Ecological Lacrosse Podcast ep. 7 - Christopher Newport Head Coach Mikey Thompson

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. Today, I am very excited to introduce Mikey Thompson, the head lacrosse coach at Christopher Newport University. Mikey, very fired up to have you on the show. How are you doing? Doing great. Doing great. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited for this conversation. Same. All right. We're diving right into some meats. We're going to talk about the Newells.

Carl Newell's constraints model that really defines constraints and talks about them. And this guy, Carl Newell, invented this, I think, sometime in the 80s. And basically... says that there are three types of constraints, individual constraints, which would be everybody's individual capabilities, their height, their weight, their quickness, their speed.

what handed they are but it also could be are you tired do you have confidence are you in a good mood or a bad mood and all these individual constraints are not only for each person, but the way they interact. So there's going to be an individual constraint when there's a different matchup. All of these individual constraints affect things. And then there's like environmental constraints, which could be like.

your surface or the temperature or the culture of your organization. And these have effects. And then there's the task constraints, which are. Basically, in a game, the task constraints would be the... The score, the time and the clock, the time and the shot clock, the boundaries, the rules, the situation, the numbers. Is it uneven? Is it transition? Is it riding? Is it clearing?

Man up, man down, whatever. All of these situations become task constraints. Essentially, the task would be I have to clear the ball. And this is the situation where this is transition and we have to stop this transition. These are the tasks that are occurring. So what I wanted to start off with was just to talk a little bit about constraints and then...

What this sort of means to you and how the notion of these constraints and these different types, these three different types of constraints have kind of impacted the way that you practice and the way you develop your individuals and your team.

Yeah, I guess I'll start off with individual constraints. This is something that has really been eye-opening for me over the past few years, just having an appreciation for how different all of our players are. Growing up, you start to watch certain players and try and emulate the things that they're doing. And you come to the realization that...

You start watching players that do the things that you're naturally kind of good at doing. And then there's other guys that you really look up to that are completely different from your current skill set.

um you know one of the things that i have told our players is to try and imagine you know call it our three best players that have very different skill sets and i got this from alex sarama and how he translates it to three of the best basketball players in the world and you know if i were to use

Three of our guys, you know, Brett Jackson, he's a big lefty shooter, you know, really great range. If you put him top center with the defense, you know, spaced in the same spots, our offensive guys are spaced in the same. spots and then a guy like fred fulkerson who's very shifty great first step really two-handed great off the dodge great vision um

And then maybe another guy like Kevin Miller, who's more deceptive and he's a better feeder. If they're all kind of in the same spot on the field and the defense is playing us the same way and our offensive guys are spaced.

um in the same spots like what they're going to do in that same situation is going to be totally different and i think as coaches we have to see value in that because we can't teach them to do the same things um in that same situation we have to really honor their unique skill sets and and you know it might be dependent on who's on defense as well you know like what type of defender is on them is it a long stick or a short stick

Is it a bigger guy? Is it a smaller guy? So we're always kind of thinking about those individual strengths and weaknesses of our players and how to set them up for success and honor. what they're able to do on the field and not necessarily how it looks. I love that word honoring. That is such a great way of describing it that I've never really heard in respecting.

You know, the fact that they're going to do it differently. But as long as they accomplish the task, which is create offense for you at the end of the game in that perfect spacing, top center, then we don't care how they do it. We have a guy that's currently, he's a senior and he's one of our captains and he's now one of our first line middies and he could not be more unorthodox in the way he moves. His high school coach and his club coach told me this when we were recruiting him.

I just don't really care, you know, because he gets the job done and he communicates great and he finds different ways to beat his guy. And so I think that every coach has an example of that type of player that just gets it done, even though it's. It's not like the by the book way that we probably all grew up learning different skills and fundamentals.

The next one, I guess an example of environmental constraints, and again, as I've gone down this path, I always used to hear the phrase like good athletes don't fall. So like if you'd play on grass or if it was wet or, you know, bad surface conditions and something like that, like. You always be like, well, good athletes don't fall. And I always kind of said that jokingly. But last year we had the unique opportunity of practicing two days out of the week on our soccer field.

And, you know, it was a grass field and like we naturally had to adjust our practice plan just a little bit because our guys weren't really used to playing on grass. And then every now and then it would be a day like today where it's pouring down rain. You just have to, again, honor the...

The reality that playing on a wet grass field is going to change the way that you play, you know, shorter, choppier steps. You're not going to be able to just blow by your guy or put your foot in the ground on a quick rollback the way you might on turn. And so that might be like one of those environmental constraints that in the past that used to be like, oh, you know, don't make that, don't use that as, don't use that as an excuse. Now it's like.

having a really clear expectation of how it might change the game. And also being open minded and curious as to how it might change the game and accept that it's going to change the game and understand that your players are going to have to adapt to that as opposed to just. disregarding it as an environmental constraint. I love that when we play pickup in the summer, if it's like the courts are rainy and you still want to play.

It's not as fun because it was like just rain and the courts are all wet and they're slick. We're playing on a hoop court or a tennis court or something like that. But it had massive impacts on how the athletes moved. And all of a sudden, the kids that were really, really quick, they just couldn't cut around or they'd fall. So you had to use position, your body, deception, and different things to be able to accomplish the task of scoring the goal.

while it was a slippery surface. And so you take that not only to the reality of you're going to have to deal with this, but also it can actually have amazing, an amazing impact and influence over how the players play. Yeah, absolutely. And this might be kind of a blend between a task constraint and an environmental constraint. We were talking about this yesterday, the two net game that we played yesterday in practice.

