not plan as much you can think situationally, but if you’re going in there, like I’m going to dribble three times, do a spin move past this guy and then cut down, well, if you have a wide open lane, why would you do any of that, you know?

So I started just seeing it, it all opened up a little bit differently for me. And it kind of freed me up to be the player. I kind of always. Was even though that felt like I was swimming upstream back, back in the day. And now I realized I was doing what came kind of natural and how I saw the game.

[00:13:25] Mike Klinzing: It’s so funny because we’ve had so many discussions, Gray, on the podcast about the way that kids learn the game today in 2024 versus the way that someone like me, who’s 54 years old. So I learned the game in the late seventies. early 80s is when I’m growing up and learning the game of basketball. And I learned it by, not to say that I didn’t have coaches or that my dad didn’t show me how to shoot or whatever, that kind of thing.

But for the most part, I learned the game on my driveway, in my neighbor’s backyard, down at the park, just playing pickup basketball with people all different ages and that kind of thing. And so kids today. more often learn the game in sort of a, a way where they’re oftentimes with a trainer, they’re always with a coach.

There’s usually always a parent watching many times when they play games that they’ve almost never played a game where there’s not a scoreboard and officials and coaches sitting on the sidelines, which leads to a lot of kind of what you described, which is they’re sort of, I don’t know if being forced is the right way to say it, but they’re learning through a method of teaching where it’s like, okay, first you do this, then you do this and this goes here and you’ve got to step this way and you got to put your hand here and this is how we shoot and this and that. And I’m always so thankful that I grew up in the time that I did where it was much more, it was much more free flowing and it was much more experimentation.

I didn’t have somebody me and I didn’t have to worry about like who was filming and this and what were the results and who was going to put that on social media. It was just, you were just kind of learning the game and playing. And obviously there’s pluses and minuses to both different ways of growing up and learning the game.

What struck me when you talked about it was once you started to just kind of flow, for lack of a better way of saying it, you felt like the game came to you more than when you were trying to think through, okay, first I’ve got to do this, then I’m going to do that. And the game of basketball, along with many other sports are too dynamic of an environment for you to be able to kind of be that prescriptive, that prescriptive, if that makes sense.

[00:15:45] Gray Thomas: Totally, totally. And it’s funny you say that about how you grew up and on the driveway, So my little brother little brother, he’s 21 months younger than me. He was a stud but he was about five 11 135, 140 pounds soaking wet. He was Steve Nash and Jason Williams before. Yeah, not before, but while that was going on, he was the model for that had this long wingspan.

And so the way I kind of learned how to play the reason I had the guard skills that I did is because I had to learn how to dribble. Right. I could only bully him with my size for so long. And then his arms got long enough and he could jump and make it difficult for me. But if I tried to square up and dribble, he would just steal it.

He co-led the state of Oklahoma in assists one year. I mean, just a hell of a passer and he was just incredible at defense. So, I mean, I really had to learn how to put the ball on the ground and protect that thing which I was doing well outside the paint and all of these different things.

So I was doing all these different things at home. We would play for hours we, we actually went to Walmart one time and bought floodlights. Essentially, so we could keep playing at night and our parents would have to be like, you got, you got to come in now. And then I get to practice, we’d get to practice the next day and they would want him to play a completely different style cause he learned to be tough because he would have to, when he would drive in I’m a lot bigger than him and I would just knock the crap out of him but he was tough as nails. I learned how to play a little bit different style for big guys and then we’d get to practice the next day and it was like, okay, forget all that. You’re going to play a completely different style. And it just kind of felt like we were doubling back on and then still arriving at the things that we were good at when it came to game time.

[00:17:19] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. Somebody put you in a box, right? Like you’re a guard a hundred percent. You have to do this. You’re a big man, you have to do this. And I think that’s one of the things where the game has obviously evolved in ways where you don’t see that. I don’t think as much. What’s funny is I think you see it.

I think you see it more at the, yeah, I think you see it more honestly at the youth level where you’re like, Oh, here’s this big kid who’s 10 years old. We can’t have that kid dribbling. He’s got to just rebound and kick the ball out to our guard. Like I always laugh and I’ve been to so many tournaments where you’ll see like a team and big kid gets to rebound and.

Doesn’t immediately pass to a guard and takes one dribble. And all of a sudden the coach is jumping up and down screaming, don’t dribble, don’t dribble, get it to a guard. And you’re like, you’re like, this kid’s 10. Like, I mean, he might, he might be topped out. He might be topped out right now. Maybe he’s a five, nine fifth grader and that’s as tall as he’s ever going to get.

And he needs to learn to dribble. Yeah, right. Exactly. So it’s just I mean, there’s all those things that kind of go into it and it’s just It’s interesting when you think about what development looks like. And so let’s kind of dive into sort of when you took that idea of applying what you were learning academically to what you were experiencing playing pickup basketball.  When did you sort of formally make that connection? Yeah.

[00:18:47] Gray Thomas: So when it first all kind of clicked, I had been doing some work some research with interpersonal synchrony. So the synchrony between two people either during a conversation or during like a task. And typically during a joint action task, like say you and I were to pick up a bench and carry it across the room, we’re going to kind of reciprocally compensate our behaviors to like accomplish the goal.

So we may move or delay our movements in time to kind of Make sure we’re doing the thing efficiently or during a conversation. There’s a lot of give and take in terms of the flow of the conversation, but also in our body movements, they, they tend to align over time in a particular way. And I thought you see this with good basketball teams, right?

Like you see them almost in sync. You, I’m sure you all have seen the, the. Clips of like four guys that almost all make the same movement when they’re turning to run up and down the corridor, different things like that, you know? And so I started to kind of make some connection that was the first just light bulb moment of weight.

Some of this stuff can be applied to basketball or sports in general. This is really, really cool. And so that’s when I had just really dove down all, all sorts of the perception action podcast with Rob Gray. That was one that really blew things open for me to, I mean, to me, he was like the, my gateway to everything.

And so I actually had Rob come out and speak at UConn one time at our departmental workshop. And we connected and we had some great conversations and he had mentioned some different people that I should check out. And some of them were these guys at emergent movement company there.

They do a lot of really cool work. They’re more focused on football. They’ve done written some papers for like MMA and some different things like that. Well, they had this thing called the skill movement conference and it was last October, I think. And I saw Rob was on it. I saw Keith Davis was on it.

He was the guy who came up with the phrase ecological dynamics and a few other people. And so one I really wanted to connect with Rob. To Keith is somebody I just wanted to hear speak. I hadn’t ever attended any of his talks. I read some of his books and a lot of his papers, but I also saw that Alex Sarama was on there and I had kind of followed him on Twitter.

