Can You Compete?
“He made his players relentlessly play against each other, in one-on-one, head-to-head competitions, so that they learned the psychological dimensions needed to compete.”
I recently had a conversation with a college coach who was bored by the glorification of velocity readings on pulldowns and max velo bullpen sessions.
In his experience, while velocity has increased in the college ranks, the ability to compete in-game has not.
He acknowledged that velocity and stuff matter in today’s game but can that same person with a triple-digit pulldown video throw strike one regularly? Can they spin their secondary pitch for a strike in a hitter’s count? Can they execute when runners are in scoring position? Simply put, can they compete?
Chemically speaking, the human body reacts to competition in an interesting way.
Researchers studied first-time skydivers and found that their stress levels dropped after each subsequent jump. So jumpers grew more comfortable with each descent out of perfectly good airplanes. By the third jump, their stress levels were about the same as someone sitting in traffic that was making them late for work.
In another similar study, researchers studied stress levels of professional ballroom dancers in competitions. They found that dancers with decades of experience had the same stress reaction as skydivers leaping for the first time. The reason for this heightened level of stress was triggered by being judged or, in other words, competition.
Skydivers, who weren’t judged on their performance (aside from the ultimate pass/fail), grew accustomed quickly. But no matter how many years of experience the ballroom dancer had performed in front of others, they still had increased amounts of stress when it counted. The body perceives the competition as a threat.
“In a threat situation, the expectations are very high,” writes authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in their book, Top Dog, a look at the science of winning and losing. “You know you are being judged, and you feel you can’t make a single mistake. Despite the intensity of the competition, the fear of mistakes invokes that prevention-orientation: you’re trying to prevent catastrophe rather than initiate success. Competitors feel more anxious, less energetic, and avoidant.”
This is why we’ll see someone throw a flawless bullpen or mow down teammates in practice but fall apart once the umpire yells “play ball.”
Training the physical aspect is no doubt important — the pulldowns, offseason max effort bullpens, and weight training do matter — but it raises the question if teams are doing enough to help players control the emotional and mental aspects of the game in order to perform at high levels.
Competitive environments are difficult to create.
Most teams default to scrimmages and live ABs to spark that competitive fire. However studies have shown that players feel more comfortable among their peers and teammates, failing to initiate that internal blaze of stress that exists in real games. There’s simply less at stake.
To combat this, University of North Carolina’s Anson Dorrance introduced a competition cauldron to his women’s soccer program: he dials the stress way up during practice so that the game’s feel less stressed by comparison.
“Every game and scrimmage in practice had a score, and that score was written down for season-long rankings,” Bronson and Merryman wrote. “He made his players relentlessly play against each other, in one-on-one, head-to-head competitions, so that they learned the psychological dimensions needed to compete.”
What Dorrance created was a significant stake in the practice session. He manipulated anxiety. Whereas the ballroom dancers often worked on perfecting their skills away from competition and stressful situations, Dorrance made practices one big judgment zone. By increasing the stress at the practice level, the player’s can acclimate to that feeling, slowly desensitizing to the stress of game competition.
But creating the competitive environment does not necessarily translate into players who can handle that pressure. The trick is convincing yourself that the competition setting is not threatening but a challenge that needs to be met.
Bronson and Merryman found that the biggest separator for amateur competitors and professionals is how they interpret anxiety in competitive situations. Professionals “recognize that they are anxious, but they also remain confident that they’re still in control and well prepared, and that their goals are attainable. They’re stressed, but not threatened. In this state of mind, higher levels of arousal help them perform their best.” They can control their emotions.
Amateur players likely need to receive more guidance for things like breathing techniques and mental focusing exercises, helping control their response to stress. As discussed in Steven Kotler’s The Art of Impossible, by equalizing inhales and exhales, the sympathetic response (fight or flight) is balanced with the parasympathetic response (rest and relax). This state calms the body and increases focus. Being able to do this during competitive scenarios is a big life hack.
These are aspects of the game that are not practiced enough. Understandably, when schedules are tight, it’s difficult to find the time to introduce stressful moments to focus on breathing. When teams only have a handful of coaches, it’s challenging to track every action in a season-long scoring system. Yet this may be what is needed to get better: Amping up competition in practice so that players can work on controlling their response in those moments.
So while the physical aspect of training is good for development, being able to control and command the emotional side may help them become true competitors.
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