And it was so fun. I mean, just imagine you have two nets with two goalies and a six on six on inside of our own offensive offensive box. And. The defense would be in perfect position, forcing a guy down the alley on one cage, and then the offensive guy would be allowed to just roll away and then immediately start attacking the other cage. And what we're trying to do is create really adaptable players and have our offensive guys be.

able to quickly perceive now there's an advantage on the other goal and the defense has to recognize that and slide and recover as quickly as possible and a drill that might you know a few years ago just be really frustrating for our defense and it's like coach why are we doing this this doesn't make any sense um Now it's just this mentality of trying to create different environments for our guys to learn.

you know, immediately you're going from being in perfect position defensively to now you're in a trail position and working on, you know, your trail checks and slow playing on defense. So there's all these little skills that emerge in these different environments. Again, that could probably be the task constraint that we design from a practice, you know, from a small-sided game as well.

The task constraints are really, I feel like, as coaches where we have the most influence. And that's where we've really tried to add as many different constraints to see. what type of skills can emerge is possible, especially this past year. I'm happy to dive more into that. That's just kind of a general overview of how I feel like those.

Those three types of constraints are ever present. They're always interacting. And it's something that as a coach, I try to be mindful of throughout the course of every practice and every game. Love it.

i just listened to this podcast the rob gray podcast with this guy keith davids who's an ecological psychologist and he talked about this and he talked about that This ecological approach, more than anything, it's an explanation for why things are happening, how skills or behaviors emerge. The confluence of those three constraints types, individual, environmental, and task. Basically.

result in coordination or modes of coordination or the functional behaviors of individuals and the group. And so more than anything else, it's like these constraints are happening. in games and they're happening in practice. And I think it's just a really interesting way to think about it, that it's as much as a methodology, it's an explanation.

for why things are working and why things are not working. And I think that's just an interesting concept. Can you give me any thoughts from your perspective on that concept? Yeah. I mean, I think it starts with just like, I don't claim to be an expert in any of this stuff. You know, Jamie, we've been talking about this stuff for probably four or five years. And I think that.

there's been several things that have led me down this path i think first of all just just my childhood and thinking back to how me and my friends all learned sports you know we we did everything pool basketball and um you know shooting on a goalie we would just like stuff a couch cushion in our

know in our t-shirt and you know play goalie wars and then we would go off and play like a mix between tackle football and soccer like these games that we created were all just you know learning on the fly and and you know, learning how to be a good athlete and how to be deceptive. And so I think that like my group of friends and the way that we grew up.

with very limited rules and playing any type of game in any type of environment. I mean, one of our friends who had the parents that didn't really you know care too much what we did like we literally boxed we would just beat each other up in the basement and like is there anything better for learning deception than boxing um and so that had a big influence on me um

i think the other thing that has had a big influence on how i think about all this stuff like when i was in college i i decided to study philosophy as my major and all my friends were like philosophy really like what are you going to do with that and i think the more i think back at that decision the more it makes sense now as a coach um because you know philosophy is really just the study of

knowledge and reason and just kind of how things work. And I love thinking big picture about things more than I like the details of things. And so all these things kind of come together and it's really interesting to think about how people learn, you know, how do people learn how to do anything, not only individually, but within the context of a game and within the context of a team sport. with a coach who wants things to look a certain way, whether that is more of a traditional X's and O's.

mental model or whether it's certain principles that the coach reinforces on a daily basis.

And I think to not like start with a really big picture approach to skill acquisition and team play. And then you could even you could even, you know, sprinkle in just the the. um the whole concept of flow and when athletes are performing at their best. I studied a guy, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and if you haven't studied his stuff, Jamie, he talks about flow and how there's basically two ends of the spectrum. One end of the spectrum is...

boredom. The other end of the spectrum is anxiety. And really when we're able to reach that state of flow is when there's a balance between the two.

And the challenge and your actual skills that you possess are in harmony. And that's when there's maximum enjoyment. That's when there's maximum performance. And I think that in itself is a... type of constraint as well you know when the drill is too easy for the offense they're going to be bored you know when it's too hard and the space is too constrained or there's too many long poles

they're just going to get anxious. They're going to be like, coach, I can't solve this problem of this particular small-sided game. And so that's something that I kind of try to keep back of mind as well. And the drill that we did yesterday with the two cages, it ended up being perfect because it was like a 15-14 win for the defense. And at first, we thought the defense had no chance.

of of winning that of winning that drill there was two cages and you know god there'd just be two on ones that would pop up every now and then but then you know they kind of started to figure out and then the d1 and it was such a fun game because there was that perfect balance between um the challenge and the skill that

our offensive guys possessed. Yeah. So, so great. And so wouldn't you say that most coaches have been using, any good coach has been using constraints forever? Like that's something that we always do. This is not like new. The idea of using constraints, you know, whether it's a three on two or two on two or whatever, there's constraints that are occurring. Right. How would you say that?

really understanding constraints has evolved for you and manipulating constraints through your understanding. How is it, how is it, or how is it evolving for you? Yeah, I would definitely say that all coaches have always used constraints. I feel really grateful that I've... you know find a few found found a few of these people as you have to study and really understand some of the research behind um the constraints led approach and ecological dynamics and how skill acquisition works

And I think as much as anything, just having a common language to talk about some of this stuff is really helpful as well. But I think that just understanding that like. Adding different constraints to maybe some of the same drills that we've always been doing is going to lead to different skills emerging. And, you know, if we were to do 10 minutes of a four on four. We used to just do 10 minutes of a four on four and whatever happened, happened. And now understanding the variability and how.

changing different things can lead to different skills. I think that variability and that willingness to try new things. and manipulate the constraints and manipulate the space, manipulate how many short sticks there are, you know, manipulate the time on the shot clock. That's where I think the learning has accelerated for myself and my coaching staff and also my players. Why is variability so important?

