Relevant History

On training vs. competition in kids' sports

This fall I'm going to be a soccer ref. I played plenty of soccer in high school, and intramural soccer in college, but being a ref is a new thing. So this piece about the relative merits of training versus competition in kids' sports interested me:

You'd think a place that's called a "cutting-edge European talent factory" and that produces some of today’s elite soccer players would be a real soccer sweatshop—but you'd be wrong. At 12, Ajax kids train only three times a week and play only once on the weekend.... The Dutch want to protect their young players; we Americans want to play ours. If they're having fun, if they're winning, if they're improving, we say, why not let them play more? Especially if they're winning. We like to watch kids win.

But increasingly, the leagues that control the kinds of sports that are competitive at an international level, like hockey and soccer, are realizing that what's fun for the watching parent is not what creates top-level players, and that's creating a schism between the top and bottom levels of sport. Those young Dutch players spend practice time drilling, not competing.

So why does this approach work?

Because they're learning as individuals, not as a team, they don't even necessarily win games. Any reward the kids feel from play comes from their own, and their coaches', sense of their improvement—not from the scoreboard. It's a different way of considering sport.

It turns out that "kids find drilling and learning fun." Just as important for the long term, researchers have generated "a battery of statistics showing that a few years of more drills, more scrimmaging, and more learning resulted in improved play, fewer injuries and less burnout."

So why don't we do it? Blame the parents....

"As soon as a kid [in the U.S.] starts playing, he's got referrees on the field and parents watching in lawn chairs," says John Hackworth, a youth-development coordinator for Major League Soccer. "As he gets older, the game count just keeps increasing. It's counterproductive to learning and the No. 1 worst thing we do." But community-based youth soccer leagues, as Sokolove noted, are slow to change. The whole point of practicing, to the American mind, is to get out there and play the game.

[To the tune of Peter Gabriel, "Secret World," from the album Us (a 3-star song, imo).]

The secret to snowboarding is to get up more times than you fall down

We're spending the weekend at Incline Village, at a place owned by a friend of my wife's family. We haven't been skiing in a couple years, and it's always an adventure.

This year the kids both decided they wanted to try snowboarding. They were impressed by the snowboarders at the Olympics, and while they're pretty good skiiers, they're also young, so they have a good shot at learning new skills rapidly. (The neuroplasticity of kids never fails to impress me.)

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So this morning the kids and I rented boards (my wife, who's skiied for some time, saw this as an opportunity to do some more challenging runs free of children, and took off for the lifts) and took a lesson. After a couple hours of training, and another hour or so of snowboarding on their own, the kids both decided to go back to skis, and in short order were throwing themselves down the hills. I decided to stick it out, and see if I could actually learn how to do this.

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Part of the reason I wanted to keep going is that I'm not a great skiier, and didn't feel like I had a lot of embodied knowledge to undermine me. And after about half an hour, the two felt so different, I suspected I could go from one to the other without penalty. But mainly it was a challenge. In some ways, it's desperately counterintuitive: you keep your balance and control the board by leaning far to the front, which is different from many other sports I've done. With each run, I felt myself getting marginally better-- more comfortable going a little faster, better able to do the toe turns (which I figured out a lot faster than the heel turns, to my surprise-- it seemed to me that the latter should be a lot easier).

But I still kept falling down-- crashing out on heel turns that threw me on my back, catching an edge in a toe turn (less and less frequently), falling to keep from running into someone. After a certain point, my backside was really sore, my wrists were starting to complain, and my quads were killing me. But it became a point of pride to keep going.

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By the end of the day I was running pretty confidently. At one point I discovered, no kidding, that it helped to imagine Will Smith shouting "Aw Hell no!" when I was starting to wobble. And, while my shoulders are sore and I really don't enjoy sitting, I feel better than if I had switched to skis.

Perhaps I'm turning into a masochist, or maybe this is a sign of maturity, but I find I've reached a point in my life where the rewarding things are difficult, or have serious costs. But I find my capacity for doing hard stuff is going up proportionately. I'm better able to push through muscle fatigue when I'm lifting weights. I can be more mindful about how hunger and mental alertness are associated (food is turning into a narcotic, I'm afraid), and just stay away from food during the day, knowing that there's a significant upside that's worth the cost.

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You have to accept falling down a lot and getting hurt. And then you have to get back up and keep going.

[To the tune of Kuni Kawachi & Friends, "Kirikyogen," from the album Love, Peace & Poetry: Japanese Psychedelic Music (a 3-star song, imo).]

On belay!

Climbing at the Y.

Jugglers on the Quad

Something I saw tonight at Stanford:

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Juggler practicing on the Quad.

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Since I'm attending a conference on collaborative visualization and distributed intelligence, I expected to see a lot of really cool things today. I just didn't expect the best one to come after the day was over.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Rover," from the album Physical Graffiti (Remastered) (I give it 3 stars).]

Xtreme Skyflyer, and learning new and unusual sports

This week the children are between Peninsula summer school and their respective camps, so we're doing things with them. Today we took the kids to Great America. I've been tempted on my last couple visits by something called the Xtreme Skyrider, a ride that basically involves being suspended from a cable, dragged 150 feet up into the air, and then released. You free fall for a couple second, then you swing.

I decided I finally wanted to do it, and Daniel immediately said he wanted to try it too. So he came along.

The first thing they do is put you in this thing that's a combination of a harness and one of those long bibs that, say, radiologists wear. Not the most fetching outfit-- it doesn't allow a flight suit-like swagger-- but since there's nothing else attaching you to the cable, I was all right with that.

Weekend marathon

My wife is running a half marathon this weekend in San Francisco. Myself, I'm good for an hour in the weight room or pool, but as a rule I don't tackle any distance greater than about a mile without a bicycle.

