Ecological_Lacrosse Podcast ep. 10 with David Farrokh

Jamie Monroe here. I'm excited to introduce this new show called the Ecological Lacrosse Podcast. The goal of this podcast is to help coaches of all levels learn to apply modern skill acquisition concepts to their teams in a cutting edge.

but practical way. In this podcast, we will discuss lacrosse in the context of principles of play and through the lens of ecological dynamics and a constraints-led approach. I guarantee adopting an ecological approach to your coaching will not only help you win more games, but it will create the best possible experience for your players and it will change your life. How's it going, everybody? Welcome back to the...

Ecological Lacrosse Podcast. I'm really excited to introduce you to David Farouk, who's a PhD student. under Keith Davids at Sheffield Hallam University. His research investigates the dynamics of competitive interactions, attention, anticipation.

in flow states in sports. David played college soccer and his coached youth soccer. And I was introduced to David via Gray Thomas, who is another PhD candidate who is now working with the Oklahoma City Thunder. David really fired up to talk some ecological.

dynamics with you on this podcast. Likewise, Jamie. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. All right. So normally when I do this podcast, I'd mentioned this to you earlier, I do it with a lot of lacrosse coaches. Some are more or less informed about... ecological dynamics and i just thought it would be great to get somebody on here that could really articulate these things in a more scientific way and i'm going to along the way try to bring it back to

what these coaches can actually, you know, reasonably apply to their coaching. But really quickly, can you give us a quick, maybe not quick explanation on what...

ecological dynamics really is? Yeah, that's a big question. So, ecological dynamics comes from ecological psychology and dynamical systems and some other tools, quantitative modeling tools.

um that come out of the complexity sciences and those are kind of developed in conversation to allow us to have a look at some of these really complex interactions that go on um and we have this kind of a stereotype of like oh sports is just sports you know it's simple and dumb jocks and all that but scientifically the interactions that happen in sports are some of the most complex things

um that we could study so it's taken us some time and still relatively young field but i'd like to say that we have been able to use these tools from ecological psychology which gives us some fundamental concepts like affordances we'll get into those and dynamical systems which gives us some way of measuring some of these things scientifically

to kind of look under the hood and see what's happening in you know all the different sports because you know it's a general framework that we can use to look at whether it's lacrosse or You know, maybe a more similar sport. We've got these kind of groupings of sports like invasion games. You have like soccer, hockey, lacrosse, basketball, football, team sports going opposite directions.

um individual sports martial arts things like that so um it's quite a broad framework which you need if you're doing science but um i think there's also been a lot of applications that have come out um through constraints that approach things like that that coaches have been able to um grasp and kind of put into their practice and there's always a lot of steps to that

process of going from science to practice, right? Why is it so important to have an understanding of the theory of ecological dynamics in order to be able to practically apply or best apply a constraints led approach so one of the things you'll hear sometimes people say is well what is it what is a constraint is everything a constraint

And then if so, what makes this any different than what coaches have always done? And, you know, it's a fair question, right? What I think the ecological dynamics... background gives us is a way of understanding. There's always a complementary relationship between constraints and dynamics. So dynamics, you just think of movement or action, right?

ecological dynamics lets us see how those two things fit together um and it allows us to think about not just like immediate effects of a constraint but these kind of like second high order effects based on how the dynamics or action in these interactions are going to kind of play out through these different networks of constraints.

As coaches, we're looking a lot at task constraints because those are the ones that we can typically manipulate most easily. We don't usually have the ability to change at a fast timescale. you know, physiological characteristics and environmental characteristics as easily. So when you talk about the ecological psychology part, it's the perception.

And when you're talking about the dynamical systems theory part, it's more about the action. That's interesting. I'm thinking about it. It's one of the fundamental tenets of ecological psychology is that it.

proposes a intertwined relationship between action perception. So a lot of theories of adaptive behavior, I guess you could say broadly. use this basic formulation of stimulus response, right? So something happens, right? And you could associate stimulus with perception or something that gets into your awareness in some way.

And then there's some kind of response, you do something, right? So there's this general structure that was always kind of assumed. And then when it was hard to figure out, well, what's happening? that makes you go from a stimulus to response. That's when we got a lot of different theories kind of saying, well, there's some kind of processing or there's something that happens in between the stimulus and the response.

that allows you to have this adaptive outcome so the way that plays out in sports i think most people probably be familiar with some version of these models where you say well you first perceive and then you have like a decision process and then you execute um so i know at least in soccer that's quite common still um in a lot of you know coaching and um related discourse is like talking about these stages of processing. The way that we see it in the ecological psychology is, okay.

Action perception have some interdependent relationship where they're always kind of relying on each other across different timescales. So you end up then with a lot of interesting questions about. well, what's the relevant timescale which something's happening? Which was an interesting question, I think, in terms of stimulus response, right? Because, you know, if a ball's flying towards you...

And you say, well, that's the stimulus. Well, you could say, well, at what point do you want to start that clock, right? To say, is it when the ball leaves, you know, the... the stick or the hand or whatever it is and it's then projected through the air is it before that right so you you get a lot of uh pretty rich questions about when do you start considering something right

Well, because, you know, all right, so the information processing theory is the more dominant theory that everyone has worked on, right? That's the perceive, make a choice. There's the processing part and then act. in ecological dynamics is saying there is no middle ground there. There's perception and action together. But it does pose the question of a player that's reading a play is...

I don't know if processing is the wrong word, but they can anticipate that that feed is going to come their way. That ball is going to be fed to them. And they kind of know before the things can even happen that they're probably going to receive this ball. And that becomes perception. And it does precede the ball even in the air because they kind of know it's going to be coming their way.