Well, I think if there's no variability, you end up doing the same things over and over again. You know, all athletes come from different backgrounds and they all learn things in a certain way and they're going to do what's comfortable for them. And we all know the only way you get better is by pushing.

to the edge of your comfort zone and um by manipulating constraints you're naturally putting them in different environments where where these different skills emerge and i've been really impressed with how quickly some of our guys have picked up on certain skills that we've been working on in our small side of games and our our champ work and pre-practice and stuff like that and and that's really

To me, what's most exciting is a coach. When you get to practice with your guys every day in the spring, we don't have quite as much time in Division III as the Division I guys do. Just knowing, you know, where we're starting in late January and where we could be in May. Now I'm starting to come up with kind of a bank of small side drills and skills that we want to work on so that the individuals themselves are getting better throughout the course of the season.

and on top of that obviously you're always going to be working on your team concepts and your chemistry but i think the better your individuals become throughout the course of the season, the better your team is going to be, especially when all of that is backed by your principles of play.

because that's ultimately how we want our team to play. And that's the real upside of all this stuff is having the confidence that we can really help our guys become individually better players, no matter what position they are playing.

I love it. And from a variability perspective, obviously, if you keep practicing the same thing over and over, you'll get pretty good at it. And a lot of times we feel good about a practice when it feels good. It looks good. It's sharp. And then we get into games and they're just a mess. I mean, how many times have you played a game? You're like, oh, my God, like, I don't know how we won that game. That game was like ugly. And then there's other games where you might be incredibly sharp.

The point is, it's always incredibly variable. Anything you thought was going to happen just doesn't happen, whether it's the weather or the officials, the way they officiated it, the way the matchup, you know, like where you're winning faceoffs all year long and then you get a matchup where you just like don't. And so one of the things about this concept of variability is that it's the ultimate game-like thing, right? To create so much variability.

Where you're in that flow state, it's not so hard that it's like stupidly difficult, but it's also not so easy where it's like you're really, really good at it. Like your classic West Jenny drill, it's like fool's gold. It makes you feel like you're pretty good on offense anyways. And so, you know, as you are thinking about variability.

Talk to me a little bit about how you're creating variability within your principles of play. You can pick offensive side of the ball, defensive side of the ball, because you want to be able to play in a particular way that you think is going to be best for your team. But you also need to be able to give looks to the other side of the ball. So, you know, you may want to play picks a certain way, but you know your offense is going to play. Do you think it...

hold your defense back to play picks in a way that's not going to be the way you play it? And how do you actually create variability in terms of just pure preparation, you know, for that side of the ball? Yeah. You know, just to your point about. how messy the game can look. I mean, first of all, it's a player's game. You know, it's a player's game and it's I always say it's simple, but it's not easy. Like the game itself is pretty simple when you strip it down, but it's not easy. And so.

We really want to simplify the game as much as possible. And that's where the principles of play and how much we reinforce those. comes into the way we we kind of come together as a team um i can't tell you how many practices we've already had this year jamie where you know my captains or one of my leaders has come up to our staff at the end of practice and They're just like, they're bombed. They're like, coach, our sticks look so sloppy, you know, or that drill was such a mess.

I'm actually really pleased with what we got out of the day. And I'm like, fellas, listen, we could design a practice that looks So clean. Everything that we do now, Jamie, it has some sort of a defensive element and some sort of pressure and some sort of... decision to be made in a challenge, an obstacle. And so naturally that creates optically what might look like a sloppy practice. And for our guys that are getting used to...

you know, visually what that type of practice looks like. It can be a little bit discouraging at times, but now they, now they're starting to really get it. And when we see another opponent that's not used to. let's just call it the level of pressure we're putting on defense, how much we're jumping picks or, you know. Those types of things that can make the stick work look sloppy or really handling pressure, stuff like that.

It doesn't look the same as your classic, like putting cones up all over the field and really clean practice that someone would walk by and be like, wow, that team is really, really dialed in. Our practices, you know, we do a lot of stuff with tennis balls and sometimes polls are playing offense with tennis balls and it just looks like a mess. But I am still convinced that they're learning the game at a higher rate than they might be. in isolation doing something that looks a lot cleaner.