So when all these light bulbs went off along with like going down the Rob Gray rabbit hole and different things, I just, I searched ecological dynamics, ecological psychology, constraints, let approach basketball, all these different things. And I followed, I don’t know, probably like a hundred random people on Twitter, anybody that had it in their profile or was tweeting about it.

And Alex was one of those people. And over time, like I started unfollowing a bunch of those people cause I was like, Oh, they’re either using it wrong. They don’t know what it means. Yada, yada, yada. And then Alex is someone I had noticed. I was like, man, where’d this guy get his PhD, right? He knows his stuff.

This is really impressive. And I saw he was on that conference that I just mentioned. And so my entire goal honestly with that entire conference and I told Sean and Tyler, they’re the guys that put it on. This probably two weeks ago, they didn’t even know it. My entire goal was to connect with Alex somehow.

So the day he was supposed to present and that the conference started, I DM’d him probably 10 or 15 minutes before it all started and just sent him this really long direct message on Twitter, kind of introducing myself, letting him know what I was researching, where I was doing my research at. And all these things.

And he was so nice and he responded within like five minutes. I didn’t expect to hear from maybe even at all. And so he said, yeah, here’s my number. Let’s connect after some time. And he gave this amazing talk, talked about rate limiters and all of these incredible things and put it in just such, put all of these complex ideas and these, that go, go with these theories that not a lot of lay people understand and definitely not a lot of coaches that I had run into up to that point had even been talking about.

And the way he talked about it was so succinct and so clear. I was like, I have to follow up with this guy. So we hopped on the phone. Probably a week after that and he let me know kind of everything he had going on. And we probably talked for like an hour, hour and a half the first time we ever talked and then just really hit it off from there.

And it’s kind of been a show improved thing. We’ve done some consulting work with Brown university, which is only like an hour and a half not even an hour and a half from my house. And I told him when you’re down there, I’ll drive down there, meet up with you help, present do whatever I can.

And at that time he’d been sending me his book to kind of proofread work, workshop some ideas out and kind of nail the, some of the nitty gritty theory aspects out. And so we had really developed a good rapport and then just kind of, once we met in person really developed some good teamwork and back and forth.

And we kind of mapped out where we see the company going where we see basketball research, basketball coaching. The NBA and NCAA, all of these things, we, we just kind of have this awesome vision for it and want to really spearhead a lot of that and kind of corner our place in it as helping coaches understand these ideas.

Cause a lot of the times what you’ll see is people get information and they kind of hoard it and that’s something I really admired about Alex is he’s excellent. He’s an excellent science communicator. And, he shows his work a lot. And so that’s something I’ve tried to emulate and do a lot better on my own behalf.

So we really just hit it off. And we want to just give coaches and practitioners and educators the tools to understand this at a high level and take it and run with it not feel like they have to be little word that we say or do or anything like that, but really that we can kind of spearhead a little bit of this revolution in basketball and kind of just help people understand it.

[00:24:18] Mike Klinzing: I think one of the things that I’ve always been most impressed about with Alex and he came on the podcast for the first time, like four years ago. And right actually before he started working with Chris Oliver at Basketball Immersion and was starting to kind of get some of these ideas and figuring things out.

And then obviously over the last four years, he’s moved in this direction even further. And as you said, has really become someone who I feel like and when I had him on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and he talked and did just such a great job of explaining his book. But as you talked about, I think one of the most important things that he does is, yeah, he has the science behind it and the technical and making sure that people understand that there’s scientific underpinnings to what he does.

But then he turns around and says, okay, here’s the science underpinning of this theory, but then here’s what it looks like on the basketball court when you’re working with a player. And you’re a coach. And I think that’s one of the things that I love about the book. It’s one of the things that I love about what Alex does is he makes it practical in such a way that a coach can take an idea and be like, okay, I get what this is doing.

I get why. And now it’s something that I can implement with my team or with an individual player, whatever it might be. So let’s start for maybe somebody who’s jumping in and doesn’t know sort of what we’re even talking about. Let’s start with CLA, Constraints Led Approach. Just tell us, What that means and how it applies in the game of basketball.  And then we can dive into that and even more of it in more detail.

[00:25:55] Gray Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. So the constraints led approach is pretty amazing cause it’s kind of different than the traditional approach. And I think it’d be helpful to just outline what the traditional approach is and then talk about the CLA.

So the traditional approach kind of comes. The funny thing about all of this too the reason it’s called the traditional or dominant approach or whatever it is, it’s because it really stems from how we all, not even just coaches across the world, more or less how we’ve understood how we learn, how we process information.

So the dominant theory for a long time has been information processing theory. And to break that kind of down simply in its simplest terms is it essentially means that we take in raw sensory information. Mediate it internally with like reason, logic, all of these wonderful things that the supposed supercomputer brain does.

And then that drives the output, right? And so it’s like this linear kind of stage like process. And there’s been some different theories that have spawned from it. But that’s in its simplest terms. And so the idea with the traditional approach for coaching is that you’re able to take the information that you have within yourself as a coach, as an educator, whatever it may be, and you’re able to transmit that into someone else, so to speak, right?

So you can show them the way to do the thing. You can show them this perfect shooting form. You can show them all of the answers to a test or whatever. And as long as you give them the right information, then they’re going to understand how to do the thing regardless of context, right? It’s all on your ability to learn and process and then execute, right?

So it’s kind of agnostic to circumstance. Whereas the constraints led approach is this really beautiful model from Carl Newell and it stems from ecological dynamics. And ecological dynamics is basically ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory. And if you ask an ecological psychologist, they’ll say ecological psychology and ecological dynamics are the same thing.

So that’s the fun, awful. thing about academia and research side of things is they like to debate about terms which I, I try not to get lost up in that debate. But the constraints led approach stems from all of that. And it’s this beautiful model that says essentially we have these three interacting constraints at all times.

There’s environmental constraints, there’s individual constraints and task constraints. So you can think of environmental constraints as things like what’s the weather like. Are you playing home? If we’re talking basketball terms is it home or away? Is it a hostile crowd? Is it an empty gym?

Different stuff like that. Is it an old gym? You know, is it the crappy double rims that you’ll see at a park where if you, if you don’t swish it, you’re not going to make it those are kind of environmental constraints and individual constraints would be things like, Your height, your wingspan your ability to jump how tired you are, you know different levels like that and task constraints would be what’s the task at hand, right?

Are you on offense? Are you running a set? Are you? Try trying to drive to the lane. Are you trying to pass? You know, whatever the task may be, the ultimate task is to win the game, right? So there’s a bunch of sub tasks within that. So these three constraints are constantly interacting, right? And there’s not any real separation between the individual and their environment. So it takes a lot of that internal processing the emphasis on that. And it really shifts the focus to the environment and the individual as a system, right? Like, so instead of thinking like, Oh, the proper unit of analysis is the individual and how they think, how they process the game.

