Scott Wylie, co-founder of S2 Cognition, returns to Slappin’ Glass for a deeper look at how athletes process the game at speed — and how coaches can use that information to better teach, train, and build around their players.
The conversation moves from theory into application: matching systems to cognitive profiles, understanding the trade-off between decision speed and accuracy, and designing practices that help players make better decisions under pressure. Scott also breaks down how stress, fatigue, spatial awareness, distraction control, and improvisation shape performance in real game environments.
In this week’s Start, Sub, or Sit, Scott discusses what elite players do differently: seeing things earlier, processing faster, and controlling impulses and distractions when the game speeds up.
What You’ll Learn
- How S2 Cognition evaluates decision-making
Scott explains the nine systems S2 measures, including visual processing, spatial awareness, decision complexity, instinctive learning, impulse control, distraction control, and improvisation. - Why cognitive fit matters
Not every player processes the game the same way. Scott discusses why some players thrive in open, read-based systems while others fit better in more structured environments. - The speed-accuracy trade-off
Playing faster does not automatically mean playing better. Scott explains how coaches can help players toggle between speed and control. - How pressure changes processing
The conversation explores how fatigue, stress, anxiety, and game environment can affect a player’s decision-making. - Why spatial awareness matters
Scott and Dan discuss how spatial awareness can influence shot selection, positioning, passing windows, and a player’s sense of being open. - How to train adaptability
Scott introduces “VEX drills” — practice designs that violate expectations and force players to adapt when the normal solution disappears. - What separates elite players
The best players are not simply faster reactors. They anticipate earlier, control impulses, block out distractions, and stay flexible in chaos.
Transcript
Scott Wylie 00:00
It’s not how fast you react that is the separator of these elite athletes, it’s all these systems in the brain that protect and insulate your reactions when you’re operating in chaos. We’re trying to train athletes to be automatic, to make these quick, read, react decisions without having to think much. We’re training stability on the one hand, right? We want athletes to make stable, consistent decisions.
Well, this is a game that doesn’t invite itself to predictability. It’s chaotic. Things break down, things change all the time. So we want athletes who are both stable in some respects, but also flexible in other respects.
Dan Krikorian 00:45
Welcome to Slappin’ Glass, exploring basketball’s best ideas, strategies, and coaches from around the world. Today, we’re excited to welcome back to the podcast for a second time, co-founder of S2 Cognition, Scott Wiley. Scott’s first appearance on the podcast was one of our most popular and talked about episodes, so we’re bringing him back to discuss matching systems with players’ cognitive profiles, and we discuss VEX drills, anticipation, and instinctive learning during the always fun, start, sub, or sit.
The Practice Lab is now live inside SG+. It’s a new space for building with Drew Dunlop around practice design, player development, and helping coaches bring ideas from film and workouts onto the floor. Think of it as a workshop for coaches, a place to study practice ideas, tinker with the constraints, and take something back to your next session. Drew walks through each idea with voiceover breakdowns, looking at what the drill is teaching, what cues players are learning to read, and how coaches can shape the task for their own players and system. It’s another major addition to SG+, alongside our film breakdowns, newsletters, podcast extras, clinic presentations, and growing coaching archive. You can explore the Practice Lab now on SGTV. And now, please enjoy our conversation with Scott Wiley.
Scott Wylie 02:39
Yeah, sure. S2 cognition, we started it to really tap into how athletes are uniquely wired to process, and this is critical, at game speed. And so when you think about human decision making, thinking, there are different layers. And so the kinds of thinking we do when we’re shopping or ordering a burger are very different than what happens on the court.
The sheer speed, the complexity, the dynamic ways that the environment’s changing. You’ve got to control your actions, your reactions. You’ve got to see things happen quickly. You’ve got to toggle between seeing the person right in front of you and what they’re doing and read those cues to broadening your attention across space, across the court, and track where and how everyone’s moving. Think of transition moments where you’re having to pick up and make decisions, and you’ve got a disadvantage count in front of you here, and four on two, and you’ve got to read and make a quick split-second decision. That kind of processing engages very different brain systems, brain networks, than everyday sorts of thinking. And so our evaluation comes out of the cognitive neurosciences. And Brandon from our career studying these fast processing decision making systems, reaction systems, visual processing systems, and we felt that there was a real important need in sports. And if we could help players, coaches, organizations better understand the unique ways each athlete is wired, that puts us in a position to be able to train differently, utilize, maximize how a player sees and processes at game speed, which generally speaking, we’re kind of guessing. We see the outcomes of bad decisions, but we don’t know the why. And so that was really our motivation was to provide the why, underlying how athletes process, the things they do well, and the things that can lead to inconsistency, errors in their decision making. And so our evaluation, it’s like nothing else. It brings the heat. It’s fast. It’s dynamic. It’s getting your max rep for your brain, these different brain systems, so that you can break down and see the unique ways that athletes are processing.
Dan Krikorian 05:12
Scott, could we talk briefly the layers of what you all end up testing for the
Scott Wylie 05:17
The evaluation takes about 45 minutes, which is our standard collegiate and professional evaluation. It’s broken into measuring nine different systems in the brain. Three of them are how we process visual information, different ways that the brain handles visual details, visual processing. So there’s perception speed, which is how fast you process what you see. That’s reading visual cues, and especially when things are happening and changing fast. Search efficiency has to do with how fast you can scan when you’re turning your visual attention to a new part of the court, or maybe you drove and you got cut off and you’ve got to turn and scan quickly for an outlet. How fast can you scan through visual chaos and find targets? And then the last one is tracking capacity, which is how well you can broaden your attention across space and see where and how individual players are moving simultaneously.