And, you know, back to the variability in practice or how we're training and being adaptable. I think that's the word that I always come back to is like, how can we be more adaptable both on the field and then also on the sideline as coaches?

based on what our opponent is doing you know it's great to have a and open clear you know if that's your your go-to clear you know then then we'll go open and usually it works but all of a sudden if a team is pressing three down and you've got two guys stretch deep and they don't know that in that case, you need to come back to the ball, then it's a real problem. Or if we're always running a, you know, a drop back or a 10 man ride.

but we understand that the goalie and the defenseman are actually not too good at handling, you know, maybe we'd be better off running a drop ride where we trap guys at the midline, or maybe they run like a four across. So. Yes, it's important to be able to kind of plan game to game. And you have to be able to give your offense a look if you're on defense. So it's really important, even if you are a team that wants to fight through.

you know, picks and switch. If you have to, you're going to play a game that likes to stack and whack and get under picks. So being able to work on, you know, those reads and those, those coverage solutions is really important as well. And the more deceptive you are and the more variable you are on defense, then you can kind of catch teams off guard.

work a different coverage that maybe they weren't expecting. So I think that, I think those are just a couple of my thoughts in terms of variability, in terms of how you like to play. Also, if you're open-minded to playing differently than maybe you did the years past because you have different personnel or whatever, then you might actually find something.

that you might not have found otherwise if you were a little bit more stubborn and you were just like, this is how we play. Figure it out. This is how we're going to play. I don't care what the other team is doing. I don't care what our strengths are and what our weaknesses are.

we've actually already uncovered some things that we do pretty well that we did not do well last year. How do you even define what makes you feel good about a practice then? For me as a coach or if I was a player that was frustrated? Well, for you as a coach, a lot of times that was a great practice. We were sharp today. That might be.

a way that, that you might look at a practice, but it sounds like you're not looking at it that way because you're okay with the messiness, but how, how, how would you define if you were happy with a practice? Well, I think it starts off, you know, this, this isn't really. quite in the lens of ecological dynamics but for us it's like controlling the controllables so effort attitude and toughness like that's got to be a staple

Every coach would agree if there wasn't great effort, great attitude and great toughness in practice, you're not going to feel good about it. But on top of that, it's really about like from a practice design standpoint. Was it representative of the game? You know, are we learning situations that where are we putting our guys in situations that they're going to encounter in a game where. we see them really figuring it out on their own. Are the small sided games that we're designing

Um, back to that, like boredom versus anxiety, like, is it close? Was it too easy? Was it too hard? Um, and we just take that. And then the next time we do that, we'll have to change it a little bit. If, if one of those things is the case. Are our guys engaged? You know, like, are there enough cages going on? Because if there's two cages going on and there's 20 guys that are on the sideline, kind of just chatting in the back of the line, then that's not a great practice. That's on us as coaches.

so i think like time on task overall engagement the types of things that they're learning and then ultimately like the effort attitude and toughness that they're exhibiting throughout the course of a practice is usually some of the stuff that we're looking for. I love it. How about when you see a player figure something out and see it, you know, you wanted them to.

You wanted them to see something. Maybe it was a coverage. Maybe it was a solution to something that you wanted them to kind of be able to figure out. Can you give some examples on that? Because I feel like that's one of the ways that I kind of get excited about a practice. And I agree with all the things that you said, but one of the things I love to see is were we able to create a situation that was new and they were able to figure out new solutions or.

Were they able to figure out how to execute within a principle of play, a specific part of the game that is really important for performance? And were they able to figure out a solution to be able to capitalize on that, whether it was on offense or defense? Yeah, I would agree. I mean, that's like, we would just call that like an unlock, you know, like when we would come together.

come together as a small group, you know, after working on something, we would just have a quick conversation and reflect and just give the guys the opportunity to quickly talk about like, Hey guys, any, any unlocks, you know, like what did we. What did we learn? And I think those quick conversations can be really impactful.

The other day, you know, Jamie, I got this one from you, the whole like, look at me, look at the ball concept of, you know, positioning yourself off ball so that your defender cannot. be in that flat triangle and see man and see ball. Like that's a defensive principle is our posture and being sideways and getting head turns. So offensively, we were working on being right behind our guy so that he either had to stare at the baller.

stare at you. And so we had our offensive guys commanding their defender to either look at me or look at the ball. And when they would look at the ball, it was a great time for a back cut or to get open with a quick V cut. Or if we said, look at me, the whole goal was to get the feeder to understand that like that guy's open because the off-ball defender can't see the ball in that instance.

And so that was one of the things that we were working on and we had to scale it back a little bit. We originally were doing it in like a four on four where the off ball guys could command their guys to look at me or look at the ball. And then I was like, all right, let's just do it in a two on two. And I feel like that was really like an easier opportunity to unlock that solution that we were looking for.

So that would just be like an example of something that we then saw on film later that day of, you know, like you're the crease guy and you're setting your guy up to slide. And instead of allowing the hot guy to see both. Our guy like got right behind that slider and then was able to back cut him. So that's like something that in real time we would try and like.

We don't like to waste a lot of time talking as coaches in practice. We like to film everything and then do our teaching and film. But in that moment, if you're able to blow the whistle and. And like really hype up that person and be like, that was awesome, you know, because everybody saw it. And it's not a guy that he's just naturally does that. That's again, kind of that like unlock.

principle that we were always looking for in practice. I love it. I want to go back to the effort, attitude, toughness concept. Do you feel like... Using more context and competitiveness naturally brings that out of the athletes. And how often are you finding that you're not happy with the effort, the toughness, the attitude? with this type of a practice versus maybe how it was when it was more about pure execution and less competitiveness and less context.

Yeah, that's a great question. And I'd say it's one of the hardest things to balance in this type of environment, in this type of practice, because. By nature of trying to scale reps and scale opportunities to make decisions and learn new things, you do have to slow things down a little bit.