Are they made of the right stuff? Instead of worrying about all these underlying internal mechanisms, you can kind of liberate a player in that sense or a coach in that sense and start looking around more and go, what is it about these environmental circumstances interacting with this particular person that is leading the to this behavior, right?

Alex has this beautiful example in his book where he talks about you could have Steph, Giannis, and Jokic and their teammates all spaced in the same way. And a same late game situation, say there’s like 15 seconds on the clock and they’re all standing at probably five feet above the three point line and their teammates are completely spaced out, right?

Those three guys are going to do completely different things in that situation, even though. The spacing is the same, the situation is the same, but because their individual constraints are different you could even give them the same exact teammates, the same other four guys, and they’re still going to choose to do different things based off those interacting constraints being different for each one of them.

[00:30:24] Mike Klinzing: So interesting. When you start again, thinking about the different factors there that have an influence on the decisions that someone makes, right? And it all comes down to, as you said, you can put somebody in the exact same situation and they’re not going to react. Look, we’re all different, right? No matter, we’re talking basketball here, but it could just be as simple as walking down the street and different people are going to make different decisions based on who they are as a person.

And so It makes complete sense when you start thinking about it in that way. And it also, right, argues against sort of the cookie cutter approach of, again, I guess you would say traditional coaching of, Hey, we’re going to coach everybody the same way. And this is how we want everybody to do it.

Everybody’s going to react in the same fashion because we know that not everybody’s going to react in the same fashion. As you said, you can put two players. If I’m thinking about like a high school basketball team, I can put two players catching the ball in the exact same spot on the floor with the exact same four teammates in the exact same spot in our quote offense, whatever that might be.

And they’re going to choose to make a different decision based on again, whatever their individual. Constraints are maybe one kid’s a three point shooter. So they’re going to pull up and take the shot. Their kid can’t shoot a three. So they got to put the ball on the floor. Another kid really maybe is a big is catching the ball on the perimeter and they don’t have the ball skills to put it on the floor.

They can’t shoot it. So maybe they’re just going to catch it, look to move the ball to the next person so that it can keep the offense flowing, whatever it might be. And so you have to, I think from a practical standpoint, again, as a coach is you have to look at, okay, what are we trying to accomplish with.

This particular individual within that environment. So talk a little bit about how that can impact how someone might coach. An individual player. Again, if you can kind of take that really general scenario that I laid out and break it down a little bit further.

[00:32:19] Gray Thomas: Yeah. I mean, I think another thing to consider too is time, right?

Let’s use that same scenario with the same exact kids, but what happens the next year? You know, they’re taller, older what happens in five years? You know, they may be more physically fit. They may be stronger, more filled out, right? They may choose to pursue different options, right? So I think it’s really important to always kind of understand the context of what you’re coaching and understand that development is not a kind of discrete process, right?

Like, so, You don’t just get the skill of shooting and then it’s done. You don’t have to worry about it, right? Like it’s always going to change, right? And exposure to that situation, right? Like say that’s you over rely on a particular set or some free flowing option or a particular lineup too much overexposure to something and not being dynamic enough or creative enough.

People are going to have time to figure it out. They’re going to get more looks at it as opposed, and the idea with the traditional way of coaching would say that you kind of jam the system down any player, any team’s throat, right? Like you, you find this ideal system or this ideal movement, right?

You’re trying to converge. actually on the ideal one, whereas you know, the CLA and ecological dynamics would essentially say what you’re actually trying to do is diverge as much as possible, but arrive at the same destination, right? Like, so take as many different routes from point A to point B as you can, but as long as you arrive at point B what are, what are we really talking about here?

So it’s I think it, it’s hard for coaches to sometimes understand it. Let me back up. I don’t think it’s hard for coaches to understand it. I think the hard work is understanding that it is always going to change. So like we were talking before the pod about how, when you think you have certain things figured out, that’s when you realize you either don’t, or someone’s going to remind you that you don’t, right?

Like things are not always you’re not going to have something figured out for life or for one situation every single time, there’s always going to be a different counter. There’s going to be different circumstances either for the player, for the lineup, for the coach. Even you may be too close to something.

You may not be paying the level of attention that you think you are there’s so many factors that can go into it. So I think it is difficult sometimes to take a step back and realize like, Hey, maybe I don’t have to figure out everything. Like it’s a chess match and move every little piece, but really what I need to start training is my level of attention.

Am I paying attention to the right things? What’s the reason somebody who can usually get to the lane you know, Anytime they want. Why is that not happening this time? What changed from two weeks ago where they had like a five game streak where they were getting 10 points in the paint every time.

And now they’ve gone three games with barely even getting a bucket up there’s different things that contribute to it. And sometimes it’s external to the game different people have different stuff going on, but a lot of times it’s right there in the environment for you to pick out and kind of understand.

So I think preparing for those situations and doing that in practice is really and empowering, but also kind of an uneasy step to take when people are just trying this thing out, right? Because you kind of have to stop trying to figure out the perfect thing and the exact right answer and actually sort of embrace the chaos and messiness of what’s actually going to happen.

[00:35:47] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, that’s absolutely 100 percent right. And what Alex and I talked about when he was on is the need for coaches to spend a higher amount of time in preparing the practice environment. So when you’re putting together what you’re going to do in practice, you’re trying to create situations where players have to, again, to your point, make those decisions, choose their pathway to ultimately get to that same goal.

And so that’s the first part is that so often, I think that the traditional perception of a coach has been that they’re on the floor, something happens, the coach corrects a mistake or the coach points out what the player should have done. That’s kind of like the traditional way of coaching. What’d you see there?

Or why didn’t you see what I standing on the sideline as the coach? Why didn’t you see what I saw? And that coaching goes on, in the moment, in the practice. And I think a lot of what we’re talking about here is, you have to spend time in preparation for practice so that you design an environment so that the players can figure out the solution that, again, works for them.

And that solution is not going to be the same for every player. And then to your point that you just made, which is sometimes that feels like you’re giving up as a coach, you’re giving up that control, right? You’re giving up your practice. looking beautiful. You’re giving up where, man, look at how crispy are and look at how that everything’s flowing.

And it’s just, man, it looks beautiful. It doesn’t really translate to the game versus a practice like the one that you just described is one where there’s a lot of stuff going on. Not all of it looks pretty. It certainly doesn’t all look the same. And so as a coach, I have to be okay with that chaos, as you said, where the learning environment is messy, right? Because you want players pushing right up to that boundary of what they’re capable of doing. That’s where, that’s that zone of learning where you’re right up against you’re right up against your comfort zone. You’re, you’re right there pushing against it. And I think that, again, traditional coaching, And the way that a lot of people have done it in the past is, yeah, I prep for practice, but I’m also doing a lot of the talking, correcting, and hey, do this in practice, as opposed to spending a ton of time creating the right environment that induces players to learn, if that makes sense.

