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Breaking Away
by Dave
Thursday, June 19, 2008
I think I receive as many questions having to do with attitude than just about anything else. Usually it goes something like "My daughter is a really good player. She is a pitcher who also plays ... She has always loved the game but now I have trouble getting her to practice. When I can get her to practice, she doesn't practice hard. I go out of my way to make myself available to go out to the fields and hit grounders and flyballs, to pitch her batting practice or take her to the cages, or to catch her pitching practice. We bite the bullet just to afford her regular lessons. She's a very good player but she could be better. I think maybe we are wasting our time, effort, and money to try to pound a round peg into a square hole. Can you offer any guidance or advice?" My reply is, "I wish I could help you with that but I can't. If you find someone who can, please give me their name and contact information."
Here is my situation: I have a couple daughters who pitch and are decent ballplayers. The older one has physical strength which could lead her to find a pretty good deal of success in this game. She has been provided some very good pitching instruction. As a result, she's a pretty good pitcher but hasn't been invited to play for Team USA yet. If I've ever given you the impression that she's the greatest thing since the yellow ball, I've misled you. She's good but she's not all that.
When she practices, she improves quite a bit. She has 6 good pitches if we include the fastball. Practicing gives her pretty darn good command. Practicing gives her better speed and movement too. If I could put the fire in her belly and make her want to practice every day, she would be a very good pitcher.
When she practices, she gets high on practicing. That is, when I get her to throw, she really enjoys it. Her mood improves immediately. She, the girl who doesn't bother to tell us when she gets a 100 on a school test or an A for the marking period, actually becomes talkative, smiles, wants to be friends again. She becomes more than a good pitcher during practices. She becomes a human being.
The trouble is the initial push to get her away from the computer, Wii and cellphone, is a very difficult push. We've tried everything in our dysfunctional arsenal, threatened to take away the electronics, threatened to stop playing travel ball, threatened to halt the pitching lessons, etc. We've searched and searched for anything we can find that will get her motivated to want to practice more, and with more effort, but nothing seems to work. The only way she'll practice is if I ask her to do it and then get mad when she wants to push it off until later. the only way I can get her to really work is to find something that motivates her like losing a game. But what motivates her today will not motivate her tomorrow. I have to keep looking and looking for things to get her to work really hard. She's become too comfortable with practicing at a certain level.
It isn't that she never practices, she does. In fact, she generally gets about a total of four sessions in per week. And long ago I made it clear that I would not answer questions like "how long are we going to throw for" or "how many more pitches do you want me to throw." We have a policy which is that if those questions are asked, practice is over right there on the spot.
The sessions usually last about an hour. I try to gauge the degree to which she is genuinely tired from pitching a lot of innings in games or from genuinely working hard at one of her physical training sessions. There are times when we go to our pitching dungeon with the idea that after one half hour we are done. Then there are times when I would like to have her pitch until she drops. Many times we go longer than I plan because we haven't finished working through all the pitches or because one pitch needs more today than usual. Since the initial discussions regarding her not asking me when this practice is over, she's pretty good about keeping on point throughout these workouts which average between 100 and 200 pitches. That's not the problem.
The way I view practicing for any sport is, I believe you must exert at least *95% of game effort in order to get better. There's nothing magical about *95%. It's really just a number I picked out of the air but I think you can understand what I'm saying. If you disagree with *95% or any other number I use here, change it. We don't disagree in principle. Our numbers are just out of sync.
Further, I believe that any practice which is done at let's say 75% to 95% is a holding pattern. You're not going to get better but you will keep the skills you currently have. Less than that level of effort and all you are doing is wasting time and fooling yourself. You've got to raise your level higher if you want to get even maintain your skills.
To me, the way to get really good is to find a way to bring your game level of effort to the practice session and to increase the number of practice sessions at which you bring your best effort. If your game effort is called a 200 and your practice effort 180, bringing your practice effort up to say 185 will result in your game level being made into maybe 210. If you were able to say bring it to 200 in practice sessions, your game would go up to 225. From there, if you could bring your practice to 225, your games would jump to 250. And so on.
Are you with me? Do you understand what I'm getting at?
Another point I want to make is when kids start out at some activity, everything is new and difficult. They have to expend full effort in order to do the thing right. In sports, maybe in everything, I follow what I call a "three year rule" which basically says, you make regular, routine improvements for the first three years you do something just by working at your skills, regardless of the real effort level. What I mean is, the first three years a kid tries pitching, goes to batting lessons, or just plays softball, she will improve regularly through ordinary effort. After about three years, she has become a pretty good player, and after that, the only way she's going to make real improvements is through bringing the effort level to practice sessions.
The three year rule is not something I invented. It is something given to me by a coach when I was around 13. He said that whenever you do something new for three years, you will find yourself becoming very competent towards the end of the three years. You'll know your way around the block. You'll be able to discuss things involved in the activity. But you won;t get any better unless you drive yourself at that point and, at the same time, you'll also learn how to really dog it through workouts.