I'd meant to link earlier today to her Team in Training page and recommend you support a very good cause, but umm, things got a little busy. Still, it remains a good cause, and I encourage you to pledge!

Yet more fencing class

Breakaway above San Gregorio

San Gregorio State Beach

Next stop for the Tour de California!

More peleton at Tunitas Creek Road

Kids photographing the race

They were done drawing with the yellow Lance Armstrong chalk.

The peleton turns on Tunitas Creek

My son, samurai in training

This year my son started taking fencing lessons. So far he really enjoys it. After a few weeks working on footwork, parries, and attacks, they're now finally fencing each other.

He's the one in the blue shorts. Anyone who knows how I dress will not be in the least surprised

I realized this morning that fencing is pretty much the perfect sport for a 7 year-old boy. It teaches grace and quick thinking, which are good. But it also has lots of equipment, which makes it even more interesting. Finally, of course, there's the whole point (as it were) of fencing, which is to hit other people. The first day, the instructor asked if anyone knew what you did in fencing. My son raised his hand and said, "It's poking people with swords!"

En garde!

I think I'm going to insist he learn archery, riding, and flower arranging. Then he'll be a samurai.

Attack! Or possibly parry!

Competition, cooperation, and the Tour de France

Someone recently gave me a copy of a recent article, in Fortune, "Pack Mentality," that extracts the "free-market lessons of long-distance bike racing" as seen in the Tour de France:

[A] stage race is less a sporting event than a commodities exchange on wheels. What appears to be a random mass of bicycles is really an orderly, complex web of shifting alliances, crossed with brutal competition, designed to keep or acquire the market's most valued currency: energy.

Amassing it (i.e., letting as little of it as possible drain away) is the only way for a racer to survive the brutal physical strain of a Tour de France, the metabolic equivalent of running 21 marathons in 23 days. Bikers save energy by riding together in a massive slipstream....

But here's the key: To thrive in the angry little swarm that is the peloton, enemies often have to stick together and make deals with one another. Cooperation across enemy lines is the centerpiece of a winning game plan.... Why play nice with someone who might beat you? Racers in the peloton are not pals; they're enemies without options.

So what does cooperation develop? Why isn't it just every man (or team) for himself?

The reason for the cooperation has its basis in physics: Wind resistance is a huge factor in energy use. According to studies done by Nike during its development of Lance Armstrong's speed suit, a bike racer consumes almost 80 percent of his energy cutting through the air and only 20 percent moving his bike.

To overcome that resistance, racers employ "drafting" - tucking your front wheel just behind rear wheel of the man in front of you, thereby gliding in his wind-free slipstream and greatly reducing the amount of energy it takes to ride.

Not surprisingly, there is an etiquette to drafting. Riders who draft too much without volunteering to slice through the wind for others are "wheel suckers."

It's an entertaining piece, though I find it a bit heavy on the "hey Americans, there's this crazy sports thing going on in, of all places, France" angle: it overplays the strangeness of the Tour de France. But I hesitate to criticize it too much, if only because it confirms something I wrote a couple years ago about "Smart Mobs and Sports."

You might think that cycling would just be every man for himself, but it's not: there's a lot of strategy that's involved, and also some cultural norms about what you're obliged to do as part of a breakaway or leading team. (It's bad form, for example, to just stay in someone's slipstream; you're supposed to take a turn leading.) There are also rules about not taking advantage of people's misfortunes, though that's a little trickier. The other day [in summer 2003], when leader Lance Armstrong was in a wreck, his closest competitor slowed down and waited for him to remount and catch up; Armstrong had done the same for him three years earlier. (On the other hand, the race doesn't stop for the person who's dead last.) Part of this is old-fashioned gentlemanly conduct, but it's also a recognition that a bicycle race is a small world, and while everyone wants to win, no one can afford alienate themselves from the group....

it seems to me that the Tour is a great example of an institution in which you see combinations of flocking behavior, smart mob behavior (the teams all have little radios, and can communicate with their coaches to plan strategy on the road), and an interesting tension between cooperation and competition. You have to cooperate to survive: you have to compete successfully to win.

We often think of cooperation and competition as polar opposites, but in the modern world I suspect that's rarely the case: the norm now is something far more complex. A few years ago, high-tech pundits talked about "coopetition" as a new business model: but this notion of cooperation among competitors strikes me as highly tactical, and not terribly profound. (I could be wrong, of course.) Games like cycling and car racing point to something more basic: under many circumstance, you have to cooperate to compete.

But the one place the article really goes wrong is in its argument that "Nothing in American sports resembles the bizarre dynamic of the cycling peloton." First, as the article itself makes clear, there's nothing bizarre about it: cooperation in the context of competition often is perfectly rational, whether in playing-fields or markets.

In fact, it's rather like companies cooperating around technical standards. Computer companies agree to standardize around USB, Google and Yahoo both use HTTP protocols, shipping companies all use standard sized containers. Deviate from the standard, and you may gain a vast advantage (as Apple arguably has with its music system); more likely, you're make yourself irrelevant. Nobody makes money off standards. But everybody makes money because of standards. Likewise, in the Tour, you have to compete to win, but you have to cooperate to finish.

Second, there is at least one rather popular American sport in which the peleton dynamics, and a set of cultural norms that define what constitutes good versus unfair competition: Nascar. As David Ronfeldt argued several years ago,

In aerodynamically intense stock-car races like the Daytona 500, the drivers form into multi-car draft lines to gain extra speed. A driver who does not enter a draft line (slipstream) will lose. Once in a line, a driver must attract a drafting partner in order to break out and try to get further ahead. Thus the effort to win leads to ever-shifting patterns of cooperation and competition among rivals.

And as anyone who's seen the Pixar movie Cars can tell you, competitors who play too rough don't get respect.