I think I’m getting at the right point that you’re also trying to make.

[00:38:29] Gray Thomas: No, you’re exactly right. It’s amazing that I actually moved to New England because I’m a huge Patriots fan, which I had no reason being in Oklahoma. That makes no sense at all. But Bill Belichick, right? The greatest coach ever.

He, Well, it would always say like, I don’t have a system, right? I look at my personnel and then I develop the system based around that. And what he was famous for in Super Bowls all the time, or in games, he would take away what the opponents did best, right? Because the way people are traditionally kind of training and practicing is they’re doing what they’re good at over and over and over again, and trying to refine that.

You know, it to, to these like nanoscales, which it’s great. Like, don’t get me wrong. Get better at things that you’re good at. Like it’s, it’s great to have like strengths. I’m not saying like, Oh don’t, don’t try and peek out at something. But what I’m saying is like, what happens when you have these beautiful practices that almost looks like a play rehearsal, right?

One, what’s your record after that practice? It doesn’t change, you know? So what, what’s it going to hurt if you’re having kind of a messy practice or something like that? And to you and Alex’s point, I completely agree. Kind of prepare for your practices like you do for your games and try and make it a little messy and embrace that chaos because you want to.

Empower the kids, the athletes in the teams that you’re working with to be able to respond when someone prepares to take away what they’re good at, right? Like, are they capable of making the read of, man, I just can’t get to the rack tonight, right? Like, I just cannot do it. I’m sure you all have been watching the playoffs.

So Oklahoma City, I’m a big Oklahoma City fan, obviously game four against Dallas they, they just were killing us and we needed Shai Gilgeous Alexander he gets to the rack as good as anyone in the game. I think he took one or two shots that entire game and he made, I think he went 11 from 14 for mid range he made the most mid range shots in the last five or six years.

And that’s because he read the game and saw what needed to happen. That’s obviously not ideal and something he wouldn’t want to replicate every single game. But what do you do? Like, how are your players going to respond when the other team is prepared to take away what you do best? Right. And creating these learning environments where they learn to find other solutions to achieve the ultimate goal, which is to win the game is exactly what you need to try and learn to do as a coach.

And I think that’s the other thing too is don’t. Ever think for a second, like as a coach that you’re not also learning in this process, you’re not always just giving out information, right? Like it should be a learning process for you to learning how your team responds, certain players response to certain situations how you respond in those situations.

Are you constantly going to the same kind of lineup? Are you constantly You know how do you react when a player gets into foul trouble? Do you let them figure it out? You know, are you quick to pull them out and try and move all these pieces? How often are you giving the players the autonomy to kind of figure things out for themselves?

And the reason I’ve been saying this phrase a lot is I’m a big believer in trying to microdose adversity, right? So if you think about it, if you have all these beautiful practices, everything’s going extremely well all the time these kids are going to be confident, right? What happens when they get slapped in the mouth a little bit during the game and it gets ugly and things aren’t going well, that’s a big jump from baseline to having to deal with adversity.

But if they’re used to these messy, chaotic environments, right, their tolerance for adversity is going to be higher. So it’s going to be less of a leap for them to have to deal with things.

[00:41:58] Mike Klinzing: It’s funny. So as you’re talking and saying that, what I’m picturing is I go back to my college basketball practices and we had an offense that we ran that we had a bunch of set plays that we called.

We ran them over and over and over again. My college coach had run them. He had been an assistant. So I played at Kent State and he had been an assistant at the University of Toledo and they had run some of the same stuff. So basically in our league, our coach, both as an assistant at Toledo and then at Kent, he’d been running these same plays for like 20 years.

So our opponents clearly knew what those, what those plays were. And they knew what was coming. And then in practice, obviously you’re playing against your second team or whatever. And so those guys know the plays that you’re trying to run. And I think about the number of times that we’d be running through and be doing something and we wouldn’t score.

Somebody would turn it over. There would be a play in. And I look back at it now through this lens. And you think, okay, really what we were given was sort of one solution, like, hey, run through the play. Here’s the, I mean, there were some options, obviously, like you could pass the ball here, pass the ball there.

But as far as like where you were supposed to move, those options were those options. And if you deviated from those options, you were going to lose. Your coach was very, very upset and got very, very angry as a result of that. And you think about now through this lens, like what those practices should have or could have looked like, where, Hey, this is sort of, I guess, the pattern that we’d like to have, you have to understand that if the defense is waiting for you on the other side of the screen, because they know that’s where you’re going to go and you don’t have any other option except to run right into them, then you’re not really going to have a very successful practice if that’s your standard for what a good practice looks like.

So it’s just, again, interesting to think back to an experience that I look at now and think, And there would have been so many different ways to approach it. Now, again, that’s whatever, 35 years ago now that I was going through that. So clearly the science of coaching has, right. I know it still happens. It definitely, it definitely still happens.

There’s no question about that, but it is interesting to think about what your perception as a coach is of. Of what’s a good practice, right? Like what’s a good practice? If I think if I took my college coach and said, Hey, what’s a good practice look like the definition that he would give compared to what you would give.  Oh yeah. Completely diametrically opposed. If that makes any sense.

[00:44:40] Gray Thomas: No, it totally does. And I think you keyed in on a very important component of it earlier when you were talking about, it’s a control thing, right? Like you want to be able to control every little outcome. And that stems from, However many different thingyou won’t want to bring up, but like one of them’s, you want to be right about how you view the game, how you view the game should be played or any number of things.

Right. And so putting these kids or these players in these situations and it going left and them trying to figure it out. And that ends up being right or against your better beliefs or different things. That’s an ego thing, right? Like how comfortable are you with letting go a little bit. And so to the control issue too.

I would rather someone have an hour long practice and it be hard, messy be ugly. People shoot 30, 40% in situations than a two hour rehearsal where everything just looks beautiful, right? And you’re ticking off all these boxes of a practice plan that you have. And so that’s another thing too, right?

Like, are you comfortable with relinquishing some control of the time too? You know, it’s okay to let these kids, these players have a little bit more time to themselves to recover, to be humans, right? But as long as they take advantage of the time that you have together and know that, Hey, it’s going to be tough.

It’s going to be work when we get here. And I don’t mean like run them into the ground. I mean, Hey, you’re not going, you may not see a lot of success. It’s going to be high rep stuff. We’re going to be working on things that you may not be particularly great at, but you’re going to walk out a better player than you were yesterday and at some point the learning will kick in depending on the rate of learning for each individual.