You start thinking about anticipation and space opening up and where and how athletes are moving. Some people can track with great awareness in front of them and others have a little bit more tunnel vision. We have three additional skills that get into kind of the dynamic ways you’re using your memory systems to make decisions on the court, to start linking what you see to what you decide to do. Spatial awareness is ability to take in information about where people are. You can’t have your eyes at every point on the court. Your field of vision is limited. And so how well can you hold in mind where people are outside of your vision behind you? We have terms like, guys play with eyes in the back of their head for a reason because they just seem to have this 360 degree awareness. We look at decision complexity. How well you can load up options and complex rules, decision rules. You think of the high pick and roll and the different options that you may have to sift through very rapidly to make decisions. Some brains can handle complexity, others you really need to simplify. These read, react decision rules. And then instinctive learning, which is how well you pick up subtle tendencies and patterns of your opponent as the game goes on. The last set of skills gets at these dynamic ways that we control our actions. It’s what really separates dynamic athletes. It’s not simple reaction time or basic choice reaction time. It’s how well you can control your actions and reactions when things are happening unpredictably, things are changing dynamically. So how well can you control your impulses? There’s a reason fakes, jukes, crossovers work because you can get to your opponent the bite on an impulse, distraction control. There’s a reason we preach contesting shots because distractions can interfere with your ability to execute actions. And then improvisation is how well you can dynamically change in the moment, change your action course when something unexpectedly happens, breaks down. So really we’re talking about these skills that give an athlete this tremendous flexibility in chaos.
Dan Krikorian 08:33
And thanks for that primer and said this in the first one too, but I myself have both taken the test. So I know how hard it is and also been fortunate to test our whole roster for two straight back to back seasons. So some of my questions today obviously will come out of the fact that I’m a user and have used it a ton. And so thanks for going through all those things.
So I think with part one, we talked a lot about some of the theory behind it. And of course, we’ll get into some of that throughout sprinkled in today, but really want to talk about how coaches, organizations, staffs, when they do get the scores, the information and understand how both an individual player, but then a group of players processes information and what their strengths, weaknesses, all that are looking at the application side of it and the training, the design of offense, of roster construction, those kinds of things. And I guess how you’ve seen really good organizations and coaches use the tests that you all provide and the evaluations that they get back in ways that really enhance their roster or their teams.
Scott Wylie 09:36
Yeah. And I think you identified some of the layers of application, you know, at the individual level, our intent was to give coaches a look under the hood, if you will, understand what drives this athlete’s decision making. Every human brain processes things at a strong level and an elite level and can handle certain kinds of complexity. And then there are everyone’s wired differently, as we’ve talked about before, some of it’s to your genetics. Certainly athletes are shaping these systems from a very young age and very important and dynamic ways. I mean, these networks don’t get exercised when you’re doing a lot of everyday sorts of tasks. So now equipped with that individual insights, it allows you to start asking questions. Well, now we know why this person may make certain kinds of decision errors. Let’s try to adapt play. Let’s see if we can adapt and get some quick fixes, maybe where this athlete can’t handle complexity very well. We need to simplify the decision rules. This person is really impulsive, especially when they’re man up on someone who has a really fast Twitch profile. We need to back them off a little bit. Maybe they’re getting in trouble against faster players. It allows you to start asking and entertaining those questions because you know where they’re going to be vulnerable in their play.
It also allows you to start asking the really important question, which I think we’re just scratching the surface, is how do we then train these systems to function and operate more effectively in the game of basketball? And I think that’s where the field has really changed over the last few years, over the last 10 years, away from kind of off court type training on vision boards and technology because it doesn’t transfer and started asking questions about how do we create more dynamically engaging game-like progressions in our drills and in our exercises to help shape decision making. And that’s where you see the powerful impact of constraints led approaches, looking at how we shape the environment, how we shape the drills. You also have individual constraints though, so you put those two together. Now you’re really running and gunning, so to speak, in terms of matching individuals to very specific kinds of drills. So I think the training aspect, the next layer you alluded to is a really fun one, is how do I configure my starting five or my different combination of five and what are the trade-offs in terms of their play, their performance? Do I need high energy? I need this five to be a little more aggressive and I know the trade-off is they might turn the ball over, they might be a little impulsive, but I need some energy. I need to get things moving. Or am I in a situation where I need five who are going to be very disciplined decision makers, not turn the ball over, control the pace? Those kinds of questions, now you can start looking at the unique combinations of the cognitive skills of your players and adding that layer to how you construct those lineups and those rotations.
Patrick Carney 13:10
Scott, I think we’re going to come back to definitely the training approach to developing these skills and trade-offs, but if I can look at roster construction, and I’m really interested in marrying system to cognitive fit, and to give you two examples, if I’m a coach that wants to play more open-core, free-flowing, heavy-read, react-based, versus I’m a coach that wants to be more set-orientated, slow it down, really try to manage the game with those two kind of parameters, what, as a coach, cognitive skills should I be prioritizing when I look at player profiles or developing or selecting players for my team, for my style of play?
Scott Wylie 13:54
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s one that gets us real excited because now we’re starting to think about the way we play the system. And in our view, what we have really been driving over the last several years is this concept of fit, because not every brain is wired to fit in every system. And we’ve had so many conversations with coaches at the professional level, the collegiate level. They got a player who doesn’t perform well in their system. They moved to a different system and then all of a sudden out of nowhere, they’re flourishing, they’re thriving in that system. And you know, then you start out, well, what do we do wrong? And I, it’s probably has to do at least at some level with how the decision making dynamics fit with their unique way of processing. So that concept of fit is really important.
You know, a little bit more of an open free flowing, you probably want some athletes who can handle, you kind of mentioned it. Decision complexity. There’s a lot of open, read, react. You probably have to be able to improvise, right? If things are going to happen unexpectedly, it’s not as structured. You’ve got to be able to handle when things change unexpectedly or the defense adapts and you know what you are about to do breaks down or changes, and you’ve got to be able to adapt quickly. So you want some flexible thinkers who can also handle some complexity when you’re talking about, I don’t want to use the opposite, a more rigid system, but a more structured system where it’s vital that everyone is making the right decision, you’re probably looking at athletes who, you know, have good impulse control, can see the court really well, probably need a little bit of complexity in that system too. It depends where you’re playing, but you’re right. Matching the cognitive profile with the system is where I think over the next few years, we’re really going to start to appreciate those linkages. I know with, you know, one of the powerhouse college programs, the last couple of years, we sat down and did just that. And they had a few different styles of play, a few different concepts. And we sat down in a room and just whiteboard it all day. What players match which system and which framework and what were the trade-offs? And it just allows you to start asking those questions because the worst thing we can do is put someone in a position where it’s really highlighting the things that they struggle with and not emphasizing the things they do well. That’s frustrating for the player. It’s frustrating for the coach. And so it really, this lends itself to another piece of the puzzle that allows everyone to be on the same page, communicate more effectively, and make sure that we’re maximizing who you are as a decision maker, as a fast processor, and not putting you in a position to exploit things that you might struggle with.
