Superbowl XLIII

Most people would say that Superbowl XLIII was an exciting game and largely well-played. Is that true?

How do casual fans evaluate success? Kurt Warner likely performed better than Ben Roethlisberger (112.3 to 92.3 passer ratings) and Larry Fitzgerald likely outplayed Santonio Holmes. Yet the Steelers’ performances will linger in the memories of the masses because they succeeded under pressure and created defining moments. A more arbitrary P.E.R. might have shown that the Cardinals played more consistently. If Arizona assesses their season properly and plugs the right holes, they have many building blocks for future success.

Why do teams play conservatively under pressure? It took the Cardinals three quarters to figure out that they should try a hurry-up offence. Hadn’t they learned that preparation can beat talent (the Patriots made adjustments and shut down the Greatest Show on Turf for fifty minutes during Superbowl XXXVI until the Rams overwhelmed them with volume and almost came back)? Why did the Steelers back-off and play a prevent defence? Normally they introduce multiple defensive adjustments as the game wears on. Coaches may have been affected by the pressure and let their players down.

Pressure can rush decisions and cause mentally weak players to fold. I’ve always felt that emphasizing Intensity and Quality in practice leads to excellent performance under pressure during games.

Pour toute la gloire du monde

Rafael Nadal finally beat Roger Federer at Wimbledon. After five consecutive championships, Roger relinquished the crown in five sets. Even McEnroe finally beat Borg in 1981. Nadal’s game has the sense of inevitability about it: his athleticism, the longer rallies, Federer’s unforced errors, the sense he gets the ball back (with a lot of power and spin) and the opponent screws up….

Eventualy, it all caught up to Federer. Had he taken advantage of his break points, he would have been in a much better position. But he needs to develop new strategies to face Nadal; it was always the Spaniard who had the championship points in their Wimbledon final. As the match wore on, Nadal’s focus was tenacious, Federer seemed to lose control at times.

Occasionally, Federer was deep in a rally and went for too much. He felt that he couldn’t win the point unless he did something extraordinary. I think he should try to break down the matches into smaller pieces, game by game, point by point. There are many little things that Federer could practice which would enhance his highly skilled game by adding a little more power.

Federer had a clear advantage in serve and volley and aces. I think it would benefit him to try to shorten points, with more angled serves, deeper backhands, more spin and slice shots. I think he could go to the net more and he shouldn’t run around his forehand as much. Federer’s number two in the world now but he’s not as far back as the public believes.

Performance under Pressure, Part IV

A C.I.S. observer suggested that the premature defeat of the Carleton Ravens at the Final 8 Tournament was partially due to the absence of tight games on the Ravens’ schedule. I disagree, specifically and generally speaking.

Although Carleton did not execute well during the last possessions of both regulation and overtime, inexperience did not lead to this poor performance. The team was comprised of largely juniors and seniors who had played close games together throughout the previous seasons. During their run of five consecutive championships, the Ravens had defeated Brandon, U.P.E.I., Guelph, St. F.X., and Ottawa by five points or less. Forty percent of the starting line-up belonged to the Canadian National Team Roster, including Aaron Doornekamp who was named National Player of the Year. In 2007, the Ravens won the title with a poor seed and in 2008 without Doornekamp on the court.

The team knew what to do, having played more than enough basketball at the high school, university, and club levels (to say nothing of the pick-up and practice courts). Like the shooter seeing the defender cheating on the curl who flares or the point guard perceiving the hedge who rejects the screen, the Ravens should have recognized what was happening. Since the final shot was taken by a player who was shooting 4 for 23 instead of a teammate playing better at the time, perhaps it was the coaches whose recognition was out of practice.

Any coach cannot and should not rely on the breaks of the game to temper a team. Practices should account for the majority of competitive situations faced by players. Every drill should be a competition against a benchmark, previous personal best, or another squad. The clock is mounted in the gym for a reason. There will be times when the Blues must overcome adversity and beat the buzzer or when the Whites will run their opponents off the court. The majority of these drills, games, and scrimmages will be close enough and all players - not just the starters - will learn how to handle pressure.

Carleton was fortunate that intrinsic motivation enhanced a number of these situations during their practices; the Ravens are tremendously proud and uncompromising. However any coach can create a similar training, practice, and game environment with extrinsic motivation.

Bemoaning the trip back from Lennoxville and blaming the fact that teams only play at Bishop’s once per year is short-sighted and ignores choices and habits. Teams play thirty games per season, a small percentage of the total time players and coaches are together. Which is ourselves, n’est-ce pas?

The Game

Put in uniform at six or seven, by the time a boy reaches the NHL, he is a veteran of close to 1,000 games-30-minute games, later 32-, then 45, finally 60-minute games, played more than : twice a week, more than seventy times a year between late September and late March. It is more games from a younger age, over a longer season than ever before. But it is less hockey than ever before. For, every time a twelve-year-old boy plays a 30-minute game, sharing the ice with teammates, he plays only about ten minutes. And ten minutes a game, anticipated and prepared for all day, traveled to and from, dressed and undressed for, means ten minutes of hockey a day, more than two days a week, more than seventy days a hockey season. And every day that a twelve-year-old plays only ten minutes, he doesn’t play two hours on a backyard rink, or longer on school or playground rinks during weekends and holidays.