But a lot of people want to practice more, practice longer and try and cram all of these things in when it’s like, Hey, why don’t you just cut the time down, focus on a few things, And see where that takes you and just kind of relinquish control and see what these players are going to learn, you know what are you comfortable with letting go as a coach?

I think that is something I’ve thought about asking coaches before, but coming from the academic side of things, I always try and not come in an antagonistic way, but usually that’s, that’s where my mind goes is like, what, what are the first things that you’re willing to let go of? Because I think that’s where we need to start and just see, go ahead.

[00:47:00] Mike Klinzing: No, here’s what I would say to that I think the answer that most coaches would give you, at least from my experience talking to different coaches, as many as we have here on the podcast, is that younger coaches would probably tell you that they would want to have more control. And it’s the longer you coach and the more comfortable you are with who you are as a coach, the more those coaches have the ability to let go of lots of different things.

So maybe they start with giving more responsibility to their assistant coaches. At some point it becomes, hey, we don’t have to run this pattern over and over and over again as an offensive team. We’re playing maybe in a more free flowing structure. And that’s because again, one, a coach has to get comfortable with just who they are as a coach.

And a lot of times if you’re early in your career, you don’t really know yet who you are as a coach and sort of what you believe and how you how you’re going to coach. And then I think to your point earlier, just in terms of figuring yourself out as just a human being and wanting to prove yourself, right?

Like a lot of times you feel like I’m a young coach. I got to show everybody how smart I am, that this is my team. I got to show these guys that I know what I’m doing. And so there’s coaches that, again, are early in their career that you go to a practice and they’re talking nonstop. They’re correcting nonstop.

They’re doing things nonstop. And then you can be at another practice where there’s a coach who is spending more time, like you talked about, Bye. They’ve set up the environment and then they’re observing or they’re coaching with questions by asking players, Hey, what’d you see there? And what are some different possibilities that could have, could have also worked in this particular situation?

I do think that so much of it is a coach becoming comfortable in their own skin and understanding who they are. And then that’s when that opens up all these different avenues that we’re talking about.

[00:49:05] Gray Thomas: I completely agree. And I think you know, to kind of hammer another point home on this would be how as a coach, ask yourself, how much do you trust your team?

Do you trust that they’re going to show up and get things done? Or do you feel that you need to move them into every single position and teach them all of these things? You know, are you instilling environments that are going to facilitate autonomy? You know, and have, have them come in and they’re, they know they’re going to get to work.

They, but you also know that they’re going to do the things that they need to do to get better, right? And if you feel that you need to control every little tiny thing, then I would argue yes, I think it’s a big piece of figuring out who you are, but it’s also it’s a trust thing. Like how much do you trust your team to get it done?

And how much of that is a lack of trust either with them or with the environment that you’re creating for them.

[00:49:52] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. And then I think it also goes to the trust between the player and the coach in terms of being tolerant of quote unquote mistakes. Yep. Where if a player is playing or practicing in an environment where a mistake leads to Some type of punishment, that punishment could be as simple as just, hey, I’m, you’re not going to get as much playing time, or you’re going to get pulled out of this drill, or I’m going to yell at you or whatever it might be, or in a game situation, if I come in and I know when I make a mistake that I’m immediately going to be pulled out of the game, I’m not going to obviously play to my potential.

So the player has to trust that The coach is going to allow there to be mistakes. And on the other hand, the coach has to trust that, yeah, if the player makes mistakes, that they’re going to be learning from those mistakes and doing that by thinking and working hard and all that kind of stuff. And then I think there’s also a trust.

And I guess I look at it, this may be more from an individual player standpoint, but kind of a personal example. So my daughter, she’s going to be a freshman in high school and she’s at the end of her season this year, we started looking at her shot mechanics and she had one like little thing that I wanted to fix that caused her like, she was sort of rotating her hands so that at the point of release, she was shooting it with two hands instead of one.

And so we talked about it. We’re like, look, you’re pretty good shooting this way, but this is a pretty small tweak in your shot. And if we could fix it, You’re going to probably be a lot better, be a lot more consistent in the long run, but in the short run, you’re going to get worse and you have to be okay with getting worse.

And so my daughter will go and we’ll work on her shot. And she’ll say, that’s so bad. It’s so frustrating. Like I just can’t, I can’t make as many as I could before. And I just said, okay, well, let’s go back to the conversation that we had when we started this. And the conversation was, are you okay with Getting a little bit worse for a short period of time until that learning kicks in.

And in the long run, it’s going to end up making you better, but she has to trust. me that I’m telling her the right thing. And I have to trust that she’s working, even though as I’m her coach and I’m watching and she’s making less shots, it’s easy for me to say, Oh, maybe we should just stuck with what she was doing before.

So you kind of have to go back and revisit the why in order to kind of get you through those rough patches. I think it goes for coaches and teams too.

[00:52:25] Gray Thomas: No, a hundred percent. And it’s funny. So some of my research that isn’t related specifically to basketball at the moment, but I see obvious inroads to it has to do with habit formation.

And so, something that my advisor and I have talked about Dr. Alex Pax, I got, I have a question. A few good Alex’s in my life. She is just brilliant. And something that we’ve talked about is the hardest habits to change are the ones where you don’t see the immediate results, right? The ones that have these spacio temporal kind of deep occlusions between your intention and then the action and the effects of those outcomes, right?

If I want to lose weight and get in good shape. I could eat a perfect diet one day, go to the gym and have a wonderful workout step on the scale and not see a lick of difference. I could stare in the mirror and my body has not changed, right? So you have to have that trust that the work will pay off and it’s the consistency that matters and you’re not, it’s not always going to be perfect.

So you want to judge. Not necessarily the mistakes, but your response to those mistakes, right? Like, how are you going to respond to when things aren’t going well? Or it’s not as smooth as you thought it would be the road, right? Are you going to trust that the pot of gold is at the end of the rainbow, so to speak, or are you going to lean into what’s comfortable, right?

So again, it goes back to that comfort zone kind of. The more you’re willing to deal with adversity on a more frequent basis, it’s going to make it more tolerable in the long run when you have to face either higher amounts of it or you’re trying to change something that’s going to take some time.

[00:54:01] Mike Klinzing: All right, let me ask you this in relation to that micro dosing of adversity.

If you’re thinking about a basketball practice and I’m a coach and I want to add more adversity into my practices, what are some things that a coach could think about? Including into their practices. How would you approach that creating more adversity in your practices for the players to fight through?

[00:54:25] Gray Thomas: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. Pressure is always one and you can do that in all sorts of different ways, whether it’s putting a time clock. You know or a shot clock, you know playing unfairly, right? Like, so I’m a big fan of this and Alex and I’ve talked about this quite a bit. You can’t control the refs, right?