Patrick Carney 16:46
Scott, within decision making, I think, especially as the game moves towards pace and playing faster, we hear a lot in talking to coaches and how we train, putting the importance first on the speed of decision versus the accuracy when starting out, that they value, hey, I want them to play fast, I just want them to make a decision, and then we’ll worry about it being the right decision. From your perspective and your expertise, when you look at decision making, does that hold up?
If you get their speed up, will the accuracy catch up? Is there a relationship, you know, I guess, the trade-off between speed and accuracy of decision making?
Scott Wylie 17:22
Yeah, we’re all familiar with trade-offs, right? You’re typing a text really fast, and you’re more likely to make mistakes. You’re trying to get it right because that’s going to somebody who, if you get it wrong, there’s repercussions. Yeah, you slow down to maintain that level of accuracy.
Those trade-offs are very real, and some athletes naturally gravitate towards wanting to play fast, make decisions fast. You put them in a range of reaction situations they’re going to err on the side of going as fast as they can and tolerate a little bit more inaccuracy. Other athletes, you push them, you press them, they get really uncomfortable. They would prefer to be a little more deliberate, a little more accurate and correct in their decisions and trade a little bit of speed. So these trade-offs are very real. We look at your speed accuracy trade-off across several of our tasks. We call it a metacognitive state because this is something that you can train. I can be really cautious. There’s a lot of drivers who seem to not be caring about anyone else on the road, and I can slow down. I got a 15-year-old, I’m teaching how to drive. And so these trade-offs, we talk about these trade-offs. Matter of fact, we talk about just about everything in our basketball battery constantly. And as they get a little comfortable, they try to push it a little bit. And so we’re talking about, when do you need to dial it back? When do you need to speed up? It is under our control. Even though there are natural gravitational pulls among individuals, it is under control. And so we probably need to practice those because you can set and teach someone to better toggle between being fast and being accurate. We do see in our profile that there are athletes who are among the fastest reactors of all the tens of thousands of athletes we’ve tested over the years who also maintain a really high degree of accuracy. They would be subject to the speed accuracy trade-off, but they’re unique. Their brain is different. They can go fast and accurate. But understanding those dynamics allows you to make decisions about if I push this group a little too fast, I know what I’m going to see on the court. Again, it gets back to there may be moments on the court where you tolerate mistakes. And if they can improvise well, they’re probably going to recover to your point. But there may be times where, hey, I’ve got a very controlled, deliberate style on the court that is going to probably play a little more cautious, a little slower, slow things down. And that may be important.
Dan Krikorian 20:01
Scott, you kind of touched on it briefly there, but I want to double down on players’ individual states of mind or emotional states and also the environment that they’re in and how that may or may not link to how they process. For example, a packed gym on the road versus a packed gym at home, does that affect a player’s cognitive decision-making based off certain factors? Also just a person’s emotional state. Did they break up with their girlfriend or boyfriend the night before? Did they get enough sleep? Did they eat? These other outside factors, as you put them in, how much do you see those things moving the degree of which they process up or down? Or does it affect it at all? How much work or thought do you guys put into that when you’re thinking about all this?
Scott Wylie 20:48
We tend to break down, hey, here’s your physical tools, your technical tools, your tactical, your psychological, and then your speeded cognitive tools. And we kind of treat them as pieces of the puzzle, but the reality is they’re all interconnected and there’s bi-directional influences.
And so if someone’s really depressed or someone’s overly anxious beyond kind of that healthy, you know, raising up of your alert system, and that can interfere with your physical execution, that can interfere with your decision making, where you put thresholds for making decisions, hesitation, obviously, if you’re overly anxious, lots of consequences. The same is true, though, that your emotional state can be driven by some of your cognitive challenges and difficulties. So if you put a player in a difficult processing situation, and that’s an area they struggle with, that can lead to anxiety and lack of confidence. But you’re exactly right. We’re looking at your underlying capacities, but the reality is those capacities can be fully expressed or can be suppressed a little bit under extreme stress, pressure, fatigue. We have the privilege of working with special forces, and those are the kinds of questions they’re really interested in exploring is, yeah, we get the capacities. We know how to configure our training environments to really push on individual vulnerabilities so that they’re better equipped and trained to deal with that when they face that in the theater. The other thing they’re interested in is when they go out and they’re fully kitted and trucking over rugged terrain for 16 hours, what are the performance degradations? Are there individual differences in how that impacts their certain aspects of their processing? And there are certainly, over the years of research, there are certainly systems that take a hit under pressure or under fatigue, but there are individual differences there, too. And so we’re beginning to explore that, testing players in different states and after fatigue when they’re worn out, when they’re highly anxious. And those, you have your baseline capacities, but the expression of those capacities can be modulated by some of these emotional states.
Dan Krikorian 23:12
When you talk about training and application of all this, would you suggest or think that from a training or coaching situation, it would be beneficial to train at that level of stress to see where these things break down for players to know? I guess what I’m getting at is the stressful environments that you put players in in practice and all that. When you’re thinking about applying this and knowing what’s under the hood, to put those players in that exact stressful situation to see where’s the breaking point versus not and then where you can or can’t go with them, I mean, I’m guessing it’s like an environmental question of how you build the environment of training.
Scott Wylie 23:49
It kind of depends who you’re training and where they’re at in their training, right? Because if somebody struggles with a particular aspect of processing and if you throw them into the lion’s den, you know, out of the gates, you’re going to overwhelm the system. They’re going to feel defeated, deflated.