A lot more of our drills are done with tennis balls. A lot more of our drills are done like with offensive guys playing defense. And so it's not that natural competitive nature of like six on six competitive, like, you know. Offense, give me your best. Defense, give me your best. That's always going to ramp things up, especially when you put a scoring system on it and you put something on the line. And so understanding kind of.

the balance that we're trying to create and being clear and intentional with our communication to our offensive and defensive guys we're in when we're in that you know kind of more small sided nature of you know it Effort isn't always about like physical dominance. A lot of times it's more about like being open minded and being curious and being focused. And I think that or communicating like.

Communication and having exact communication, elite communication, that's really a principle that runs across everything that we're doing. And you have to be willing to communicate and you have to be willing to try new things.

um you know a guy like george mumford would talk about right effort you know it's a it's kind of a mindfulness concept um and right effort is going to be different for different situations um you know how you approach uh running a marathon versus how you're going to approach running a two hard 200 yard sprint is going to be different um it's a different task constraint and how you're going to approach

You know, surfing a two foot wave versus 20 foot wave is going to be different as well. It's going to require a different level of intensity and a different level of focus. And so. we try and teach our guys that because it would be very easy to have the small-sided stuff just turn into goofing around like, Coach, why are we doing this?

It's not very hard, but we do need them to focus. We do need them to communicate and we do need them to be open-minded if they're going to learn these new skills that we're hoping they'll learn.

Would you say that their effort, attitude, and toughness when you make it competitive six on six, give me your best, is easier to come by than in a small-sided game? Yeah, I would. I would say that that comes a lot more naturally to them. You know, you have the back and forth of like the D guys on the sideline hooting and hollering, the offensive guys, you know, getting jacked up after every goal.

There's a scoring system in place. We're playing for something, whether it's just for pride or as part of our competitive cauldron where we kind of track wins and losses. throughout the course of the season. So we 100% value competing in everything. So the effort piece, for sure. The attitude piece, I think, you know.

You just have to have a great attitude and an open mind and joy with whatever we're doing. So maybe not so much. And I think from a toughness standpoint, anytime you're really banging bodies and getting after it, that's going to. emerge more in that six on six competitive versus anything with a tennis ball. You know, if you just like blow someone up with a tennis ball, it's not, it's not cool. So

The reason why I'm sort of bringing this up, though, is just because I think so much of it is in our control. It's certainly harder to get competitiveness with no context if there's no defense. you know it's you can compete with like all right can you do it 10 times in a row or something like that and you can call that you know you can you can you can really dive into the focus if you're doing empty net shooting drills i heard a story the other day of uh

a coach that had said something like, this is BS. I'm watching the film of these guys and I'm pissed. They're just not working hard enough. And they were, they were just shooting on an empty net, you know, two line shooting. And it's like, well, what, what.

What would you want them to do? They're missing the net every time. Well, they're probably trying to hit a corner because there's like, there's no goalie in the net. There's no defender on them and they're just shooting. Obviously, whenever you add...

context of defenders, it's going to amp up the competitiveness. And then anytime you make something competitive, and you said that too, like, you know, when we play six on six competitive and people are hooting and hollering, there's something to play for, they're going to play harder.

I personally have like played in like no equipment pickup games that are insanely competitive. I'm trying to win. There's no equipment. We're not allowed to run each other over and we can't blow each other up. And we are playing with tennis balls, but like the ground ball scraps are epic. And I'm just wondering from your own perspective, how much of how much of this is sort of within your control of how to change the environment, make it more competitive or do something.

Sometimes if you just do the same thing over and over for too long, it just gets that way. It gets stale. Wouldn't you say like if you do like you could probably get five or seven good minutes out of somebody doing a small night game with competition, but then maybe. You know, if you did it for 20 minutes, it would probably start to slow down and get stale or whatever. Are there things that we can do as coaches to create the environment that will get us that?

That competitiveness so that we're getting the look. So that if you're playing O guys against O guys with small nets, that you're getting them to compete harder and give you a better look defensively for what you need. As opposed to when you just rep something out. it's a little bit harder than if it's competitive. Would you agree? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that there's always going to be things that coaches can do to make drills more engaging and more competitive.

I was referring more to like the small sided drill. That's maybe like one V one plus a picker off ball, which is in many ways, like it's almost like a shooting drill and you can make that competitive if you want. But I think that what you're trying to bring out of that, you know, that small sided drill might be more of, you know, like learning little nuances of the game. So I don't I think we do a pretty good job of.

making as many things competitive as we can. But I also think that there in some cases is a downside to competition where like, if you're just trying to win. at all times, then you might end up doing the same stuff that you always do. For example, one of the concepts that I learned a while back was that concept of underloading. Jamie, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, you know.

we have this in common we both love pickup and i i play pickup all the time here at home and sometimes it'll be my neighbor across the street you know who played at Virginia and sometimes it'll be like a 12 year old kid who literally just started playing lacrosse. And so, you know, again, it's an individual constraint, but what I've found is that. naturally my game will change just a little bit based on

the guys that I'm playing with and the guys that I'm playing against. And I'm more willing to be creative and deceptive and try things that are more outside of my comfort zone. If I'm playing against. you know, I'm more likely to try those things if I'm playing against a lesser opponent. Whereas if I was to go play, you know, in the PLL championship series right now is a 37 year old, you know, former D middie.

I would probably just like do my absolute best to survive and communicate. And it's kind of like any lacrosse player.

that goes out and plays pickup basketball what are they going to do they're going to try really hard on defense they're going to hustle they're going to communicate maybe run a little transition and then you play against a really good basketball player who's just going to make things look so easy So that underloading concept in terms of how you put it into your small sided games, I think can be important as well.