And obviously on the defensive side, they might see that coming their way too, which is when it gets into the very interesting stuff about deception, about not allowing that defense to be able to see that that play might be coming their way.

How do you sort of articulate that from this processing piece? Is it processing? Is it just perception? Is processing the wrong word? Yeah, it's a really good question. So there's definitely something. that happens in sport that it intuitively makes sense why we feel like we're processing right or there's a there's some process that goes on that gives us this sense of

We're making a decision or we're figuring things out to try to anticipate and act adaptively. So that's fair. But I guess where there's disagreement is like, what are the actual processes that underpin that? What I think where I like to pick up the question, this is actually one of the motivating questions that I had coming into a lot of the research stuff was from both from playing and coaching.

I had this question of like, okay, in a one verse one situation, who's deciding what happens, right? Because I'm doing something based on what you're doing and you're doing something based on what I'm doing. So you could see without doing any advanced math or science or anything, but there's something kind of loopy going on there where it's pretty interdependent who's doing what.

And I was trying to work that out based on like, well, okay, maybe I have a model of what you're doing, but then... it kind of loops around right because my model has to include your model of me wishing that right so it just explodes infinitely um other ways that's been proposed to say well maybe people have these heuristics or um which is kind of more a simplified framework but then you get a question of

well then how do you determine the specifics of what you do which is a little bit related to the question of how you control all the degrees of freedom of the movement system because you could do the same thing different ways what's actually determining what plays out in reality. So I think a really fascinating way to think about this, just in common sense terms, is, okay, if we're competing, we're in some kind of a competitive couple.

You can think about this in terms of lacrosse or even just something simple like I'm trying to run past you, which is common to most of these games, the invasion games I talked about. What I can do, let's just say I'm attacking and you're defending me to try to not get past you. I'm trying to get past you. What I can do, essentially, it starts right where what you can do stops.

So the places that I can run past you are the places that you're not able to defend me. Does that make sense? Yep. And vice versa. Relative to the context of the play, the situation. Yep. Yeah. So there's an interesting kind of like a dovetailing where my opportunities for action, and we'd call these affordances, but, you know, even if...

You didn't have that terminology. You just say, well, what can I do at any given time? Well, given that you're trying to stop me and I'm trying to stop you. If you think about then, well, what's going to actually happen? something's going to happen or there's going to be some kind of an outcome when there's a mismatch where either you can do something that I can't do or I can do something that you can't do.

So if you think about us as a competing dyad, and this works whether it's one-on-one or if it's a whole team versus team situation, but you can think about this kind of jostling process that you're going to see. as this this competing systems kind of moving around the space and it's looking for that can can't mismatch so where is there something that i can do that you can't do right because

that's going to be an opportunity for me or vice versa. So that starts to get you a little bit into this question of like, okay, well, how then does that play out? Because that's what your possibility space looks like. And if you want to know in any sport, there's clearly different things that you can do, right?

And there's points usually where you're not under a lot of pressure and you feel like you have a lot of this stuff open. But then there's other points where they're kind of bottlenecks, right? And it's like what you can do feels like it's a lot more tightly constrained. And it's usually in those spaces where the edge of what you can do becomes much more relevant. Right. So if I'm literally trying to squeeze through a gap.

It might, you know, come down to millimeters in terms of what I can do in terms of my physical abilities to accelerate or manipulate a bowl or stick or whatever it is. So. A lot of what I've been looking at is kind of like, what do these things look like in these interactions as they unfold? But it really starts from a fairly, I think, intuitive premise of like, well, I'm trying to do something.

that's not available to you, right? There's a gap there. I'm going to try to see if I can go through that. If you're trying to win the ball off of me, you're trying to look for something that I'm not able to do.

where I'm going to be unable to evade you or whatever. So that was a lot of how I got into thinking about this. Yeah, it's really interesting. And it makes me think of a few different things. relative to a lot of the topics on this podcast. It's like when you play a more constrained pattern set offense, you will have... more constrained opportunities. So you'll have less opportunity. It becomes more obvious of what you're trying to do and you're going to have to beat this person now.

which is going to be easier for them to be able to defend you if they kind of know that's coming and if the rest of the sort of... Defense knows this is coming because it's been, it's a pattern, it's a set, it's a, it's a specific time. Whereas in, you know, Alex Sarama really got me into ecological dynamics with his, his conceptual offense where.

When there's so many interactions and actions that the defense has to contend with, then all of a sudden your scope of opportunity just opens up so much that there just becomes. a lot more space or opportunity to you know you're not just on the edges of millimeters you actually probably have tons of opportunity um to be able to make plays and it also makes me think about how again how important deception is which is always a huge topic

I really feel like deception is the difference between good and great. Because if I'm just going to make this obvious, me against you in a one-on-one, there's not a whole lot of deception I can use besides jabbing one way or the other. But I can't look a different way. I can't pretend I'm not doing anything. I can't. There's no other variable.

that you as the defender have to like think about that I can sort of get you distracted with. And I think that those are some of the sort of the practical applications that I sort of pop into my head as you're sort of talking about. Yeah, I think. That's a really good direction to go in terms of thinking about how does this play out practically and what can we get out of that as coaches. And the two things that you said that there were having multiple options and deception.