If somebody has a really high capacity, and again, we talked about this last time, just because you’re driving a Ferrari doesn’t mean you’re driving it the way a Ferrari should be driven. You’ve still got to hook these cognitive systems up to the game of basketball, and that’s the fun part. But if you have somebody who has the capacity, they do need to be pushed and really stretched in the most dynamic, difficult, challenging aspects of the game to make sure they are expressing those capacities within the game. They can handle it.
You can push them. For someone who struggles a little bit, I’d probably start with a little more of a controlled exposure, and gradually build towards more game-like, build the speed, build the dynamic ways you’re manipulating the environment to stretch them and to pressure them. But yes, ultimately, you know, that was the whole kind of impetus behind several years ago the counter to block training, introducing randomization, and the basic take-home message was we’ve got to make our drills a little more game-like. We’ve got to move towards the more dynamic aspects of play.
That’s not the only thing you should do. I think there’s probably places for both of those strategies, if you think about it, right? I get coaches all the time say, well, when I just leave it to open random drills, they’re not really learning the structure and the sets and the way we want to. You know, like with most things, you know, when you get this new concepts, new ideas, you don’t throw out the old ones, necessarily. You look and think about how the old, what are the situations under which blocked helps you get out of the gates and create some foundational linkages in your decision-making, and then how do you gradually then start to introduce and use those foundational associations and structures you’ve built into more game-like scenarios. So it’s usually a combination of both.
Dan Krikorian 25:57
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Patrick Carney 27:07
And I like to drill down maybe on spatial awareness, me and Dan and prepping for this and talking about our own teams. There’s guys that can understand space, read space really well, other guys that just can’t see it at all.
What have you learned about spatial awareness from the athletes that really are good at it, excel at it, versus struggle? And how do you recommend or work with coaches to improve it, like you said, to kind of help train, put eyes in the back of their head?
Scott Wylie 27:33
There’s a couple of quick fixes with that. Spatial awareness can emerge in some very subtle ways. That’s what we’ve learned too. It’s not always that you’re just wandering around the court completely out of position. It’s usually much more subtle than that.
Right. And what I’ve learned from coaches is that if you’re just even a foot or two out of position, you’ve pressed, you’ve closed the gap that can have reverberating effects throughout the entire design and shift and spatial structure. So we’re talking about small shifts. We anchor our sense of space around some landmarks, some fixed landmarks, right? The baselines, the sidelines, the top of the key, the marks on the court. So we have some fixed landmarks, but the most dynamic part is the hardest part for spatial awareness. And that’s because you got bodies too, that are moving and we’re making spatial decisions based on the position of bodies. One of the quickest fixes for someone who has a hard time with spatial awareness is this term has different ways of saying it, but head on a swivel, always knowing and looking and taking in information about where people are in and around you. Some people have this unbelievable ability to look around, take a snapshot of where people are, where they’re moving, turn their attention back and maintain this mental map, if you will, where people are, I mean, they’re making plays. Just some of it is because you trust that your teammate knows where they’re supposed to line up and you can make a pass, but some of it has to do with picking up the little nuances of spatial positioning, depth, where they’re at, where the defenders are in real time, and then holding that in mind for a few brief seconds. Other people, when they take those snapshots, they not only get a less accurate spatial picture, but it decays and degrades very quickly. And so they need to look more frequently. They need to look even a tick longer to maintain. It’s like when we used to have telephones that you’d get a phone number and you don’t have to run to your landline. I know I’m aging myself a little bit. You had to rehearse the number right over and over. And if somebody interrupted you or said something to you, oh, shoot, what was that? You had to run back to the phone book. They’re really dating myself. And you had to look it up and then run back and, you know, back in the day. But that’s what you’re doing. You’re having to update it more frequently. So one of the things is training an individual athlete to be more intentional about their looks, not just going through the head motion of turning your head, but really taking in information and making decisions and setting up drills where they have to make decisions based on where people were, past decisions, drive decisions, shift decisions, but teaching them to look at the anchors, pay attention to that as well as to take the more frequent, longer duration snapshots and training the discipline of where you look and how you look.
Dan Krikorian 30:38
personally with the spatial awareness, it’s been interesting over two and a half, three years of data from my own team. I think there’s a pretty direct correlation with spatial awareness and shot selection. And it’s interesting because what you think as a coach is a shot that’s obviously not open. Someone who maybe struggles with spatial awareness, they don’t actually maybe see it that way. And not like they’re being defiant, but it’s like, I thought I had more space.
I thought I had more time. And that’s been interesting when you get a bunch of scores over the years and you kind of pair it up going, hey, who are guys that maybe just see it differently or just don’t quite see it? And then I think the other interesting part, which gets to my question, is that there are guys that when we talk about the cognitive scores that you all test for, if they are a little bit maybe lower in their spatial awareness, but their distraction control is very high, they can still make those shots because the hand in their face doesn’t bother them as much as someone whose distraction control might be lower and their spatial awareness is lower. You’ve got guys that can make tough shots with someone’s hand in their face because their distraction control is really high. It doesn’t really bug them as much as someone else. How do you look at pairings of things like that where it’s like someone could still be a really good player with low scores somewhere, but they make up for it somewhere else and they’re still highly effective even though they’re not A’s all the way across?
Scott Wylie 32:02
that’s a great question. I’m going to broaden it out real quick and then I’ll zoom back into your specific example. But early on we get the question, well, you know, can this athlete process or not? And we’d say, yeah, that’s probably not the right question. Everyone processes. It’s how they process. And once you know how they process, you know whether you have a lot of degrees of freedom. You know, if they have a lot of high skills, that just means they’re bringing a lot of opportunities and flexibility in their decision making to the game. If they don’t have a lot, if they have a lot of areas that can lead to some struggles, but they have a few strengths, you’re probably going to have to work a little bit harder to make sure you are optimizing them in your system. And you have less degrees of freedom. You’ve got to tailor what they do, how they do their role to what they do well and try to mitigate some of those inconsistencies from showing up. So that’s the better way of thinking about it.