The three year rule is kind of a catch-22. You;ve earned a level of competence which provides you probably more enjoyment than you had at any time since you started. Now you need to turn it on, if you want to get better. But now you really now how to get through workouts without really putting anything out.
This is the point at which I find myself with my daughters. They've been doing this for longer than 3 years. But they know how to get through workouts without really pouring themselves into it. They have reached a plateau and the only way over it involves losing the dog it work ethic.
It's not just my kids. Every kid I have ever coached in any sport follows this pattern. The kid who is hardest to motivate is the kid who has been doing it for three or more years. You can try to push them but they don;t generally budge.
And it isn't anything to do with age. It doesn;t matter if I'm working with a kid aged 4 or 14. If this all is new to say a 14 year old, I have no problem pushing her to the next level. But give me a 9 year old who has been playing a sport for 3 years and I know there are going to be issues.
Just about any parent of a pitcher knows what I'm talking about. She used to do everything I told her and do it with a lot of effort. Now she gives me trouble about practicing her stuff and even when she does practice, the effort is just not there. She's not getting better, or at least not getting better at the rate I want to see.
Now, I don;t have any answers for the problem. I do believe I have identified it in a way which most people can understand. But I do not sit her with the idea that I have the answer which will solve everyone's problem of this nature. Instead, what I do believe I have are some tips which might help you break through the plateau.
First of all, think about how you were when you got to a similar point in some activity. It may not have been softball or baseball. It may not have been even sports related. But with something in your life, you most likely began it with no knowledge or skill set, worked at it for a couple years, attained a level of competence, and then got somewhat bored or lacked motivation to really improve yourself. Hopefully, at some point, you refound your mojo and got busy again. What I want you to do is get real introspective and try to remember how you were able to motivate yourself anew. Maybe it was some external event like a loss to a rival, a work raise somebody else got, or an inspirational speech you attended by someone in your field of endeavor. Maybe it was a realization which struck you like lightning. I do not know all the possible things which may have motivated you but I want you to figure that out.
Then think about times when you were unable to get out of a rut or overcome a plateau. What happened to your sense of self, your confidence, your life, when you sat at some point for a long time? How did your brain react to it? If you could avoid that in the future, would you? Was that enough to get you over the hump or was something else required.
Now picture your child and know that their mental makeup is not all that different from yours. Understand that, in an experiential sense, they don't know what you know. They do not fully appreciate that a superstar like Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods routinely pushes themselves beyond their pain threshhold. They don't understand that Jordan brought his game to practices. They don't understand that when you sit still and take a break while you are firmly on some plateau, you may never be able to get off it.
One of the tricks I think which helps people overcome plateaus is interaction with others, particularly good motivators. This is the chief attribute of a really good coach, whether at the professional, collegiate, high school, or youth sports level. The really good coach is the one who thrives in circumstances in which their primary work involves motivating others.
We see this sort of person in Vince Lombardi or Bill Parcells in football, Phil Jackson, the late Jim Valvano, or Pat Summit in basketball, Sue Enquist or Mike Candrea in softball. These folks may be very knowledgeable in mechanical stuff, may really know their games and how to make their teams do great plays to win games. But more than anything else, they are outstanding motivators who not only can help their teams do the mechanical things but also teach their charges how to be motivated and what it takes to play at the highest levels.
You can disagree with me that these people are primarily motivators, if you like. But when they retire from their sports and want to do something else, more often than not what they end up doing is motivational speeches. And there is high demand for these folks to come talk to business people, government employees, etc. precisely because what they have to say in this regard is extremely valuable.
To take this a bit further, I think many of us fall into a parental trap with respect to our kids' sports careers. At early stages, we recognize that the kid needs instruction and practice. The kid most definitely does not recognize this. So we set to pushing our children to do some kind of practicing in the same way that we supervise them and make sure all their homework is done. They are too intellectually immature to take care of business or to recognize that if they skip a homework assignment or whatever, things are only going to get much more difficult. Young kids very seldom, if ever, are self-driven.
We raise these kids up from the time they can't pick up their heads to the day they start getting speeding tickets or sit down with some guy with 50 years experience to tell him how he should run his business ... at a $400 per hour rate. We teach them to walk and to speak, to eat with a spoon or fork, to keep their fingers our of electrical sockets, to not be afraid of flies, to swing a bat.
Other aspects of life have rights of passage which tell us when to pull back some, if not completely. High school graduation lets us know that our kid has arrived at the point at which he or she must get a job or head off to school in a place at which we can't adequately tell them how to deal with all the dangers they may encounter. Marriage tells moms they aren't the most important woman in a boy's life and dad's that they can no longer threaten to shoot the boy driving the car with your daughter riding in it if he goes one mph above the speed limit. Softball has no rights of passage at which it is abundantly clear for dad and mom to move away from the dugout for good and just let her take care of herself.