Because if it's always competitive and you're always like our best versus your best, offense versus defense, you're not quite as likely to develop. the skills in a way that you might have otherwise, if that makes sense. So when it's offense against offense in a small-sided game, and it's not as full contact competitive as you might want it, there's still going to be some skills that emerge that guys do some stuff that they...

might not otherwise do if they're getting the crap beaten out of them. And those things will translate to real life. Michael Sowers talks about this. Michael Sowers has become a good friend and I've been working with him for about the last 15 months. And there's just a pretty cool article in USA Lacrosse about him playing pickup. And he swears by it. He played two or three times a week with high school kids for the year leading into the 2024 season.

And he's playing as high school kids. Talk about underloading. I mean, he's like, you know, one of the best players in the world. He's playing against high school kids, but all of a sudden skills began to emerge and he actually learned how to slow down, which is one of the most. challenging things. He told me the other day, Jamie, you got to do a reel on slowing down. Slowing down for him is the hardest thing. He's just so 100% speed, but it gets him in trouble.

probably has got him some concussions over the years. And it definitely gets in the way of his productivity because you're easier to guard if you're only going 100%.

So that's a really, really interesting sort of way of thinking about it. And the reason why I was bringing it up is that I do think that there are – when you bring up the example of, all right, well, when we're doing a one-on-one plus a picker drill and maybe they're not giving us like –

quite as good of a look maybe you know that that maybe that's straight up you know you just got to give us a better look and that's an effort thing um However, maybe you can figure out a way to reduce the space a little bit or create, you know, the offense has to score in these ways. as a way to make it competitive so they don't keep doing the exact same thing. And I just think there's probably more power behind what we can do as coaches to even influence.

you know, the effort, the attitude, you know, if you keep doing the same thing over and over, obviously people are going to get bored, you know, and, and, and, and if you change it up and you give them new tasks and make it challenging enough, but not too challenging, it brings me to a. I want to move on from this in a second, but I've been thinking about this a little bit, which is the aha moment for me with the CLA was I was pretty... diligent about trying to teach every

thing i could think of to athletes i i had to listen let's just say 150 skills of of dodges of deception of two-man game of reads of shots of feeds i mean anything and everything and i Like most coaches, I did understand constraints and I was trying to put them in situations where I was teaching them things. And my biggest frustration as a coach was.

Why is it that I know these kids can do all these things, but yet they're not doing them in games? And I think that's the general frustration that we all have as coaches for one reason or another. Like, I don't know, our kids don't seem to be committed. Maybe they're not committed enough or maybe they're not good enough shape or maybe they're not smart enough or maybe they're not tough enough and all these things.

When my aha moment was maybe I have to take a different approach because I know they know how to do it. I've seen them do it. They can do it anytime I ask them to do it. I put them in a situation where I want it to happen. It'll happen. But yet it's not happening. Maybe it's the approach. And I think we all know this because as coaches, we have had a lot of experience where we know stuff works.

But I think there's other times where we think stuff works. But if it's not working, maybe we have to come up with a different approach. And I think that's one of the things that I would... Have any coach contemplate, what are your frustrations? What's not working? And how can we create a situation through these constraints where we already know that these constraints are an explanation for how things are actually even happening?

And how can we create situations where the players are engaged because it is competitive or it's fun or it's variable or it's challenging but not too challenging? Um, so anyways, that's just something I've been sort of thinking about. Do you have any, any comments on that? No, I think, um, I think you, you know, that's, I've, I've experienced the same thing and I, I agree with everything that you're saying.

you know, that's also led me down this path. And I think it comes back to like acceptance, you know, if something's not working and if you're not getting the results that you want, you know, the first thing you have to do is accept it and think of other ways that. you know, other ways that you can train certain skills and, you know, do things differently to make things better. But there's definitely a reason for it. You just have to uncover that reason. I can just think of myself being like,

How many freaking times have I told you X, Y, Z? That's on me. If I have to tell somebody the same thing that many times and it's still not happening, that's on me in terms of designing the situation. or figuring out how to emphasize it or maybe reduce the amount of things that I'm emphasizing so that the thing that is most important to me is actually happening. And that's where like, really, I feel like this.

You know, back to when you're talking about environmental constraints and you're talking about the two net game and how all of a sudden the defense was in this bad position, even though they had been in great position. But I feel like. The more you put your players in all sorts of different constraints, the more adaptable they become, the more adaptable you become, and the more you allow.

them to figure it out, the more likely they are to be able to do these things that you've told them a million freaking times to try to get stuff done. Because it becomes an environmental constraint too, where it's just like, If you're not successful, then that's probably good because unless it's too hard, if you're not successful, then that's perfect. Because if I wanted you to like. Get a shot with your stick to the middle and we're playing on a small net

and you keep shooting shots that don't go in with your stick down the side, eventually you're going to learn that your stick has to be in the middle to score because it's a small net and that's the use of a constraint. That's why boxer cross players tend to shoot at a higher percentage than U.S. players is because they just get used to not shooting.

an alley shot versus getting to the middle. And so therefore the constraint ends up doing the teaching. It doesn't really matter how, how much your players know in some ways it matters what they do. And so.

you know, I just feel like it's really interesting, but I want to switch gears. Just to add to that, like, I think that's kind of leadership 101 is that phrase, like it's on me. And is it, is a coach, if you can be okay with like, you know, subpar performance. And if you can just be like, all right, that, you know, that's on me, you know, how can, how can we train better? How can we develop a better culture? How can I recruit better? Like anytime you fail, it is on you.