So we look at every profile and say, okay, we’re not asking the question, can this guy play or not? We’re just saying, how do you use this player, this human being, the way they’re wired to process and see things to maximize their success? And what are the things you got to guard against and worry about? Just because you have a low impulse control score doesn’t mean that you’re running around doing impulse things all over the court. It just means when the situation is prime, fast pressure, you get this triggering impulse to want to react, you’re more vulnerable to doing that. So how do we mitigate that? To your question, there are a lot of different systems that can cover or counter. So if your spatial awareness and your ability to make judgments about closing space and distance leads you to make shots when you would say, man, that I want you to do something else, but you have great, to your point, distraction control, meaning distractions and hands in the face are less disruptive to your action execution. And I think that’s an important distinction is when we talk about distraction control, we’re not just talking about disrupting your attention. There’s a lot of research that when you’re in a reactive situation, especially when you’ve got to be highly accurate and precise in your action and your execution, distractions lead to more variability in performance. And the better you are at shielding and blocking out distractions, the more effective you’re going to be at dealing with hands in the face, dealing with contested shots, you’re going to be less variable. You’re still going to be more variable, but you’re going to be less impacted by that. So that’s why we’re big fans. I mean, there’s a reason we’ve got Wimpy Arms, you know, I’m sure they did things with Kareem Arms back in the early days, right? I mean, they’ve been doing constraints and contesting shots probably since the beginning of basketball because it’s such a disruptive force. We actually need to think about how to practice that and build that and develop that.
Scott Wylie 35:02
And so there’s one layer of decision-making, which is, hey, let’s help this person make better decisions about what’s open, what’s closed. But hey, if you do make the bad decision, how do we help you execute in the face of distraction and chaos as effectively as you can?
Can we move the needle a little bit there? And that kind of thinking, how do we break this down? What are the decision-making dynamics allows you to tolerate one without the other, the trade-offs we were talking about, or to actually work on both? Because what if this sharpshooter who can shoot with hands in the face is less affected, made, you know, five, 10% better shot decisions, you’re probably looking to success all around.
Patrick Carney 35:45
Sticking on like this training, if we look at improvisation, I think of improvisation, I think of also a little bit of like creativity. How do you train creativity?
How do you train improvisation? So again, in working with coaches and seeing the results, what are you talking with coaches about if they want to improve a player’s improvisation?
Scott Wylie 36:05
Yeah, this is one of my favorite topics. Improvisation kind of flies in the face of what we’re typically think about when we train. We’re trying to train athletes to be automatic, to make these quick, read, react decisions without having to think much. We’re training stability on the one hand, right? We want athletes to make stable, consistent decisions. But this is a game that doesn’t invite itself to predictability. It’s chaotic. Things break down, things change all the time. So we want athletes who are both stable in some respects, but also flexible in other respects. And so when we talk about improvisation, we’re talking about what do you do in those instances, those instances, actually, I’m trying to get at this concept of time, those moments where you’re about to do something or you’re starting an action and the window closes, something unexpectedly changes, breaks down.
How do we redirect our motor system? How do we find an alternative action solution in those moments? We’re big fans that we should train that. We need to train stable, but we also need to balance it by training improvisational skills. When do you need to improvise? Well, one of the situations when you’re at a disadvantage, you’ve been on a fake, you know, you’ve shifted incorrectly. The basketball gurus listening to this and you guys, you guys know when they’re out of position, what are the most common situations where they find themselves at a disadvantage. We need to actually put people in that disadvantage, not to train them to be in that situation, but how to react when they’re in that situation. So drills where you’re putting people at a disadvantage and they got to find a solution and you’re pushing that more and more to that disadvantage. Our brain needs opportunities for the unpredictable to learn how to adapt. You can’t just tell somebody to adapt and be more flexible in that situation. It needs that exposure, that experience. I think the other way we do it is to actually build unexpected situations, breakdowns into your drills. So one of the things that the training science has really pushed on recently is not falling prey to drills that are predictable, certain, the same thing. Because when the brain knows what’s coming and it’s predictable and they know what this person’s going to do or they’re likely to do one of two things, you can kind of low into sleep. We need to add more dynamic elements, more uncertainty. We call them VEX drills and that stands for violating expectancies. You create expectancies. You can even have drills where you create this kind of falling to sleep, if you will, in the drill, this creating expectancies and then you unexpectedly violate them. Or you can use probabilities of, this happens 80% of the time and then 20% of the time you throw in a wrinkle or a curveball, if you will. The brain needs those and you can learn to adapt and to kind of manage your expectations a little bit and keep yourself from being falling prey to the more routine and be both routine and dynamic at the same time. There’s a lot of research that you can build a little more flexibility, but you got to train it.
Dan Krikorian 39:24
Scott, this has been amazing so far. We want to transition now to a segment on the show we call Start, Sub, or Sit. We’re going to give you three options around a topic, ask you to start one of them, sub one of them, and sit one of them. And then we’ll discuss from there.
So we just got one of them for you. And the question today is around what elite players do differently. And I’m going to give you three different things that elite players might do. And from your experience, what is it the start would be? They do the best over, say, even a very good player. And so start, subset, what do elite players do differently? Option one is they see things earlier. Option two is they process information faster. And option three is their impulse and distraction control is better than the average athlete. So option one is they just see things earlier. Option two, they just process it all faster. And option three is they just have better impulse and distraction control to not make the mistake or that impulsive action. Can I start?
Scott Wylie 40:28
Two and sip one.
Dan Krikorian 40:33
You can do whatever you want, it’s your question. Okay, yeah, that’s right.
Scott Wylie 40:36
But there’s two here that we think are just fundamentally separators. And this is athletes across multiple sports, but certainly in a dynamic sport like basketball. When you can anticipate what’s about to unfold with a high degree of accuracy, when you can have that sense of knowing what your opponent is about to do, what they’re about to do, how they’re about to do it, that puts you at such a remarkable advantage. And some of that comes from experience. So you look at some of the players that have been in the league for a while. They’ve seen it all. They know how to read situations. But some of it comes from just being able to pick up the nuance, the subtlety. We didn’t talk much about instinctive learning from our evaluation, this knack for picking up patterns and tendencies as they emerge in real time through experience. So that one, to me, is a candidate for start.