I think the thunder and like Mark Daignault have a good philosophy about this, right? Like that’s like complaining about the weather, like it’s going to happen. You don’t really have a lot of control over it, but what you can do is say it’s going really you’re scrimmaging up and down, like call it really, really unfairly for one side when, and see how they respond, do different things like that.

Bring in people to watch let let people come in and watch, tell them to act like an away crowd. Oh there, there’s all these different little things. People perform in many, many different ways when they’re watched, when there’s an audience and different things like that.

I think there’s a lot of room for creativity. playing really loud, obnoxious music. That sounds simple or silly, but see how they respond like make things difficult. I really do love the idea though of playing the role of the unfair referee. I think that’s, that’s, that’s great.

Just great. Or if somebody if there’s a side that’s kicking the other side’s butt, flip the score be like, no, you got to come back from this. You know, I don’t like how this is going. Just make it tough on them. All these little tiny different things tire them out beforehand, get all the conditioning done before practice, right?

See how they go when they’re tired. That’s not saying like, Hey, have a really high intensity practice after a lot of conditioning or anything like that. You don’t want anybody to get hurt, but you know, do different things to make it a little bit more difficult. You know, stop in the middle of it and have them take like a little math quiz, different things like that.

Make them think differently. Make it, make them think hard really shake up what they’re used to and make it difficult. You know, don’t let them just find what they love and their, their little comforts and kind of, kind of poke at them just a little bit. You know, you don’t have to be rude.

You don’t have to be mean, definitely. Like I’m not a bit, I’m not an advocate of yelling. Especially at kids, right? Like, don’t get me wrong. Like, you can jump on someone like whole accountability is different and it can take many, many different forms, but a lot of coaches yell just to yell, right?

So I think inducing pressure in, in all of these different kinds of way, or inducing fatigue practice at different times, right? Like make it inconvenient every now and then. I know some of that is a logistics problem with gyms and gym availability and, you know depending on the age group, like when people can practice but just change things up here and there.

Just, just shake, kind of shake the snow globe a little bit just to make it don’t let them know exactly what they’re getting into and exactly what it’s going to be like the second that they show up, right? They shouldn’t be able to go on autopilot throughout a practice.

[00:57:08] Mike Klinzing: I think that’s a great point is to take things off of autopilot.

And I think that when you, the more often you do some of those things that you just described, the better the reaction is going to be. If you only call and make official and you make, make the game officiated unfairly, if you only do that once a season, you’re probably really going to get people angry.

And they’re probably not going to like it for that particular time. But if, if that’s coming once every. seven days or it comes, people are going to start to be able to say, okay, look, we got to look, the thing coaches just flipped. We got to figure out how to how to fight this. And again, that goes to, is that, is that transferable?

Is that skill transferable to a game? And I think that the more often it happens, the more likely you are to acclimate yourself to that particular scenario. And then when you face it in real live action, you’re much more likely to be able to, to be able to handle it in that moment. And I think so often, and this is a point that obviously you and I have been talking about, but what I see is that the practice environment can get sterile.

And I love your comment there of going on autopilot and we’ve all been in situations where You can kind of, you’ve done it so many times and you know what’s coming next and you can kind of just. Go through the motions and you can get away with it and it looks fine, and boom, we move on. And did we really, did we really get better?

Yeah, and it’s when you’re intentional about what you’re doing, it starts with, again, I go back to that prep work as a coach, right? You have to be prepared with what you wanna do and then the why behind it, and then obviously. From a playing standpoint, if the players trust the coach, then they know that they’re going to put the work in and it may not always be pretty.

We know what coach’s intention are. He’s trying to get us better as individuals and as a team. And to me, it becomes all of us working together to get there, but yet we’re not just going down a road that is completely straight and flat. The road has turns, it has ups and downs. There’s all these different things along the way that are surprising, different, which helps us.

Ultimately to get to where we want to go, as opposed to just going down this flat, straight highway through the middle of the desert. We want to have all these twists and turns. Yep. And ups and downs. And that’s what really helps us to grow.

[00:59:35] Gray Thomas: Absolutely. And even if you’re using the same road, the traffic’s going to be different every single day.

Right. So True. It doesn’t. Very true. It doesn’t have to be this overly complex, like, Oh, I’m going to make it hard or really, really weird today. You know, an analogy I like all the time is make, make them brush their teeth with their left hand. You know what I mean? Like, that’s not hard. That’s not a hard thing.

I’m not saying literally do that. You know, that’s not a hard thing to do in theory. It’s like, yeah, we can all brush our teeth with our offhand, but it’s a little more difficult. You know, it’s something you have to think about just a second and you’ll probably be able to pick it up, but there’s nothing wrong with just switching things up to some degree.

And there’s all sorts of opportunities in a practice to be able to do that and that’s why it’s on the coach to really like take step back and start looking at your practices in that way. Look for those opportunities to kind of inject yourself into the practice, right?

That’s when you want to do it. You don’t want to be like, you need to shoot this perfect way or make this kind of pass in this situation every single time. You want to be able to step back Kind of let the environment see what behavior emerges and then kind of shake it up. Look for those different opportunities.

And that’s when you’re going to start realizing when you’re looking at the game like that, you’re going to actually open up your own creativity. Because if you can do that to your own team, guess what? You’re going to figure out how to do that to your opponents as well. You know? Absolutely. Yeah. No question.

[01:00:57] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. Yeah. No question.  No question about that. And I want to dive into this kind of. I think pretty well into talking about perception, action coupling, because being able to be an in game coach, right, is your ability to perceive what’s going on and then take an action in response to that. So just give people who maybe haven’t heard the term perception, action coupling, Give us an idea of what that term means.

And then we’ll dive a little bit more into it, both from a coaching and a playing perspective.

[01:01:25] Gray Thomas: Yeah. So again to go back to the like information processing thing, I always think it’s easier to kind of define the other thing that it’s compared to. And then I’ll talk about that. So essentially the idea is from information processing, it divides sensation, perception, and action.

So sensation is when you Get sensory information light to your eyes, audio audio waves to your ears. You know, electrical signals from haptic information from your skin, different things like that. So that’s sensory information. And then that goes to your brain where perception happens.

And that’s where that reason and logic and different things kind of make sense of this raw, ambiguous world. And then once you’ve made sense of whatever it is that’s happening, then you can act, right? Whereas perception action coupling and ecological psychology and ecological dynamics would say that it’s more of a kind of loop where you perceive to act and you act to perceive, right?

So if you want to see something across the room, you need to walk across the room to see it. And then once you walk across the room. That changes the information that you see, right? And so every which way you move and act in the world, it’s going to, there’s going to be new information generated that you’re perceiving, and that perception is going to guide your action and the action is going to influence your perception and so on and so forth.