Right. Which is exactly what we've started to pull out of this, because if you think about, OK, I want to find something that you can't do. Because that's essentially my opportunities are your lack of opportunities. Well. We could think about, well, where's the dyad, both of us, if our intentions kind of cancel each other out, right? Because we're both looking for this mismatch. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to kind of...

keep moving together until we get sort of some kind of an edge, right? And what that edge is going to essentially organize around. is a point where there's some kind of a fork in the road where you've got multiple options or multiple affordances. In most sports where there's some kind of a shooting element, you can think about like what's a primary for it. And so like in soccer, it's say for most players going to be to kick the ball with your dominant foot.

is going to be a very primary for us because a lot of what you do in the game organizes your kind of goes forward from that point so then what you can predict based on this okay if you get towards that area where you're able to have this affordance to strike the ball there's going to be a second affordance that branches off which is some kind of a deceptive movement or fake right where you can also usually

you know, fake a shot and kind of cut or sweep the ball, you know, past the defender. I'm going to guess without, you know, having a lot of knowledge of lacrosse that you guys have some similar kind of fakes that go on. For sure. That you set up off the shot, right?

um so what's interesting there is in the context of deception the most what we're finding is like the most effective deception is not so much I think I'm going to or I want to intend to do A, so I'm going to sell you B and then go back and do A. It's actually kind of remaining in this hovering state.

which is technically called metastability, or just means beyond stability, right? Where I have both A and B available to me, and I'm just saying, I'm going to read the game and take what it gives me. So if you're going to start to lean on to B, I'll take A and, you know, and the other way around as well. So once you get into these, these kind of forks in the road, right, where it's like, well, I can do multiple things, you got to pick one.

that's when you start to see an outcome emerge. So usually we're going to see the outcome emerge somewhere around this, what we call like a bifurcation or a branching pattern, where you either got this option or that option. Right. And that seems to be pretty deep into the structure of sports, because even if you think about deception, so then what we mean there by effective deception is like.

how close are you to this fork in the road where you're able to maintain both of these options. And that seems like it is a more beneficial strategy than, say, for example, You know, even if I wanted to deceive you in a traditional like verbal sense, well, I'm constrained by what I can do. Right. Because if I go away from the camera for three seconds.

The set of convincing lies that I can tell you is essentially what I could have done in three seconds. If I tell you that, you know, I went to China and back in three seconds, it just doesn't sell. Right. So very similarly in sports, the closer you are to the goal, right? What's easier to deceive when you have these like prominent affordances, you got a good shot on goal.

it becomes a lot easier than to fake that shot, right? So all that to say, like, deception seems like it, or what looks like deception, a lot of times... emerges when players are in these kind of super positions right where they've got multiple options defender commits and then there's an obvious choice right and they may have been setting it up

But what they're setting up, it's not exactly like, well, I always knew I was going to go this way, so I'm going to try to sell you the other thing. They're actually maintaining a certain openness or flexibility. You see that a lot where I'll be like watching film with somebody and I'll be like, now, did you sell that on the run hitch? Or were you just going to shoot and then didn't? Right. Right. You know what I mean? And, and, and obviously like.

The latter is what a lot of times they'll answer. And sometimes it's the former. But I do think that when you try to be too scripted with your deception, it doesn't work as well. You don't get that deceiving sort of lie. But at the same time.

I think so many kids grow up with doing one-on-ones against cones. They're actually just in the habit of projecting what they do all the time. And so this element of deception is sort of, to me, it's an overriding thing where you just... it's an overarching concept where you are going to be literally looking off what you're doing kind of all the time while you're looking for your opportunities.

you know when you're doing that one-on-one it's usually a race and if you have the ball the one advantage you have it is interacting between your defender but you get to say go right and you get to pick the direction and so if you make it pretty obvious when you're saying go or the direction you're going to go you're obviously going to be

in not as good of a position as if you could have sort of used deception. So I see what you mean exactly on how it is an interacting thing. And at the same time, it's something that some people are more natural at, honestly. Some people have trained in a way that's been more probably contextual so that they just naturally are doing these things a lot more often than they would if they were training in a less contextual, meaning offensive defense.

um but that is a really really interesting way of sort of thinking about it and the other thing that we observe is typically is like you go up in level the closer you are to these these kind of branches or forks in the road the smaller movement you need to cross over them. So let's just say I'm looking at two different passing lanes. I don't know, maybe you're pressing me as a defender, and I've got two different passes that I might be able to make.

Well, a lower level player might not have situated themselves right on that brink between those two. So for them to be able to essentially shift.

From one to the other it's going to take a much bigger more exaggerated movement a higher level player That's balanced right close on that edge. They're able to with quite small movements tip between those two So that makes it a lot harder for you to cover as a defender because I'm able to effectively show you multiple looks or I might do this, I might do that.

with less exaggerated movements on my part. So it's a higher efficiency. So typically, as you go up in level... the the deceptive movements get more subtle and to the point where if you don't know a sport well you might miss it yeah so true yep you know even on the level of just eye movement stuff like that at a very high level um

But it has to do with that proximity to kind of being right on that edge. So that's a lot of what I've kind of just done. It's so cool. The proximity, you know, in a practical sense. in the sport of lacrosse and in basketball too. And in soccer, I mean, you're talking about being closer to the net, but really it's being closer to your defender. Because you can make the same play far from the net in soccer to be able to beat him in the middle of the field as you can if you're in the box.

But if you're far from your defender, then there's not as big of a threat. And so things don't work. And I totally agree with the subtle nature of this. I mean, there's nothing wrong with a bigger exaggerated fake. Sometimes there's times to do that. But sometimes it can be the subtlest little hesitation or look. I'm so intrigued with looking. I mean, I feel like there is nothing easier to do than just to look.

If I was just having a conversation with you on the street and I just all of a sudden turned my head and looked, you'd notice. And you'd be like, what? And then you'll look.

think it's but yet like back to what how people end up training they literally look where they're going right or you know one of the other things i don't know if this happens in lacrosse but in soccer you'll get a lot of times coaches will set up some kind of a training activity where there's no pressure balls coming in and say make sure you look over your shoulder before you get the ball which

I mean, you're not actually looking at anything when you do that. It's just the physical head movement. And I think, I don't know, maybe coaches hope that it somehow becomes a habitual thing or something. Because, you know, there was research that came out in soccer that said, you know, better players tend to scan more, right? So then...