And not that you have to like totally beat yourself up about it because everybody is doing the best that they can. But again, coming back to like accepting that when you lose or when something's not working, it is on you. But then when things go well and it does work, it's always about the players. That's what I feel like is most important as a coach. When things go well and your players make plays and you win games, it truly is about the players on the field executing.

But if you can just be okay with the fact that any loss, any blowout, any bad practice, like if you can just reflect back and say, all right, that one's on me. We got to do better next time. Then I think your players. your players see that and they're able to kind of trust you as a leader as well. Yeah, I totally agree. All right. I want to switch gears and talk about the word affordances. And I talked about this, I think a little bit.

on my podcast earlier this year with like tim mccormick but an affordance is an ecological term for an opportunity to act or or better stated an invitation to act so like if you get the ball and you see space it would be an invitation to attack it um On the defensive side, if you see somebody getting beat, that becomes an invitation to be able to help. And within all of these constraints that we're designing, we're trying to create a landscape.

for players to be able to see these opportunities because it's their ability to see it is really truly what makes a player a good player. They can recognize a coverage. They can recognize how they're being played. They can. And it's not so much of like an identification of the whole thing. It's kind of an instantaneous thing. But you're just sort of recognizing, is this an opportunity for me to do something?

Really quickly, what are some constraints that you've used to try to create? Let's just think of something you want your players to be able to do on either side of the ball. And how have you created constraints that are making these invitations more bold or more enticing so that they will do this?

in the scope of performance, in the scope of like, we need to get better at doing this thing. Yeah, I mean, I'd say that there's two that come to mind that we're working on right now. On the offensive side of the ball, we're trying to... trying to make people overplay us a little bit more with deception or call it like baiting checks like yesterday we were working on giving our offensive guys like a half a step towards the middle

And instead of just like releasing our shots on time, we're trying to show some type of, you know, posture or body language that we were about to release our shot just to draw a check prematurely from the defensive guys. so that then we could get our shot off soon after that. We feel like a lot of times you beat your guy, but the defense is able to time it up with that one last-ditch effort to get a trail check or to get a check to the glove.

We tried to work with our guys on drawing a check earlier so that now the defense can't check again immediately and we can get more of a hands-free shot. And defensively, we're working on more opportunities to double team and to throw checks. And I think, you know, back when you were playing. jamie like checks were a big part of the game and then they kind of went away a little bit more with the stick technology and stuff like that there's definitely still opportunities

you know, in today's game to put the ball on the ground. And so we've been putting our guys in situations where we're doubling picks or we're throwing different types of checks or setting up different types of checks in different ways um that aren't big risks to us defensively um so there there are there's all these opportunities for action that might not be like your typical

you know blow by your guy and either you know move it forward move it back or or shoot if there's not a slide um there's there's more to it than that and the guys that are the best in the world the guys that are the most fluent and have the highest iqs realize those little advantages that show up because the easy advantages on offense are, you know, they're easy to identify.

and act upon but it's just as easy for the defense to act upon those and that's how all defenses are trained to slide and recover um it's kind of the little moments between the moments that make world-class players you know who they are Yeah, you watch Ryder Garnsey. How does he get shots off coming up the hash when he never has that big of a step? He shows shot, draws a check, and then once they check, they can't check again immediately. Like you said, that's amazing.

from the double team and those opportunities, the invitations to double. You get some guys when you first start doing it and they're just doubling in such a way that... It's so obvious. They probably should have turned down that opportunity. And it's the same thing with checking. I mean, checking can be great, but it can really kill you. And it's going for that check.

when when when it's not a good time to do it and you might want to have declined that over the head check way out when you don't have help but you might even accept that over the head check opportunity You know, when you're going over a pick and you know you've got a shorty standing right there because you've got the help. And so those are some of the things that people can understand. But what I wanted to do was chat a little bit about the concept of shared affordances.

which I think is incredibly interesting. And it flows into the concepts of principles of play. But really what great players and great teams do is they're all seeing the same affordances. So on defense, you know, we talk about all the off-ball players. recognizing the quality of defense on the ball. That's a shared affordance. I can see that this was a difficult approach, and this guy's probably going to get run by. The middie didn't get a chunk of him.

And all of the defenders need to be not just the slider, although that's a shared affordance, but it's all the rest of the defenders that are basically sharing this affordance. That's what team play is. Same thing on the offensive side. If we see that there's going to be a double team, somebody has to. you know you if you see like somebody jumping a pick there's going to be an outlet that's going to probably try to get open he'll see that coming and then all of a sudden you can throw it to him

So that you can maybe hit the slip rather than just try to throw it to the slip. And this occurs in so many different ways. And I just wanted to just open up this conversation about. shared affordances and how we, this is the IQ of the game, right? When we talk about lacrosse IQ, it's really shared affordances. It's the ability to operate in these situations and these performance situations.

together within the scope of our principles of play. And I just wanted you to just talk a little bit about your thoughts on this concept of shared affordances and how you view it, maybe how you would develop it. Yeah, I haven't thought too much about that particular term, but I think it for me, what resonates is coming back to variability and like. training your team to recognize those shared affordances. And if you're only seeing the same style of defense or the same style of.

