| Slappin’ Glass sits down this week with the Head Coach of LMU Beach Volleyball, John Mayer! Coach Mayer has become one of the best coaches in the sport, and risen the level of LMU Volleyball to compete at the highest of levels. In this conversation the trio dive into differential learning, “lab work”, and Coach Mayer’s deep dive into Ecological Dynamics, and discusses creating “anti-fragile” players and maintaining high performance after success during the always fun “Start, Sub, or Sit?!” |
Transcript
John Mayer 00:00
Something that really stood out was the idea of implicit learning. And I felt like I had taught a lot with explicit learning. And I can remember in matches, my players under pressure turning and looking at me, what do I do? How do I fix this? And feeling like the players were a little reliant on me and a little bit fragile when things got stressful or pressure filled.
I think even just thinking like, okay, what sort of team do I want to be a part of? What sort of players do I want to see out on the court? People who are reliant on me and fragile or people who are adaptable and problem solvers and also the connection of like, these are life skills. Like, those are skills that they’re going to use beyond our season. Like, man, this seems like there’s a lot of opportunity here.
Dan 02:06
And now, please enjoy our conversation with Coach John Mayer. Coach, really appreciate you making time for us in your busy schedule. We’ve got a lot to talk about today, so thanks for making the time.
John Mayer 02:27
It’s an honor to be on with you guys. I was telling you before we started, I’m a little imposter syndrome, seeing all the great guests you guys have had. And I hope I can add some value to what you guys are doing. I think it’s a really cool thing that you got going. Appreciate that coach.
Dan 02:40
We’re really excited to have you on and all the value and we know that you will add to the show. One of the things we wanted to dive in with is the CLA, ecological design, all these things that I know in your world you’ve been at for a while now and it’s starting to creep into basketball and it can be a little intimidating I think at the start for coaches to think about theories and constraints and how does it work in a practice environment, all these things. And I think we wanted with you to go back to the start for you and kind of the entry point into all this, you know, when you decided you thought this was going to be something was going to work for you, why and then starting to I guess look at like the first early steps of this whole process.
John Mayer 03:25
Yeah. And you say a while, it doesn’t feel like that. I remember at one point I was like, I’m like an infant with this ecological framework, like trying to apply it. And maybe now I’m a toddler. I can walk, but I fall over a lot. So I feel like I have such a long way to go in the journey.
And that’s why coaching is fun because there’s always just so much to get better at. To go back, I was lucky to play for a coach at Pepperdine University. He coached in a couple of Olympics, won a gold medal. He had his PhD. He was someone, and I didn’t know it at the time, but he had a deep background in motor learning. And we never used that term, but our practices were, there’s a lot of specificity. There’s a lot of game-like reps. I was drawn to that idea. He was close to another PhD who was big in the volleyball world named Carl McGowan, and his PhD was in motor learning. And it was from kind of the more traditional, the informational processing side of motor learning, which would be more traditionally no teaching and keys. Here’s the right way to dribble. Here’s the right way to serve a volleyball. Here’s the right way to throw a baseball, maybe having some explicit cues for how you do that. That was my background, and I think that way is really effective. And I was coaching at LMU. I started as a head coach in 2015, and I had the keys for each skill. I had basically like a system for how our players would play. And also a lot of other motor learning principles that cross over to ecological dynamics, things like game-like reps, random reps instead of blocked reps. But I had this framework that I really liked and had some good mentors help me with it. And we slowly built the program and had some success. We won our first conference championship in 2019, and then COVID hits. And throughout that time, I do a podcast and had had people brought up this idea of ecological dynamics and had people send me some research papers. And we were going to do an episode on our podcast on it. And I remember the person we had is Dr. Steve Bing. He’s like, yeah, check out these ideas. And he sent me a paper. And I tried to read the abstract, basically applying an ecological framework. And I think I understood three or four words in the abstract, nonlinear and dynamical systems. And I got back to him and was like, can we just talk about blocked and random reps? I’m not following this. So there’s these things along the way that people were nudging it towards me. And I think a little bit of a maybe fixed mindset, a little bit of just not investing in the time that it would take to understand it. And also just what I’m doing is right. A little bit of stubbornness. So I was slow to adopt it. But then over COVID, as things slowed down, I had more time to dive in. And I was lucky you guys had Andy Bass on the podcast. I was lucky to have built a relationship with him. I had visited the Pirates in 2019, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and gotten to know him. And we’d become close friends. And he talked me into buying this textbook. And each week, it was, shoot, I’m blanking on the name of it. But basically, it was like Keith David’s and a lot of the guys in the ecological world. And we would read a chapter each week and get on a Zoom and talk about what is an affordance and what are constraints. And he was really helping me understand and also confusing me. But I basically spent six months using an ecological term, very destabilized. I remember sitting up in bed, my wife looking at me like, are you okay? I was sitting there just questioning everything I’d done. And do I want to go this direction? And a part of me saying, this stuff doesn’t make sense. It was definitely a back and forth battle.