If you take that out of all this rich context of like, well, what are you actually doing when you're making those movements? It just becomes move your head around, right?

without actually any reference to what are you trying to do with that and you know and then it tends to not i think come into competitive context as much because yeah it's easy to do it if you're just setting up some kind of a just unopposed exercise removing the ball around oh have a glance over your shoulder before the ball comes yeah but there's nothing actually there it doesn't benefit you

how many fingers am I holding up while you're doing your one-on-one, right? Maybe it's better than looking down to be able to do that skill with your head up. But again, there's no information to take in. It is amazing, though, when you think about all of this stuff, everything comes back to perception. The deception comes down to it, the scanning, the next pass, all of the decisions that you might make.

You know, I end up talking about this so much to the athletes I work with also and just trying to get them, you know, to realize how important it is when they don't have the ball that they need to scan to figure out where to be, not just. pass you're going to maybe want to make but just exactly where to be relative to the the situation right to be closer to the net or farther from that or in a gap or and kind of know where that pass is but um

you know you you you've been studying sort of anticipation anticipation is what the coaches use all the time how does that sort of fit into this conversation yeah so one of the things we talked about before was the time scales are like these stimulus response things. So we've been talking about kind of hovering on that edge of multiple possibilities. And it's easiest to think about this like in a one versus one.

situation right or if it's just like a even like a really simple binary am i going to go to the left or the right you know taking on the defend or something like that but if you actually start to to look at it in terms of the movement and how it shapes up in team sports, for sure, is that you get these nesting structures. So you get these things where it's like one thing's inside of another thing.

Explain that again, Alex. I read about that in Alex's book, Nesting. Yeah, so nesting just means like, I don't know if anyone's seen those little, like those Russian dolls where there's one inside of the other inside of the other, right? Yeah, where... You've got any kind of a structure or, for example, like a tree. If you look at a branch of a tree, it looks something like the whole tree, just in this smaller thing. Right. So you could say that each of those different scales are nested.

within a broader thing. So what you end up having this interesting realization is the same way that me and you might be jockeying or doing these small fluctuations, body feints, jukes, whatever you want to call them, in a one verse one.

that's a really fast time scale. But that's the very immediate kind of limit of how we can move. Well, that's kind of sitting within you're like well why did why did this unfold right there why this time this place on the field well that comes down to where was i you know five seconds ago where were you five seconds ago

And as you start to kind of peel those layers back and look at these slightly longer timescales, what you start to see is that's where you start to get into what we recognize as being the tactical parts of the game.

So the dynamics are actually the same, where you've got the same fainting and jockeying, right, at these very slow timescales. And then if you think about all these... scales of action sitting inside of each other that's going to kind of trickle or funnel into those immediate one verse one actions so you know as coaches let's say we're competing coaches

We might be trying to do similar types of deception, right? The players are doing one versus one. It just unfolds a lot more slowly. Okay, I played you guys last season. You set up with a certain defensive structure. We're considering all these different interaction outcomes that are going to unfold within that. But it's the same kind of thing. I want to set myself up or set my team up right in a way that.

our tactical shape is also kind of perched in this optimal metastable region. So you see these same dynamics at long timescales of how the tactics of sports form. that you see in the immediate one verse ones um so that tends to be sort of nested within the scale of the whole team offense and team defense and it's just like it's all part of the same tree essentially exactly yeah

Yeah. And I mean, what you tend to see with those things is you get some kind of small fluctuations and then you get eventually like a big cascading reorganization. So things kind of, they're kind of. balanced on a tight rope and then something tips. So we can look at those in terms of movement. We look at those distributions of movement, but you can also look at that in terms of how tactics set up where.

you know a certain style of play certain tactical framework might be dominant for a while and then you know something tips right where somebody finds the the hole or the weak spot in that and then it

It opens up a new part of the landscape. So we talked a little bit about affordances, which is an opportunity for action. I love the term that I heard from Keith Davis, invitation. I even like that better because some people take invites that they really should have turned down because it really wasn't there. That gap wasn't there. Take a shot they shouldn't shoot.

And others aren't seeing the opportunity for whatever reason. Sometimes it's confidence. Sometimes they just don't recognize a coverage or whatever. And in the constraints led approach for coaches, you know, we're trying to create all of these situations so that our players can better recognize these affordances, such as a two man game coverage. But what I wanted to talk a little bit about.

that I did hear on a podcast with Rob Gray and David's is about shared affordances. It's so incredibly interesting. Can you talk a little bit about what a shared affordances? Yeah. So. The question is, how do you go from what I can do to what we can do? Yes. Now, what's really cool about the affordance concept, I've been talking about this whole nesting thing.

the probably more technical way of talking about nesting is through what we call like fractal geometry but what that essentially means is you've got something that doesn't have a characteristic scale So, you know, like earthquakes are like this. You're like, what's the average size of an earthquake? Well, it's not really helpful to say because you've got a lot of small ones and a couple of really big ones. Right. So there's a certain distribution. That's what they call scale free.

what that tells you is like the process that generates this doesn't operate only at one scale. Now, this is how affordances are set up, right? And this is a whole thing with the nesting thing, right? there's affordances aren't we get a little bit sometimes we get into a habit of thinking about a discrete action like oh i have an affordance to make this pass but actually

If you look at this nesting stuff, what we're really finding is the Fordans, it's much more like a tree or like some kind of a big vine, right? Where it's just keeps branching and stuff like that. It doesn't happen really at one scale. What that gives us then in terms of moving from individual to a team or a group or whatever is the same.