And so is the impulse and distraction control. We’ve written about this quite a bit, where it’s not how fast you react that is the separator of these elite athletes. It’s all these systems in the brain that protect and insulate your reactions when you’re operating in chaos. It’s the ability to keep yourself from impulsively doing things you don’t want to do. It’s blocking out the noise at the right time. It’s being this flexible in your actions and counter reactions. It’s all these systems that protect your reactions and keep your reactions from going off the rails that separate these elite athletes. So I would say anticipation and then protecting and making your actions and reactions flexible are the two separators. I’d probably sit just your processing. That’s important, how fast you process what you see visually. But I’d probably up against anticipating such a huge advantage and then being able to dynamically act and react when chaos comes. Those two seem to be big separators.
Dan Krikorian 42:44
Awesome. Yeah.
Pat and I going through this before the show, just sort of talking about great players we’ve coached and some players can obviously just be great because they just react to things well. They process stuff fast and they can make dynamic plays and all that. But then where does, you brought it up was a great point of where does experience start to play into decision making and players that you mentioned have been there. A senior in a big moment handling something better than a freshman, even if the freshman cognitively might have a better skill set under the hood. The seniors been there a lot of times, which I think is interesting.
Scott Wylie 43:18
you got to put these up to the game so if you have the experience overlaid with the capacity experience can also help you make better decisions to avoid your vulnerabilities so you know what not to bite on because you come to that too many times and so experience you know in the professional level it’s unfortunate as experience increases as we get into our 30s and pushing 40 our ability to process and handle things at the same speed starts to diminish and so find a nickel for every former player that said gosh I wish I had the brain of today at my body of yesteryear I’d have been a rock star you know
Dan Krikorian 43:55
Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a quote, youth is wasted on the young, or whatever it is. Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.
Patrick Carney 44:00
Yeah, Scott maybe this is too far of a detour. I’ll try to bring it back.
I hope so and hearing you with this question about like elite decision makers and maybe it ties into instinctive learning but my mind kind of went to when you look at you sports like the value of playing multiple sports versus early generalization in terms of their cognitive ability and just how they solve if they’re only playing one game whether they’re seeing playing a lot of games with seeing one game versus playing multiple sports with different games different solutions and we can’t obviously go on a time machine and make our players play more sports but with the players we do have I guess the value and whether it’s like a warm up or like playing games outside of your respective sports with the team like again maybe it’s in a warm up phase but this challenges them with different rules different you know strategies different ways to win and how that can maybe influence these cognitive processes
Scott Wylie 45:00
I think you’re getting at another element of building this flexibility and building just that ability to switch cognitive sets, switch rules, figure out how to make new decisions. We’re big fans of multi-sport, not only because of the evidence that suggests that you build different muscle groups and more dynamic bodies and more flexibility and utilizing other muscle groups that then enhance your other sport. I think from a cognitive standpoint, there’s a lot of value in new rules, new sets, discovering new ways to beat your opponent, to play the game. I think it just enhances your, not only the specific skills that an athlete needs to make real-time decisions, but just the ability to think about strategy at a higher level and what is it going to take to master this sport, to beat the opponent?
What is the strategic thinking? I think it just involves, at a metacognitive level, that understanding that what are the rules? How do I find ways to beat my opponent as well as the very specific skills where you’re challenging them in very different applications? That probably doesn’t always transfer over, but just building those very flexible, dynamic, cognitive skills is going to enhance performance across a range of fronts.
Dan Krikorian 46:24
And Scott, I guess this question, but then also going back to start, subset kind of is both. But how much do you find of these skills are actually malleable over time plus or minus verse it’s kind of like what you are. And you just need to train knowing your strengths and weaknesses.
Like, is that the value of just knowing what they are and training in and around those weaknesses and strengths versus I can better this cognitive skill and I can train this to be maybe not tons better over time, but I can train it to a degree. And if you found that one, yes, that’s possible. And then two, which of the skill sets do you find our most trainable from, you know, the perception speed, the decision complexity, impulse control stuff like which ones do you find to be most likely to be changed?
Scott Wylie 47:18
Some of this is overlaid on just normal maturation of these brain systems, and so some of your rudimentary visual processing systems start to take shape by your mid-teens, 14, 15. The frontal lobes of your brain and its connected circuitry that governs action control and abstract decision making and timing, those continue to develop. You can peak in your mid-late teens or continue to fine tune into your early 20s. So you’ve kind of got a moving target.
We thought for a long time that the goal of cognitive training was to raise the ceiling of these skills. And if you raise the ceiling of these capacities, that that would affect everything. That is really hard to do. And a model that is emerging that really has some appeal to us is this idea that, hey, you’ve got these capacities, they start to take shape late teens into your early 20s, is how do you make those systems operate more efficiently within the context in which you’re applying them? And so it’s much more effective. That’s why training on generic computer games and vision boards don’t transfer very effectively to the environment. It’s much better to say, how do I make better open closed decisions in the game of basketball and train that? And I may shift the curve just by small amounts. And we’ve talked about this before. Even small changes in your decision making and your efficiency and falling less prey to deceptive movements of your opponent can have a big impact on your success and your play. So I think it’s more about what are my capacities right now, knowing that they’ll move a little bit through these critical ages. But how do I maximize their expression, the things I do well in the game of basketball? And how do I start to mitigate the lower areas? Can I take them off the map completely by changing how I play or, you know, can a coach say, look, we’re just not going to put this demand on you. So you’re not relying on that. Or can we move the needle a little bit so that we buy back incremental changes and success in your performance and ultimately the team success.
Dan Krikorian 49:41
really well said. And I guess that’s the heart of where the coaching field comes in knowing where to take players out of certain situations that they’re just not going to be as strong in so that their overall ceiling raises because they’re not in those situations as much versus spending all summer trying to raise the floor of something.
What’s the overall benefit of that?
Scott Wylie 50:02
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And a coach also has to make a decision about where are the pain points, right? Because you might have an athlete with three or four areas that can lead to inconsistent decision making, but coaches know where the big pain points are. And so now you start to look at those pain points and understand what’s driving those pain points. And you prioritize those.