So it’s like constantly tightly coupled and looped.

[01:02:55] Mike Klinzing: So when I think about this, It makes so much sense. It’s such a simple concept. And yet I think it’s one that over the course of the history of coaching, one that we haven’t necessarily always focused on. And I know that when you look at the situation, right, and you think about the game of basketball, it’s constantly, the pieces are constantly moving and shifting.

You’re constantly moving and shifting position. Your opponent is constantly shifting and moving position. Your teammates are constantly shifting and moving position. And as that’s happening, I have to be able to read and understand what’s happening and then make a decision of what do I do based on all those pieces moving.

And one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about, Gray, on the podcast with different people is how do you teach basketball IQ, which in. Essence is what we’re talking about in terms of, yeah, I mean, it’s, but that that’s exactly what we’re talking about here is how do you develop that ability to, to read the game?

How do you get to develop and be a passer the way that Luka can pass the ball or the way that Jokic can pass the ball where they read situations and they just, Boom. They know where the ball should go. They’re mapping the floor before they even get the ball in their hands. They know where guys are going.

They were able to read little cues of which way a defender is leaning. And then that allows them to make the counter move. And so, how can coaches give players more opportunities to do that within their practice setting? What’s a way for a coach to actually take this science and put their players in more situations that allow them to continue to build that feel, build that IQ?

[01:04:46] Gray Thomas: Absolutely. So I think the simplest way to, the simplest principle of this to lean on would be variability, right? Like, so varying things you can run the same activity and change where they’re standing where they start from what hand they start with what direction they’re facing who they’re on the court with, how many defenders there are, and Whatever it may be, always kind of have it varying a little bit.

So the way you get acclimated to this is by facing all of these different scenarios. And the science behind it too, is the higher, the more amount of variability. So Andy Bass he is the mental performance coordinator for the Pittsburgh Pirates. He has an excerpt in Alex’s book transforming basketball.

And he talks about this, how there’s the hypofrontality hypothesis, where the prefrontal cortex is where you’re like planning, decision making your metacognitive stuff like a lot of thinking is happening, right? And so when there’s less activity going on there, so like, like something you would see in like mindfulness meditation there are these particular brainwaves that are being, being fired.

And I think it’s alpha and beta. if it’s not alpha and beta, it’s alpha and gamma. Check the book out to be exactly sure because I don’t have my notes in front of me. But the thing is, those same brain waves are brain signals are being fired off when you’re forced to engage with variable training as well.

So when you’re not doing the same thing over and over, right? So to go back to the autopilot, If a player knows exactly what they’re going to be doing in an activity or a drill from the beginning to the end, and there’s nothing that’s going to be changing, they think about how you drive to work.

If you were to drive the same route every single day, it’s a lot easier to zone out and then you get to where you’re going. And you think, how the hell did I get here? Right? Like you can think about other things. Some people check their phones, they’re on their phones, all these, you can, you can kind of multitask because you’re on the autopilot.

So if you have variable practice environments, right? If you’re changing even tiny little things constantly, the player is inherently going to be more sensitive to the perceptual information that’s relevant to successful performance, right? So the same, again, the same brain signals are going to be firing that are in mindfulness meditation.

So there’s less activity in that prefrontal cortex. There’s less planning, less thinking, less decision. By decision making, I mean deliberate, you know pre planned decision making. Decision making happens, you know through actions. But the same kind of thing is happening when you’re forced to engage with variable environments because you have to be attuned to what’s going on in front of you to navigate the world, right?

So if you can switch up tiny little things here and there in an activity and put your players in all sorts of little nuance situations. And that’s not saying like you have to be the craziest crew, most creative coach in the world and come up with so many novel scenarios where they never do the same thing twice.

But it’s to say like, hey don’t let them just do the same thing five times in a row to where they could do it with their eyes closed make it so that they’re having to pay attention to what the heck is actually going on. So I would say like variability is the major thing to lean on and the best place to start for anyone.

And you can do this in very, very simple ways. And the more you start doing it, you’re going, you as a coach are actually training yourself in that same exact thing. So you’re going to pick up different spots to do it, different ways to do it. more nuanced, more complex ways to do it as well. So I think that is kind of it’s not a cure all, but it, it, if you’re going to do anything, I would say, start with that and just see, just see what happens because I kind of think that is like the gateway to everything else.

[01:08:24] Mike Klinzing: When you put that variability in, I think one of the things that I know in the limited amount of reading that I’ve done, the difference between someone who is able to perceive things and then act at a very high level. is they are reading the cues before the actual action takes place or the major action, let’s say, takes place.

So to go back to my example of Luka or Jokic holding the ball and making a move or, or, or reading a pass and people are like, well, how did they possibly see that opening that other players just don’t see. And my understanding of that is that what happens is, is that they put themselves in those positions so many times that they’re reading the small cues.

Is this defender leaning just slightly this way? Or if I take my eyes and look this direction, I can get that defender to shift. a half step, half step this way, and now I’ve created an opening where one previously didn’t exist, whereas the player who is less accomplished can’t see those things or anticipate what’s about to happen.

They only see what’s already there. They’re not seeing what’s about to develop. Is that, is that sort of the synopsis of the difference between a somebody who’s really perceiving this in the, as well as they can versus someone who’s a less, more of a novice, I guess.

[01:09:56] Gray Thomas: No, a hundred percent.  And that was actually a follow up. I was, I’m glad you touched on it. That’s something I wanted to kind of add is, I think the perceptual sensitivity piece of it a less skilled, less experienced person. It’s almost always going to be reactive instead of proactive, right? And so I think people get really caught up in how can we develop their ability to make the read right?

Like, and read it correctly. And sometimes what I think it’s lost in that is, how can you also develop their ability to create that opportunity, right? And there’s these little subtle things, like you said with Luka, whatever he may do with his eyes or his body, the way he shifts, you know what step he might take that shot he had over go bear where everybody was losing their mind.

People talked about a ton about how he likes to go left. He likes to go left and do that step back three. Well, he set it up and he saw that Rudy wasn’t giving him left. So he just kept dancing out there and then he went right and it was right there for him. And that’s not a prescribed thing.

He was taking what was given to him that. And so I think like that kind of perceptual sensitivity to the information that’s unfolding in front of you is only. possible when you are used to being engaged with these highly variable environments as opposed to relying on one move, one sequence of moves and kind of just hammering that over and over and over again.

[01:11:23] Mike Klinzing: Yeah. And it goes to, right, the variability versus, Hey, let’s do 20. Start at the top of the key, go to your left, cross over to your right, shoot a right handed layup. Let’s do that 20 times. And by the 20th time or whatever it may be, all of a sudden, Hey, this guy’s got it mastered. And we’re doing that day after day after day.