You know, you don't actually have to change anything to look at, you know, what a collective or a shared affordance is versus an individual affordance. It just basically is defining what are the real. The way I like to think about affordances is what are my real possibilities for action? Because what happens, the actuality is going to be some subset of that, right? You're not going to do everything that was possible.

But there's some limitation on what is possible. And that's where there's a big role for natural law, right? So that's why we study this stuff scientifically. That doesn't... change the way we study it based on whether it's one person doing something or two people doing something three people or if it's one person plus some kind of a tool there's still some point where they're

It switches over between something's possible for me, not possible. So shared affordances are something that we can look at when we have groups of players. that obviously is like highly relevant in sports. Where it becomes interesting is... We've got this idea in terms of an individual person, like, well, how do you coordinate, say, all your different joints, right? That's what they call those degrees of freedom problem. You've got to coordinate multiple things to do kind of a shared objective.

We just have that same framework and you scale it up in terms of shared affordances. The bigger question starts to become, OK, we could do a lot of things, right, because it kind of multiplies. So now the same way that we need some kind of a coordination to constrain right movement of an individual, we need something to coordinate and constrain the movement of a group.

Right. So we've got this whole set of what we can possibly do. So that's the shared affordances. And then what I think in a sports context is going to be really relevant is. looking at within that, how do we kind of whittle that down, right? Because we could do all kinds of things, right? We could all start just doing jumping jacks on the field, right? I mean, infinite. But specifically, there's endless...

actions that you can run in a lacrosse game to try to create offense to score a goal. And so if we don't have any sort of constraints. it would be hard for people to work on the same page to know what they would do together. And coaches generally take that and constrain it so much. that it becomes a pattern that is just, you can definitely get what you're hoping for, but it becomes so constrained that there's just not enough options and it becomes actually a defensive advantage. Right.

They know what you're going to do, where you're going, and oftentimes takes away from the actual perception of opportunities because the focus goes into the pattern of that rather than the...

the opportunities. But trying to find that balance, and this is why a principles-based offense is so interesting, is that if you know we're going to attack with some kind of a two-man game over here, Now everybody can start working together to sort of, in a shared way, together, create the space, create the...

facilitate passing when, when it's going to be needed because there's a double team to be able to read the defense and do all of these different things. Is this a fair characterization of what you're talking about? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And it's the same idea I was talking about balancing on those edges, whether it's, okay, maybe I have an affordance to shoot, which gives me another affordance to also, you know, fake and do something else.

I can position myself to do either of those things based on what you give me, right? Well, if we're two versus one, it's a similar thing, right? And you feel as coaches will say, usually intuitively, like, get the defender to commit. But if you're in two versus one on the attacking side, you can feel that kind of breaking point where the defender just stretched.

Right. And there's a point where they're unable to cover both things. Well, then you think, okay, as a, an attacking group, right? Cause that's two, two people in a two verse one. where do you want to be? You want to be in the point where you continue to stretch the defender until they have to commit and you can play what they give you. Now, that's a simple situation like a two versus one.

It's the same thing that happens in terms of the further upstream events that trickle down into that two verse one. So if you think of player, we're talking about anticipation.

well a better player is starting to recognize beforehand okay if we go this direction we're going into that two verse one right so that affordance of the two verse one which if you're good enough you know you could probably um capitalize on the two verse one right you already start to recognize that as a whole affordance that it contains other things within it right but

Now, you know, let's say we're in a different part of the field. I'm realizing, OK, we get this pass. Now we're numbers up or two versus one over here. And this is kind of the question I think developmentally is. Where do players start to be able to recognize these things? You know, at what scale can you recognize these affordances? Because there's usually a point and usually...

how we think about it in sports is like technical and tactical, right? Because a technical ability is usually like a small scale, kind of a discrete movement and tacticals. something you do over like a whole game or a phase of the game or something. And there's usually a point where we switch language in terms of how we talk about it. And usually the point that we start talking in tactical terms.

is the point where we expect that the players can no longer actually perceive the affordances and we'll just stand here. I think a lot of what we're trying to do is... You know, it's not in no way throwing out tactics, but it's just allowing the players to actually be a part of that. Say we're setting up like this. This tactical setup is like this.

because it allows us to trickle down into these affordances more on this immediate time scale. Because a lot of times you get a big disconnect where it's like, well, I know coach told me I'm supposed to cover with roughly this proximity to... the sideline or whatever it is but there's a disconnect there a lot of times right and that's that's what happens with coaches a lot we'll say something like all right when they go behind you know when the ball's behind in our big little invert

I want you guys to exchange that top because it will occupy defenders. And they'll be like, but dude, you're wide open. Like, why didn't you cut? Well, it's because they're actually trying to do what the action is. Rather than recognize that their guy slid and they're wide open and all they had to do was step in and cut. And that's one of the really interesting things about...

about a principles-based offense in the context of affordances and shared affordances and in the context of principles of play. I think this is one of the biggest keys. for all of the coaches out there that really know the game, you know what the principles of play are. You know that to be able to create affordances for the ball, you have to give it space. But you also... have to you know space so that's a spacing topic but there's also but you can't just

You can't all play a mile wide either because then all of a sudden you're going to allow one defender to guard too because you're so far out of the play that your man can then help in all they want. And so figuring out how to focus on principles of play. allowing your players to then recognize what these affordances are and begin to anticipate what's going to happen based on what their opponent's going to do. And it's the same thing on both sides of the ball, which is why.

Coaches have to know the principles of play on both sides of the ball because it's not just X's. It's X's and O's. And that's because it won one. Like you said, from that very. first analogy of one versus one who's in control here um you know some people think It's the ball carrier that's in sort of in control. And others might say the defense can go ahead and impact exactly what that ball carrier is going to do. And it is sort of a dance. And it goes that way in the team and team play too.