Coaches ask, well, where do I start? Do I try to train all these low areas? I said, no, start with the game. And where the pain points are, use this to understand what’s driving some of those. And then let’s construct a strategy, either adaptive strategy or training strategy to try to move the needle to mitigate that pain point. Because usually it’s about a pain point. And you can have the three players with the same pain point, but for three different reasons. And that’s why those individual differences, knowing how they’re wired, allows you to then compose a strategy that’s unique for each kid, each athlete.
Dan Krikorian 51:02
Well, Scott, you’re off the start, sub, or sit hot seat. Thanks for going through that. A second time for us. Tough one.
Two starters there. It’s all good. That was a fun one. Hey, we’ve got a final question to close the show before we do. Again, thanks for coming back. Congrats on all the success as I know you all continue to just do amazing things in the game. So thanks for coming back for a second time today.
Scott Wylie 51:24
Oh man, I appreciate it. This is fun.
I mean, we’re having a blast. I mean, just getting to sit down with coaches at all levels, all around talking about basketball and what’s important to them and listening to them and learning from them is just science and sports. I can’t think of too many professions that would be more enjoyable to a guy like me. So we’re humbled, but we’re learning a lot and just love the environment.
Dan Krikorian 51:49
Our last question to close the show, the first time you were on I asked your best investment. This time on round two I’m gonna ask you, what are you most curious about right now when it comes to your field and the future of your field of study?
Scott Wylie 52:03
So, I’m going to come at that from the field of cognitive neuroscience meets sports. And what we tried to help establish was a better way of understanding game speed dynamic processing on an individual basis. I’m excited and most curious about how the next 10 years rolls out in terms of some of the topics we’ve been talking about, the training. How do we help individuals maximize who they are and the weaknesses that they show? I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.
We’re starting to ask the right questions. Other fields of athletic performance are moving towards individualized, customized understanding that not everybody shoots the same way. And there are some commonalities at some points in this shot, but it’s, they get there a different way. Not everybody swings the bat the same way. There’s different dynamics when it comes to their flexibility and mobility and just the way their body is constructed and we’re beginning to appreciate that. And instead of making everybody a cookie cutter version of an athlete, we’re beginning to say, who are you as an athlete? And I’m excited because we’re adding this dimension. Who are you? How do you process? How do you take in information? Because not every brain is uniquely wired for that. And as we start to understand that and appreciate that, I think the next decade of how do we train that? How do we maximize individuals? How do we take a young athlete and start to shape their decision-making when they’re much more malleable and flexible than the guy on the podcast with Grace Sideburns, who’s working hard to hold on to what little I had to begin with? How do we then start to create more dynamic athletes at a younger age when we can put them in such a, get away from just the physical development and now work on the decision-making and dynamic aspects of performing and playing?
Dan Krikorian 54:10
All right, Pat, hey, let’s hop into this wrap up. Round one with Scott was phenomenal. We had just a ton of feedback from the first round that came out last year. And we’ve just gotten to know Scott and Harrison and the whole crew over the last year and a half, two years. And we just really love what they do. And just based off of how much feedback we got the first time and all the questions we thought to have Scott back would be really fun and beneficial for people to keep hearing about it. Yeah.
Patrick Carney 54:37
Tremendous conversation and as they continue to amass more data points, but more importantly just talk with coaches who are using up this and really thinking about what the results are giving them or providing them and about their players and teams with that said, Dan, I’ll throw it to you for our wrap up on the.
Dan Krikorian 54:54
first takeaway. I’m gonna do something a little different I’m gonna vex this for you and so I’m gonna violate expectations and I’m gonna go right to the start-subsit for my first takeaway and then we can circle back later.
I think that thinking about what elite players do differently it’s just really interesting I think you and I have been talking about this multiple guests throughout the years but what’s the separator and I really enjoyed the start-subsit because we’ve been talking a lot about anticipation and group flow and how you see things before the play all that kind of stuff as coaches that were after and his two starts which is seeing it earlier the anticipation and then the impulse control I thought wrapped up a lot of really good takeaways from just a you know when you’re looking for great players and what great teams do well before you know cognitively what’s under the hood and obviously get into that today the ability to anticipate and help your team anticipate to see things earlier we got into a little bit about experience and what that plays into it I thought that was a really cool part of the conversation and had just like a ton of applicability because all of our rosters are different of course but these things play out within each roster and what can we do to one find elite players like when you’re looking at recruiting or bringing players into your program what is it that you’re really looking for that they can do and then getting into what he ultimately said I thought that was really good was because I asked him about what’s trainable verse static and teaching and thinking about it more of like how to operate within a system rather than just raise the ceiling or the floor of strengths and weaknesses like thinking about more from a system base so I’ll pass it back to you because I think there’s a lot more here in the start-subsit but I really enjoyed that part of it
Patrick Carney 56:44
I liked your follow-up and I thought he said it well, it’s not so much about, all right, take all these nine things, you know, make their strengths better. How do we raise their weaknesses?
But as a coach, and how can we just think about we’ve identified their strength, their weaknesses, cognitively, how can we optimize their strengths for our style of play? And how can we mitigate their weaknesses again, for our style of play? And I thought, probably smart, that you mix it up on maybe starting with our start-subsid because I think that’s really what our conversation was all about in the application front is just the trade-offs. How do these things relate, not relate, but it’s all based upon whether you can recruit a roster or not, can you optimize your style of play based upon the strengths? Like we do when we look at their skill and, you know, their size and their speed, but also their ability to cognitively process things and make decisions is a huge component and why we are so curious about this, not only from with us too, but other conversations we’ve had just about decision-making and yeah, it’s just fun. Like I said, like where this topic is going and how coaches are really just starting to scratch the surface of using it and, you know, we got into, I think slowly start to bleed into our main bucket, knowing what players need less reads, more space or simplistic actions versus putting the players who have the ability to make complex decisions, read complex space, improvise, yada, yada, yada, all these things and again, just optimizing your offense because of what this task has been able to tell you about your players.
Dan Krikorian 58:17
Yeah. And I think we’re kind of now branching into point number two a little bit, which is cool.