It all has to do with the way we look at free time. Constantly preoccupied with time and keeping ourselves busy (we have come to answer the ritual question “How are you?” with what we apparently equate with good health, “Busy”), we treat non-school, non-sleeping or non-eating time, unbudgeted free time, with suspicion and no little fear. For, while it may offer opportunity to learn and do new things, we worry that the time we once spent reading, kicking a ball, or mindlessly coddling a puck might be used destructively, in front of TV, or “getting into trouble” in endless ways. So we organize free time, scheduling it into lessons - ballet, piano, French - into organizations, teams, and clubs, fragmenting it into impossible-to-be-boring segments, creating in ourselves a mental metabolism geared to moving on, making free time distinctly unfree.

It is in free time that the special player develops, not in the competitive expedience of games, in hour-long practices once a week, in mechanical devotion to packaged, processed, coaching manual, hockey-school skills. For while skills are necessary, setting out as they do the limits of anything, more is needed to transform those skills into something special. Mostly it is time unencumbered, unhurried, time of a different quality, more time, time to find wrong answers to find a few that are right; time to find your own right answers; time for skills to be practiced to set higher limits, to settle and assimilate and become fully and completely yours, to organize and combine with other skills comfortably and easily in some uniquely personal way, then to be set loose, trusted, to find new instinctive directions to take, to create.

But without such time a player is like a student cramming for exams. His skills are like answers memorized by his body, specific, limited to what is expected, random and separate, with no overviews to organize and bring them together. And for those times when more is demanded, when new unexpected circumstances come up, when answers are asked for things you’ve never learned, when you must intuit and piece together what you already know to find new answers, memorizing isn’t enough. It’s the difference between knowledge and understanding, between a super-achiever and a wise old man. And it’s the difference between a modern suburban player and a player like Lafleur.

For a special player has spent time with his game. On backyard rinks, in local arenas, in time alone and with others, time without short-cuts, he has seen many things, he has done many things, he has experienced the game. He understands it. There is scope and culture in his game. He is not a born player. What he has is not a gift, random and otherworldly, and unearned. There is surely something in his genetic make-up that allows him to be great, but just as surely there are others like him who fall short. He is, instead, a natural.

“Muscle memory” is a phrase physiologists sometimes use. It means that for many movements we make, our muscles move with no message from the brain telling them to move, that stored in the muscles is a learned capacity to move a certain way, and, given stimulus from the spinal cord, they move that way. We see a note on a sheet of music, our fingers move; no thought, no direction, and because one step of the transaction is eliminated - the information-message loop through the brain - we move faster as well.

When first learning a game, a player thinks through every step of what he’s doing, needing to direct his body the way he wants it to go. With practice, with repetition, movements get memorized, speeding up, growing surer, gradually becoming part of the muscle’s memory. The great player, having seen and done more things, more different and personal things, has in his muscles the memory of more notes, more combinations and patterns of notes, played in more different ways. Faced with a situation, his body responds. Faced with something more, something new, it finds an answer he didn’t know was there. He invents the game.

- Ken Dryden, The Game

North American athletes play far too often, which is the reason why other countries have closed the gap in international competition, whether on the ice or the hardwood. European basketball clubs practice twice daily, improving individual moves and shooting skills. Hockey clubs emphasize quickness and passing in extensive development programmes. Plus fitness.

United States and Canadian sports organizations devote excessive time to playing and traveling. As Dryden alluded, muscle memory falls by the wayside when seated in a car or on the bench. Why should a high school player go from league game to club tournament - barely playing - when he could practice on his own and receive one-on-one attention? Skilled coaches do their best work in small groups.

La joie de vivre, ou la joie de jouer, est trés importante. Ken Dryden mentioned this in 1980 and it has proven itself to be true repeatedly: in the 1988, 1998, 2004, and 2006 Olympics for starters, as Europeans and South Americans have entered the Association, as skilled post play is replaced by mere size and athleticism.

Fundamentals remain paramount. An athlete cannot succeed without outstanding performance factors and exceptional skills. A student-athlete cannot land a scholarship without grades. A country may have won in the past but they must continually improve the entire sport system to win in the future. After all, John Wooden was correct when he said that “it’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

Endings and Beginnings

Watching the bookends of two practices this week, I thought about work ethic and attention to detail. The middles may have been the most intense and focused practices one could imagine but since I didn’t see them I can’t write about them.

I thought about how one starts and finishes something is a tremendous barometer of how they will complete the whole. Consistency shouldn’t take days off. Execution counts and there’s a reason that coaches harp on it. I don’t think it bodes well when bigs eschew running in their lanes, littles neglect to read their defenders, and many stand around too much, perhaps looking for a place to happen.

When is it time to take things seriously? When the regular season begins? During the playoffs? Or earlier than everyone else, during off-season workouts? In my mind - at least for exceptional teams - the sooner, the better. Working hard matters; little things make a big difference. Play hard, play smart, play together; from the first practice of the year to the last game in the playoffs.

Harry Potter and Leadership

Harry Potter becomes a Quiddich coach in The Half-Blood Prince and does a decent job. I found his tryouts somewhat uninspiring; he should have brought a practice plan. Choosing his keeper based on five penalty shots - an extremely unreliable sample size - was asking for trouble, but it worked out in the end.

Before the first match, I thought Harry was setting up Weasley to be Rafael Palmeiro. However, tricking his keeper into thinking he had taken performance enhancing drugs was quite the ruse. A lot of sport is mental as opposed to physical; sensing that Ron was prone to negative self-talk, Harry employed his mental training skills to help that particular student-athlete play to the best of his abilities and deliver the win for his team.