And that's why I always start by asking coaches, OK, what what are the edges that you're looking at? Right. In terms of these principles, because you might have a certain.

guidance right so in soccer and i think this holds in probably most most of the sports where you're shooting at a goal there's a certain kind of a wide angle shot that's not a great shot right So, for example, in soccer, there was research that came out and said, statistically, you're better off to kind of cut the ball back somewhere into that danger zone in front of the goal.

to play that pass on the ground into there as opposed to taking a wide-angle shot. Yep. Which, you know, makes sense. That's a reasonable thing for a coach to tell the players, you know, don't waste that wide-angle shot. Put the ball in front of the goal. Yep. Well, where's the goalkeeper? In almost any of the sports, the goalkeeper is going to stand on the near post, right? If the ball player is on the right, they're going to be on the right side and vice versa.

Well, why would they stand there? If you're never going to take the wide angle shot to that near post, the goalkeeper wouldn't be there. The goalkeeper stays there. You think, well, why is that? Well, clearly there's a contingency. Because if the goalkeeper actually stood on the far side of the goal and gave you that wide-angle shot, the coach would be upset if you didn't take it.

It becomes a little bit trivial for the coach to say, oh, don't, you know, don't take this shot because there's some set of scenarios in which that guidance is supposed to apply. Right. There's a point where the goalkeeper is out of position. The defenders aren't covering the shot. They're going to be, of course, yeah, take the shot. They're giving you the shot. Take the shot. But the question becomes, well, where, where does that tip over? Right. Where's the point where.

yeah, it is better than to take the shot or it is better to play the pass. Well, guess where the game is going to be? The game is going to be right on that edge. On the edge. Right? And because if it wasn't, it would be obvious. given that in any competitive sports, it's not obvious what you should do. It means the game's organizing somewhere around that edge. So it becomes a little bit trivial for the coach to say,

Oh, you should, you should do this because what's going to happen is to say, well, the game's going to go right to that edge. Right. And I used to do this, for example, I was an attacking player in soccer. If players are covering and sort of defenders are covering sort of a zonal way, you can usually feel there's a place where, you know, one defenders feels their responsibility ends and it goes to the next defender.

Right. And what, what I would do as an attacking player is try to move across that edge, right? Because that's when you're feeling how they pass you off, what their communication patterns are like. If it was, let's just say it was a laughably rigid thing. Like there was a physical line that were like, if you're on this side of it, then I'm covering you. If you're on that side of it, then other defenders covering you.

Well, then if that was the case, you would just stay right there so you could go back and forth and they would both be constantly occupied. it's clearly not that rigid, right? So it doesn't mean there's no role for those kind of guidances. But what I try to tell coaches is to think, what's the edge of that guidance?

Because the game is going to be around that edge, right? And you got to be able to put players in that situation to recognize. And a lot of times it is recognized collectively. You know, different players are going to have different proclivities there, but a lot of... You know, the shared affordances, a lot of coordinating as a team is being able to be on those edges together. Right. So that's why whenever I set up training sessions as a coach.

That's the first thing I always think about, where are the edges? And the easiest way to recognize them is just when you start to see hesitancy or you can recognize when players are making decisions. You think, where are these decision points or edges in my session? That's how I think about, I kind of start from there and kind of build backwards, if that makes sense. Yeah, really interesting.

It's true. I was just sort of trying to think of examples in my own head of the edges. It's like if a short stick's picking for a long stick on the wing in a two-man game and it's not. ever that obvious if it's good defense that they're definitely going over the pick or definitely going under the pick until that last second and you might have to react in various deception to try to

figure it out. Sometimes it is obvious. And if it's pretty obvious, then it's probably going to be not the best defense. And when it's really, really good defense, they might pressure you to the point where you don't really know and you think they're going over, but then they just drop right off of you and get under. Right. And so like, you know, all of these sort of principles of play will have edges. Like if you give too much space to the dodge.

all of a sudden they can just crowd the whole thing. And sometimes overloading that area becomes a really good tactic because you make the defense think they're in position when maybe they're really not. True, that's why it's so hard to go with hard and fast rules. I do think that generally speaking, principles of play are consistent. I mean, generally not going to win if you take a lot of bad shots. Yeah.

But but there is sort of a fine line between what a good shot and a not good shot is for certain players. Right. It's figuring out where those edges are. And that's where the that's. that's really where affordances come in yes and i think that's one of the big roles of the coach is that

In a sport, like I said, you've got these different timescales. So if you've been around a sport, like you said, you've been around lacrosse for decades, you have a pretty good sense of the fluctuations of that landscape. where there's going to be these niches or opportunities in that landscape that are moving based on these slow timescale trends of the game.

that you as a coach are going to recognize. And it could also be local things too, right? Like what the league or the conference, whatever you're playing in, what kind of setups and trends there are there. I think that's where coaches are. are kind of helping bridge that to to situate that for players to say okay this is something it doesn't have to be like a timeless universal but

This is a pretty stable aspect of our landscape that we're playing in, you know, for the purpose of this coming game, for the purpose of this season. This is pretty stable. Right. And then. the faster dynamics are going to unfold within this landscape. Interesting. Changing topics. One of the biggest... breakthroughs for me as a coach has been i've noted this on a few different podcasts but it's just been really diving into more variability in in

in training what what doesn't really change that much is principles of play you're going to have to come back to these principles they they exist you can tweak them a little bit but at the end of the day there's these things are going to win you and lose you games But what I didn't really understand that's been so exciting for me is to figure out so many different ways to try to put kids in situations.

where they will learn these principles of play and using so many different constraints to try to difference. different constraints to teach them that really the same principles of play. That same two-on-one is going to happen in a million different ways, but figuring out so many different ways. I think most coaches understand. If you coach a lot, you understand constraints. You understand that this drill setup will give you a certain behavior that you want, but we all have this tendency.

to come back to the same ones. And we like them. The reason we come back to them is because we do like what they show us and give us. But can you talk a little bit about why variability is so important in your mind? Yeah, variability is huge because when I was talking about these, you know, the competing system looks for that mismatch, you know, where one side can do something, the other side can.

it's almost definitional that that has a lot to do with variability. So true. Because at a global level, we know we're trying to win the game. right so there's a point where it kind of bottlenecks into it and actually this is one of the reasons why it's kind of hard to score goals um there's a point where it starts to kind of funnel in, right? You got to put the ball in the goal. But how you kind of lead into that, the kind of broader that funnel is, the more...