And yet the player has no ability to know when. to utilize those skills. And so it comes back to the honest truth is what really is skill. Is skill the ability to just do it when there’s nobody there? I mean, I think the argument is no, that is not skill. Skill is when you can take the physical movement and apply it in context and do it in a dynamic environment which is what’s required in the game, obviously.

[01:12:18] Gray Thomas: It’s consistency across contexts. And by consistency, I mean, consistency in outcome, not necessarily in movement or in, in execution and, but it’s funny if you ask people what skill is They’ll give you any number of answers.

And then when you kind of press them on it, they’re like, Oh, well I guess I don’t technically know they’ll try it like they’ll kind of default to like whatever technique is or whatever it may be. But really skill is, can you get the thing done in a variety of contexts, in a variety of ways.

And by thing, we mean the outcome I don’t care if it was, yeah. Three dribbles, you know behind the back whatever sequence you want to talk about. Did the ball go in the hole and how efficient were you when, when you, you did it as well. Right. Right. A guy who scores 20 points on 10 shots versus a guy who scores 20 points on 25 shots.

I’m going to say the guy who did it in 10 shots is more skilled.

[01:13:19] Mike Klinzing: Absolutely. And I think, right, the phrase that popped into my head when you talked about, Hey, you do all these moves and then you don’t make the shot. So the, the phrase is million dollar move, 10 cents shot, right? So it’s like, yeah, you can do all this stuff, but ultimately the goal is to put the ball in the basket.

Or I think about, When I’ve worked with players individually, or when I’ve worked with ball handlers on teams that I’ve coached, ball handlers have a tendency, especially in today’s era, where they’re spending a lot of time working with trainers and working out against cones, that everybody wants to go between their legs 17 times and show off all the moves they have, and my thing with people who are going to handle the ball is the best move you have is no move at all. If you can just go by somebody and put the ball in one hand and get by them, that’s the most efficient way to do it. And at most, At most it’s one move and go just because you can dribble between your legs 17 times.

That’s great. You’re not accomplishing ultimately the goal, which is to get past your defender and penetrate the defense and then see what happens from there. And then you got another decision to make, but it’s really an interesting way of sort of taking the one on zero or in the case of a team five on zero and making sure that you are always putting a player or a team in a situation that’s variable where there’s a defense and making it as game like as you possibly can so that you’re not just taking the physical execution of the technique but you’re also understanding how does that technique get applied during the game and to me that’s the secret sauce and again that goes back to I think What you talked about and what we had a little conversation about earlier is you have to, as a coach, you have to prep the environment for practice that helps your players to learn and it also helps you to learn as a coach and to me, those are the key things when we start talking about all this and we can get down into All the nitty gritty details.

But ultimately I think for me, it comes down to, you have to prep the environment to give the players the best opportunity to learn in a variable environment.

[01:15:37] Gray Thomas: Right. Absolutely. And are you okay with being wrong? And if you are wrong are you okay with adapting and adjusting on the fly?  Cause that’s what you want your players to do. So can you do it as a coach?

[01:15:51] Mike Klinzing: Yeah, well said. All right, Greg, before we get out, I want to ask you one final two part question. So when you look ahead over the next year or two, what do you see as being Your biggest challenge besides finishing your dissertation and getting your PhD.

I’m sure that’s challenge number one, but just what’s an idea of what’s something that you’re looking forward to as a challenge. And then number two, when you think about what you’re getting to do every day now, at this point in your life, what brings you the most joy? So your biggest challenge and your biggest joy.

[01:16:22] Gray Thomas: Man. Okay. I think it’s going, I can cop out here and say that they’re going to be the same thing. I have a kid on the way in November, so I think that that answers both of those.

[01:16:32] Mike Klinzing: Oh yeah, absolutely.

[01:16:35] Gray Thomas: So I think that’s actually going to be it. But let’s see biggest challenge, I think, aside from the dissertation stuff, I think Alex and I have done a lot of groundwork to kind of get this information out there, and I think there’s kind of a swell in the community that are really getting behind it, but there’s also been an increase in the resistance and understanding.

The dominant approach has been the dominant approach for a long time, for a long reason. And when there’s a machine behind something, there’s always going to be resistance and pushback. So I think the biggest challenge is going to be overcoming that resistance. And also I think there’s going to be people who try and co op the language in terms and ideas that don’t really get the theory or why it’s applied. So I think really being careful and intentional about that and really finding the right people to empower with these ideas and helping them get set up. And that can be, so we do a lot of consulting with NCAA programs some NBA teams here and there.

So really trying to find a way, I think the biggest challenge is going to find a way to scale it to where anybody can pick it up and feel like they’ve got the tools to go out and be a better coach, better leader, better teammate, better player. And because I think a lot of the initial stuff right now is really hammering out the jargon and saying why this is important and actually getting some of the research out that’s going to prove this and get some of that resistance to quiet down a little bit.

So that’s kind of a multitude of things, but I think if I were to put a bumper sticker on it, it would be scale it in a way that people can understand it and use it, but also back it up with the research to where the resistance will be a little bit less. So I think that’s going to be the biggest challenge.

And then what’s bringing me the most joy, honestly, like, I really, I love this kind of stuff. I love having conversations like long form conversations. I think it’s kind of a lost art. I think things are really distilled down into tweets and the posts into reels and all of these different things.

So since working with Alex, I’ve actually been able to do just a handful of different podcasts here and there. And that’s just been bringing me a lot of joy is to actually have a long form conversation with a lot of different people and work these ideas out you know, over time, because I think a lot of people can have a lot of canned responses and be prepared to say a thing that either sounds Catchy or smart or whatever have you but like actually fleshing out some ideas and then backtracking and being like, well, I guess that makes sense.

I really love the art of long form conversation and I’ve been able to have that a lot more. So I want to find different ways to continue to do that. In my life.

[01:19:26] Mike Klinzing: Well, I’m glad we were able to at least contribute to that joy in some small way. Really appreciate that.

[01:19:32] Gray Thomas: No, this is great, dude.This is great. I loved it. This is super fun for me.

[01:19:35] Mike Klinzing: Well, thanks. I appreciate it. And Gray, we cannot thank you enough for taking the time to, to jump on with us. Really appreciate the conversation again, to any coach who’s out there listening, take some of the ideas, go out and get Alex Sarama’s book, Transforming Basketball.

I think it will have a big impact on how you coach, how you think about coaching. And if nothing else, to go back to the very beginning of our conversation tonight, it will get you to at least think about what you’re doing and look for ways that you can grow and improve as a coach. So Gray, I thank you for all that tonight.

Really appreciate it. And to everyone out there, thanks for listening and we will catch you on our next episode. Thanks.