offense you know every day in practice or you know if a lot of the teams in your league kind of play you know pairs offense and you see the same thing all the time it's going to be harder to recognize those shared affordances so For example, there was a couple of teams we played last year. Probably the equivalent at the D1 level is maybe like the way Colgate plays defense. It's a little bit unique. you know, got used to kind of

not making as big of an emphasis on having outlets like right away, just based on, I guess, the way that we play defense, you know, they can kind of figure out how to get an outlet there if we need to. That's like one of the biggest reads. But you're just like eventually going to play a defense that's almost going to slide to everything. And so we had to.

train in a way like a drill that we would do is that 55 rapid fire which is like a dodge pass pass dodge slide to everything and that drill is going to train your offensive guys to make sure that there's an outlet like right away because that slide is coming right away. And, you know, teams that slide that early are usually good at cracking the pop and rotating into throwbacks, like really, really fast as well. So how you might play versus a defense like that, it might, it might.

give you more shared affordances than a defense that doesn't slide at all. And that might teach you how to bounce and hesitate and create more space to dodge one-on-one or a defense that really, really presses out. you know to to your earlier example about like double teaming you know um

You might need to move the ball quickly out of that double and then have that guy be the feeder as opposed to the, you know, the ball carrier being the feeder. And then you might play a game that plays really, really packed in, like their short sticks don't want to even guard you outside the box.

And then you might have more shared affordances of like, hey, guys, going into this game, we really need to get the ball lower and spread the defense out that way and get the ball through X and then whip it to the backside. And we might have to take some of those 12 yards.

shots we might have to look for our screenshots we might need to seal more off ball because they're more packed in by nature and like get a couple shots on cage early like so those are the different types of things that I think you start to look for, but the only way you know what to look for and more importantly, feel what to look for is by having variability in practice and also having variability in your schedule. for us.

You know, we knew that eventually within the trajectory of our program, like we had to play Tufts, you know, like Tufts has a very unique style of play. And, you know, whether you win or you lose, like it's great to put yourself in that situation.

know kind of what it's going to bring out of you physically mentally and all the others and they're very different from another team that we play all the time Salisbury they play very different and there's no right or wrong those are they have different principles of play but no how you can be successful and knowing some of the challenges that both of those different teams present, I think is really healthy for your program. Yeah, I totally agree.

about a huge emphasis on communication. I mean communication might be one of the best examples of shared affordances. You know, when you see something, maybe your teammate doesn't see what you're seeing. That's why having a great communicator is so important because you can end up, you know, coordinating your group through the communication so that you will have.

those shared affordances um and i also think about this concept i mean it's obvious this is a different way of saying what we're already doing which is we're trying to get players to play together and we're trying to do them within these principles. And I think that's why it's so important.

If you're too rigid with your structure, if you're too rigid with your structure, then you'll start focusing on the structure and not so much on the shared affordances. So if you have a pattern on offense where people have to move, they will focus more on... the pattern than what the defense is actually doing and how to capitalize on it. I would say defensively.

Everything is more ecological because you have to kind of react to what the offense is doing anyways. But you can sort of have a... a structure of like hey we really would rather force people down the side and and we'd rather you know slide earlier slide later or whatever but there's going to be there's going to be times when they beat you top side and you have to be able to sort of see that coming and you can you can see a midi

you know, a lefty middy on the righty alley that's bouncing around, you know, that guy's probably going to be rolling back on your shorty, you know? And so being able to create these opportunities for your team to be able to see these things within the scope of your principles of play. allowing those principles of play also to be flexible enough that we can actually recognize shared affordances instead of trying to remember the exact rule or the exact structure.

Yeah, I mean, I think the longer I've been coaching, the more I've realized that communication, like both verbal and nonverbal, might be the most important principle there is. And in terms of how that translates to the way we train, if you're doing things in isolation, what is there to talk about? You know, there's really nothing to talk about. There's no information.

There's no information. And whether it's like the nonverbal communication of, you know, deception with your opponent, you know, hey, I'm looking like I'm going to use the pick and then I refuse it. or whether it's like two off-ball guys working together and one guy simply just saying, hey, cut, you know, and that guy cuts and he takes someone with him and it opens you up.

When we used to do a zigzag drill, you know, your classic like skeleton passing. And it's not like there's anything wrong for that, but not wrong with that. But now we just add pressure. You know, we put.

um put one defender on that guy is we're kind of working the ball up and down the field and then we were like okay now you have to um you have to get it out in one cradle and now all of a sudden like If I'm the next guy in line and I know that you need to throw me the ball within one cradle, now I have to start talking to you so you know.

you know jamie you know use your first name and now you know generally speaking where i am or if i'm inside or i'm outside so like it's just a simple example of how Communication, I think, is like one of the ultimate ways to look for IQ when we're recruiting because guys that are talking generally have a good. you know, understanding of the game and they're able to anticipate things before they happen.

And so none of that happens if we're doing things in isolation without a defense or without making them, you know, without showing affordances throughout, throughout our drills and our training. So true. So interesting. Mikey, thank you so much for coming on. Best of luck to seeing you in this upcoming season. Can't wait to watch you guys play. And as always, love talking lacrosse with you.

Yeah. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me on. I've really enjoyed all these conversations and some of these things that... that you have mentioned regarding competition and stuff like that. So my hope is that five years from now, we'll be doing things a lot better than we are right now. And definitely.

definitely don't know all the answers and know that i have a lot to learn so i appreciate everything that i've learned from you and so many of your your other guests that you've had on um along the way so thank you very much thanks brother