I think I’ll just add, I thought what Scott said was just really insightful within the start subset and as it relates to point number two, but that understanding how to teach players how to operate more effectively within the system or the environment is what will maximize strengths and limit weaknesses more than just individually trying to go at each thing and doing a drill just for that thing. And though that that’s clearly something you do as well, but that if like, as a coach, you really think about the system and the environment and how to use that player knowing their strengths and weaknesses within your environment, that is what’s going to raise the ceiling of the strengths, limit the floor of the weaknesses, I think is what he was saying. So it’s like just a different approach to, hey, let’s just not take all these things individually and just say, Hey, this summer, I’m going to raise these three things. And then this summer. Yeah. Like, not that that’s bad either, but on the whole, if you’re really thoughtful with your system design, that is going to help your players just as much as say, just individual drills here and there.
Patrick Carney 59:26
The other part that was really interesting that we wanted to dive into them was, yeah, like system fit, marrying these cognitive capacities to the system. And I enjoyed that early part of the conversation and kind of like the chicken or the egg, whether it’s you have the ability to recruit players to your style of play and the traits you should be identifying then that fit well with that system or vice versa, like what we just talked about.
This is the makeup of your team and how you should think about your style of play to, again, maximize their strengths, optimize your team. I enjoyed him going through identifying a couple of the things again, we can going through all nine of these things is the dream conversation for us. But I don’t know how many parts that would be. But when he just talked about, yeah, if you want to be more open, free read base, then, you know, of course, valuing improvisation skills, decision complexity versus maybe if you’re more of a structured play caller. Thinking about impulse control, vision, you know, I’m sure spatial awareness. I mean, all these things probably kind of toggle the dials up and down on each of them based on how you want to play. But I think that’s a really interesting conversation. And again, the value of just these results. It reminded me in terms of how you want to play, I think, with Thiago Splitter, when he was with Paris, we had a really interesting conversation about the Iverson cut and talking about players who could really play well off that Iverson cut versus players who couldn’t. And I think he ultimately boiled it down to like, well, those players who could read that space better, whatever that spacing was, like, it was more optimal to their vision, their capacities versus the players that struggled. It just wasn’t. But then if you put them in another spacing, like all of a sudden that unlocked them. And I think that’s a great coaching challenge we all face. And then it’s fun to have conversations like this, that kind of what he said and what you like, get us under the hood of. Oh, this is why maybe this again, in this example, an Iverson set makes more sense for this player versus another player because of how they are able to process information, see the court and all this yada, yada, yada stuff, which I think is again, marrying these real world applications to the science behind it.
Dan Krikorian 01:01:27
Absolutely. I’ll just kind of take us into the third takeaway, which was also in the first bucket for me and ties to all this, but the third takeaway for me, because we were talking about environment, we were talking about the stuff that you just mentioned. And I asked him a follow up about the environment, the player’s emotional state, who they are physically, and how that also plays into it. And I thought that was a point that I think was a highlight.
And also, I’m going to bookend as like a, not a miss by Scott, but like something that would be interesting to keep diving into, which is difference in decision making in a real game when players tired or their stress levels a certain point. And then we talked about where you should try to train to get players cognitive capacities at that ultimate stress level or anxiety level in a practice or trading setting so that you kind of can see how they might react or where that breakdown might be. But I do think that that is interesting within all of this as well. I know Scott has talked about this, that if you take an S2 cognition score, it is a fantastic tool, but it’s a tool that a coach needs to use within their whole toolkit to help players and make decisions. And what are they like cognitively? It’s well worth knowing that. But also, what are they like emotionally? What are their physical traits? What is their role in the team? What’s the part of the year? All that kind of stuff. I think that’s where the fun part of it is adding this in as like just another tool that you can have. I think there’s an interesting part of the conversation about when there’s stress in the game versus in our training session practice. How much does this stuff kind of move and then how do you, I guess, train to that and then understand that as a coach?
Patrick Carney 01:03:13
I mean, I think that’s like been our other kind of mission this off season on top of like This cognitive stuff, but then training building environments and he even talked about too with these vex drills Getting more your constraints not only as like the group game or whatever the constraint of the game but then constraining the individuals maybe based off of again the results their weaknesses trying to optimize one thing over the other and Again all these tools at our disposal of the coach which can I mean even for myself feel like very Overwhelming like there’s so much information But it’s also fun to just start to like peel back and understand these things deeper and deeper try to learn try to see Where you can drip these things in because I think they do have Impact the smallest shifts can change the course of a game a season and it’s the fun and the privilege of what we get To do and having these conversations and how they start to bleed into yet The cognitive aspect now, it’s like, okay Where does CLA drill design ecological design all start to play in that helps optimize these things on top of skill on top of movement?
You know and all the interplay and like I think our favorite saying is all a piece of the puzzle or
Dan Krikorian 01:04:23
slice of the pie. And I guess lastly with that is what I’ve found personally over the last few years with this is the interesting trade-offs that come up where you get evaluations and some of your best players have these interesting trade-offs between really high and improvisation but low and spatial awareness or just using examples and as a coach you go, okay, this is a really good player.
How do I think about that? Like, how do I think about pairings of stuff that I think we talked a little bit about that nobody’s going to take a score and just be 100s all the way across. Kudos to you if you are about it. I don’t think reality is there’s going to be all these trade-offs and then how do you think about that as a coach and use that if that was interesting. So Pat, I gave one of my misses. Was there anything else you thought maybe we could go on deeper on when we wrangle Scott for around three sometime?
Patrick Carney 01:05:12
Yeah, I think the one thing I enjoyed our conversation briefly before starts upset about improvisation, but another kind of thing we had, I want to say earmarked identified with instinctive learning. And we could have just stopped at each one of these nine factors and amiss on my end, would have loved to have tugged on that thread as well and just gone into instinctive learning because I think there is like a trade off we seen to between instinctive learning and even like the improvisation and how they all kind of interplay just intending to apply the same conversation we had in instinctive learning, I guess was my mess.
Dan Krikorian 01:05:44
Yeah, but once again, we thank Scott for coming back for a second time. We appreciate everybody for listening and we’ll see you next time.