The more opportunity you have to play with as you kind of co-adapt right in this this jostling competing situation What's interesting is the structure of that variability we know pretty well now is going to be different if you're just on your own trying to do stuff in multiple ways or if that's sort of being driven by an opponent. So it's very difficult to recreate the type of variability that you get in a competitive situation.

as an individual right right um so i think as coaches then if we start with that variability within a competitive context and we think Well, when we manipulate constraints, right, we get these different kind of competitive looks. Again, I go back to thinking, well, where are the different edges, right? Where you see the players making decisions between one thing and another. You'll notice most players have a favorite edge.

Yes. Right. If they got something they're really strong at, they use that to set up other things. And we know one of the ways you can kind of tell how these things are hanging together is based on the distribution of. of outcomes right so if you look at the top scores say in any league uh you've got most of the players got like one or no goals a couple couple and then there's going to be a long tail right

So it's not this kind of a bell curve situation where most people are in the middle. So that tells us just kind of mathematically that what's going on there is not an additive process. Because if all these different skills were just kind of adding together randomly. you would get more of a normal distribution or bell curve. We almost in all sports are going to see a long tail distribution where top performers are going to be maybe orders of magnitude having more.

successful outcomes than average performers, right? So that wouldn't be possible if you're just adding together. independent little pieces of skill. It tells you that the way that they relate to each other is that they kind of build multiplicatively or that they kind of exponentially increase each other. The other way you can think about that is usually there's a point in most sports you get to a level of competition. You don't just get a little bit worse. Everything, the wheels fall off.

right if you go up you hit your kind of your level competitively you go just beyond that suddenly you can't do anything anymore so how i think about that in context of variability is well We want variability in terms of how we nest these opportunities for action, these affordances. So it's not just, oh, I'm doing this one move five different ways.

but it's also the temporal sequence of actions that that's kind of sitting within. I want to come into that or I want to sit that within different events. Does that make sense? yeah so like if if if you have a player that's really good at you know let's come back to two main game and they're really good at at rejecting a pick or something you know we could

We obviously would want them to be able to learn how to use the pick and reject it. That's an edge. They just tend to want to reject all the time. They tend to want to reject, but it would be really good if they actually were able to use the pick as well.

Some little variability there as far as being able to like make sure they're doing different things that way and having the defense play them in different ways so that they have to learn how to do that and use constraints to kind of make that happen. Yeah. On both sides of the ball. For example, like Alex talked, Alex Sharama talked about how he made it a significant point disadvantage for the defense if they gave up or reject.

Yeah. As opposed to trying to get the offensive player not to just reject every time. It was more like, hey, if you get rejected on twice, the game's over, you lose, you know, as a cool constraint for that. But also taking that two main game and putting in some different texts, context.

spots in the field with different coverages that's nesting then within different situations. Is that kind of what you meant? Yeah. Yeah. Nesting within different situations. Yeah. That's a lot of how I think about variability is. you know, where, where are things situated? Yeah. Yeah. Where, and then what coverage and what, yeah. And I think that's, that's the key. And that's, that's kind of the beauty of, again, every single.

coach that knows lacrosse well, that has offensive looks. They're rooted in principles of play and they will work. The question is though, without variability, they're just easier to guard. And the variability is not just what that action is. It's kind of what it's nested within. So if you're nested within a particular set all the time, it's going to be easier to guard.

than it would be if it was nested in lots of different ways or in a very invariable ways that nobody had any idea. You can still run that same two-man game and you can do it in different parts of the field and you can do it with players in different spots rather than always.

in the same spots um which is that kind of is that sort of yeah explain it yeah yeah no exactly you know back to the one on the one on o thing there are a lot of athletes that want to practice their game by themselves i was one of those athletes it is hard to be variable without the context of you know situations but you can also be intentional about not doing the same thing over and over and over, which is like what everybody sort of does is they have a routine.

I'm going to do 50 of these and 30 of these and 20 of these, 25 each hand and all this stuff. So that's kind of where differential learning comes in. I don't know how much you've thought about this or talk about. Yeah. So I think there's an important. you know things with training individually so personally i was like that i you know i did my 10 000 hours of training more or less by myself right um you know there's some things you get from it i'm not going to say it gives nothing

What I think players should be aware of is let's say you get really good at like a discrete movement. Well, What that means in competition is going to be highly contextualized by where and when it's situated. So it's like what we're talking about with this whole deception thing. Let's just say I've got a certain pattern of movement that I like as a pet skill that I use. Well, what actually determines whether it's effective or not isn't my movement.

but it's the relationship between my movement and the environment right which is in a competitive context the environment's acting against you so what that means is this it's a Actually, a little bit deeper point beyond even just sports, something called interaction dominant dynamics, where you could think about things as either having a kind of intrinsic purpose.

or a purpose that's kind of imposed by the environment. So I think that's kind of like a interesting common sense examples. Like let's say, You know, at night you hear what sounds like someone's breaking into your house. Well, suddenly you're looking around, right, for something to defend yourself. And you're like, well, what counts as a weapon?