I've seen parents of 18 year olds say in sugar coated voices, "Here you go baby doll, her's your power bar and some water, now eat it and drink up, you don't want to faint." I've also seen parents of 8 year olds pull up to tournaments and say, "here's a jug of water, a sandwich and five dolalrs you can spend at the snack bar. If I'm not here at the end of your last game, call me on your cell phione and I'll be here within a half hour. Stay with coach Bob, if I'm not here. If he has to leave, stay at the snackbar." Someplace between these two extremes is the optimal time to let go some.
Understand that I'm trying to discuss how to get a kid 10 - 14 years old to overcome plateaus by being self-motivated and I've digressed into a discussion about when to stop treating your child like a, um, child. The reason I've gotten to this spot is because I think the two seemingly different things are related. It is their game and they are the ones who really do the practicing. If they are going to get better, they need to find motivation from within or without. We cannot give them that though we certainly can and do try. But in the end, they need to fucntion outside our purview and find their own motivation. Otherwise, we are truly living vicariously through our kids.
I think it is fair to say that every year at a number of colleges, some kids return home, relinquishing their scholarships in the process, and evirtually ending their careers because they are incapable of finding motivation within themselves to overcome some hurdle, some plateau. One thing a kid can get out of sports, if we let them, is a certain level of self-confidence and competence which prepares them for that inevitable time when they are going to be truly on their own. Eventually they are going to be on a job, working on a school project, or p-laying for some coach in a situation in which our input is not merely discouraged, but rather completely forbidden. At that point, the kid who has been coached completely by the parent, who has never learned to go out their on their own, is at a decided disadvantage.
So, where I have come to with this issue of how to get your darling daughter motivated to practice and pratice hard so she can improve and overcome a plateau, is teaching the kid to be self-motivated and self-sufficient, to break away from taking care of everything, to allow her to fail of her own lack of effort. It isn;t an easy thing to do. And we don;t just throw her into the swimming pool and hope that she learns to swim before she begins gulping water and falling like a stone to the bottom of the deep-end. We have to talk to her and explain what it is we are doing and what it is she should begin doing. Otherwise we fail as parents.
Once I was at a clinic with loads of kids of varying talent levels around. A very smart father of a very gifted ball player struck up a conversation with me. Somehow he brought the subject around to issues of coaching your kids. He said, "At some point you can't coach your kid any more. At some point, if she is to progress as a ballplayer, you have to let her be coached by other people. She needs to learn to deal with other people including some she has never met before. She needs to break away from you and that's hard to do. If she doesn't break away from you, she'll never grow up in this game. She knows that. &mnbsp; You know that. But its hard for her to do. And if you hinder the process or if you put up obstacles to her breaking away, she won't be able to do it. She doesn't want to hurt your feelings. You have to let her know that its OK, really OK."
So that's my advice piece for the day. Having trouble getting your kid to practice? Having trouble getting your kid to practice hard? Don't make her. Let her make herself work. All you can do is try to explain the way things work in the real world. That other kid over there, she works really hard at her game. If she continues to do it and you continue to sleep through your limited workouts, she is definitely going to get better than you. You have to decide for yourself how much or little you are going to practice. I'm here to catch for you anytime you want. But please don't waste my time.
*95% = Originally this number was posted at 75% but I got some pushback on that. please understand that the number is drawn out of thin air. It is a concrete, objective way of expressing something which is neither concrete nor susceptible to objective measurement.
We Americans are fond of saying that you have to give 110%. But, honestly, that's just not possible. If you have 100 of something to give, you might be able to give 100 but you are incapable of giving 110.
Further, I sincerely doubt that anyone ever gives 100% while doing anything. If you gave absolutely everything you had on say a pitch or in a run, at the end of the line, you should be collapsed. I don't mean you would be on the ground with a smile on your face, knowing that you gave everything you had. I mean, you would be on the ground in pain, trying with all your remaining might to stay alive. In truth, nobody ever gives anything near a real 100%. They simply give what the effort requires or something short of that.
Most of what I know about training comes from a completely unrelated sport, swimming. Back in my youth, baseball and softball players never worked nearly as hard as they do today. Runners, swimmers, wrestlers and others trained in a serious fashion using scientifically proven techniques. Now just about everybody does that.
In a swimming training regimen, you usually overwork for much of the season and then gradually come down in something called a taper in which you taper off the distance and work towards developing fast-twitch muscles. But say you swam 100 yards of some event in 50 seconds during a race. You might, for part of the practice, work a sequence of 10 times 100 yards in which you try to repeat your sprint at an average time of under one minute with 5 to 15 seconds between sprints. This is, to my knowledge, one of the ways in which sprinters in all types of sports work out. And to me, this represents a 75% effort level. That's really where the 75% came from.
I have gone ahead and changed 75% to 95% so as to avoid further push back. But I don't really mean 95%. The numbers are unimportant.
So, please don't get hung up on numbers. The concept is there is an effort level associated with games and a different one with practice. I don't care who you are, you just cannot get the adrenaline flowing in practice that you can in games. But the idea is to bring your practices to as close to your game level as possible. If you don't, if you learn to dog it, you will never see the amount of improvement you are seeking and this will make your practices mostly a waste of time, your own and that of whomever is coaching you.Labels: parenting, practice
 
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