Well, it could be just about anything, right? It's got to have certain characteristics. You've got to be able to pick it up. So, you know, maybe a chair, but probably not a table, right? Maybe a vase, but... probably not a small cup or you know like yeah you're gonna notice all these different things that you might be able to use to defend yourself but what's interesting about them is like

they might not have been things that you would think of as being, oh, this is a weapon or something for self-defense, right? It just suddenly takes on that characteristic. based on how it's situated in that context so that's an example i like to think about just to to make it a little bit more alive it's like well it might be that it was just a you know a book or something you're like oh i can throw this at somebody

It's not that that thing is designed for that, but it takes on that characteristic in the context. So that's how competition tends to be. The things that we employ or kind of send in in these competitive situations, they're not necessarily... always designed beforehand, they take on the meaning based on the context. Now, the opposite of that would be if let's say you've got like a factory floor, you're putting, you know, 1000 bolts in a car door every day. Well,

you've got some kind of robotic arm that pops those in, that's going to have pretty stable functions, right? And you can start to say, well, this is for this, because that context never changes or changes very infrequently. The more stable the context is, the easier it is to kind of build up these independent pieces that have these specialized or predefined meanings and roles.

It's a hard one in sports because you might put together a skill that you really like and then in a game it might not mean what you hoped it meant. right it kind of takes on the meaning based on what happens around it so true you show me a great technique and i'll put a defender on them and it won't happen right because it won't happen anyways it may happen but it'll happen differently

Yeah. And it's like saying, well, do you want to have a flathead or a Phillips head screwdriver? Well, it depends if the screws are flathead or Phillips head. And then you say, well, in this context, the screw is trying to change on you. So if you come prepared with one, what you really want is ability to switch between either.

Yeah, that's a lot of the idea, I think, of the constraints-led training is to give players that ability where... you have these things that you can switch between or they're we would say like they're soft assembled you're able to like bring them into the context for sure yeah the toolbox is an analogy a lot of people use yeah that's sort of a little bit not it's a little off because there's like going to be a million different types of screws

That's screwdrivers. Like there's going to be all kinds of different forms. I mean, there happens to just be Phillips head and flathead in our world, but in a game, there's just endless situations that you're going to sort of face in those schools. I remember we were talking about my youth.

My soccer background, playing a lot of pickup soccer. And I remember growing up, everyone said, never kick with your toe. And then I saw the best player that played pickup. He used to like pop these little passes with his toe all the time because it was.

quick release. Right. And I was like, wow, that's actually really interesting. Right. And it was something that he was doing that was, you know, completely the opposite of what everyone taught you to do. Right. Yeah. Where people are like, you have to throw overhand. until I guess someone's on you and their stick's right in the lane that you would want to throw it overhand and you better wrap it around them or you're going to throw it right into their stick, you know? Right. Yep.

There's a lot of people, though, that believe that you must learn this one thing before you can move on to the other. That's one of the biggest challenges in trying to get people to buy into ecological dynamics and a constrained-led approach is they just believe that you must learn. this, you know, the best players can do it all. Sure. But, you know, you don't start there, you know, and, you know, we could probably talk for hours, but maybe let's, let's finish up on that one quick topic.

Well, this is, I think, a practical way of testing that, right? I'll ask people, you know, can you tie your shoes? They'll say, okay, make the movement that you use to tie your shoes.

Just with your hands like actually try it What do you mean so okay, you know without actually going to your shoes Imagine you're tying your shoes, but just do it with your hands without your shoelaces right oh oh yeah yeah and think about well first of all you know clearly that you didn't learn this and then go down and get your shoelaces and be like okay now do it with the shoelaces right

yeah but not only that you can do the whole thing with the shoelaces but for at least for most people if you try to do it you're like you're kind of doing something But then if you go and do it with your actual shoelaces after, you're like, no, it wasn't the same. And, you know, even they've done studies on this, say, like, for example, with driving, where they've looked at how people, you know, move their hand to steer. They said, you know.

Move as if you're you're driving a car and people can't come remotely close to how they actually move. They tend to over exaggerate the degree of movement. But I think, well, clearly, you know, most people can.

you know drive a car to some degree um so why can they not do this individual component part of it and that comes back to what i was saying about those interaction dominant dynamics if to The whole idea that you have to have the part of it to be able to then build this whole end product, that assumes that the dynamics are component dominant dynamics or that they add together.

That's something that I've actually just done research on this. There's other research as well. We know pretty solidly empirically that that's not the case in sports. Depending.

probably a little bit on the sport there's gonna be different degrees of interactivity but in most sporting contexts we could say with a pretty high degree of certainty you're not going to have this kind of additive dynamics that these events are all independent and they all just kind of add together like little pieces um you know even just like i was talking about the distributions of performance outcomes

that speaks very strongly against that. Because if these things were all just independent, you wouldn't see these huge differences in performance, which is one of the things that characterizes sport, I think. pretty deeply is just the the difference between the levels is mind-boggling you know and you talk about like what percentage of players uh you know to play in a varsity high school team you've got to be reasonably competitive and invest quite a lot of time and then

you know one two percent of those players are going to go play in college and one two percent of those players are going to play in college or in professional level well clearly you've got something that has this kind of a exponential distribution right and that's just something you would not see if it was um independent little parts that were adding together parts of the action capable of what you can do act you know right skill

Because everyone's learning the same skills and frankly, everybody can do them. Yeah. Yeah. So it really comes down to the perception and the action together, which is like what it's really all about. Yep. It's really cool.

Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to jump on this podcast. Yeah, Jamie, thank you for having me on. It's been a really enjoyable conversation. Yeah, it was really cool. I hope I meet you in Chicago one of these days. Yeah, for sure. All right, man. Great to meet you. Take care.