And then I guess as we got a chance to enter back into playing, it was the fall of 2020. I think I’d been convinced enough. I’ve always been someone who at least in theory said, I liked the idea of being evidence based. If there was enough evidence to show me that there was reason to do it, I’d be open to applying it. So decided, hey, this is a great time to do it. We don’t even know if we’re gonna have a season this spring. It was a unique scenario. I was like, why don’t we give it a go and experiment? And that fall, we started trying to apply it and saw some benefits. And then kind of from there, yeah, that was fall of 2020. And hopefully each semester, we’ve improved along the way. And that gives you a little start of the journey.
Dan 07:14
it absolutely does. And I guess I’d like to go back. You talked about there’s kind of a tipping point when you thought, I want to dive in and do it. And for you, what was the tipping point? You mentioned the evidence. You mentioned that, you know, you’d done the research. Was it something for you as a coach, you wanted to try to coach a different way. And you felt this was the way that allowed you to do that. Internally, what was the tipping point for you?
John Mayer 07:36
It’s hard to think of one, I think something that really stood out was the idea of implicit learning. And I felt like I had taught a lot with explicit learning. And I can remember in matches, my players under pressure turning and looking at me, what do I do? How do I fix this? And feeling like the players were a little reliant on me and a little bit fragile when things got stressful or pressure filled.
And then learning about this idea of implicit learning, they’re going to learn without realizing their learning. And when you learn implicitly under stress, I think Andy even talks about on the show this idea of reinvestment theory, like if you learn an explicit way, you get under pressure, you’re going to reinvest in like, how do I put my elbow and you get the hips and those sorts of things. Or when you learn implicitly, you don’t even realize how you got better at something. It’s more robust, right? Under stress, you’re not going to think about where your elbow is, you’re going to go, I’ve done hard things, I can do hard things, I’m going to adapt and solve this. So I think even just thinking like, okay, what sort of team do I want to be a part of? What sort of players do I want to see out on the court? People who are reliant on me and fragile or people who are adaptable and problem solvers and also the connection of like, these are life skills, like those are skills that they’re going to use beyond our season, like, man, this seems like there’s a lot of opportunity here. And so yeah, I think thinking about that idea, thinking about understanding implicit learning, that really excited me. And then the other, I remember Rob Gray, who’s kind of been one of the leaders in the field, he had some studies. I was asking some friends, like, is there any studies comparing the informational processing and ecological worldviews? And, you know, not too often, like, usually the ecological people, they just study that and the information processing, they study that, but he did a couple words of comparison. Here’s some hitters using constraints. And here’s some hitters with explicit feedback. And I don’t know, when I saw that data, I was like, oh, wow. So there’s something behind this. And I know there can be issues with studies like that, but it convinced me.
Pat 09:25
If we start to look and then when you start to put this into practice coming out of COVID and you’re going to really invest in it, how did that change? How you thought about maybe a practice plan and what were the early struggles where you felt maybe it applies really well here. Maybe I need to work on these areas a little bit more to get this implicit learning or build a better environment for your players.
John Mayer 09:45
A lot of the practice plan was even like if you were sitting in a car watching our practice, you know, we’re outside. So I guess if you couldn’t hear it, it would have looked similar. There’s still like lots of random and game-like reps, but I guess the difference is we weren’t saying as much. Like we weren’t constantly like, don’t worry about where that pass went, you did it the wrong way. Or here’s the right way to do it, you know, get them back on track. Some of the mistakes with it was, or just misunderstandings.
I thought about this great constraint, and then I just get to watch them like magically self-organize. I thought that idea, like self-organizing, that’s such a cool idea. And just because I tell them they can only go in this part of the court, or we adjusted the net that they would self-organize, and then I watched like, they’re just doing the same thing they always do. They’re not even thinking about this, the Fordans were trying to open up for them. So I guess, yeah, I didn’t realize, you know, it’s still, you just really need to be hands-on, you need to be really observant, ready to adapt on the fly. Like, okay, I thought this would lead us that way, but no, I’ve got to change it where I think I just kind of thought I could magically offer this drill, and it would all kind of come together somehow. Also, probably the biggest one was, you know, I’d spent six months really excited about it, learning, studying, and the players came in not realizing that and not studying ecological dynamics, and they came in expecting to do what we had always done. So I think that clash, I don’t think I prepared well enough, or was empathetic enough to their experience. So then I also probably didn’t have a deep enough understanding of the why it’s to feel comfortable enough to go like, here’s what we’re doing, and it’s awesome because of this.
Pat 11:13
You bring up a great point with the player buy-in. You’ve been thinking about it and then, you know, the players come in and think, okay, we’re just going to do block stuff, get the game. So how did you help with the buy-in and get the players on board, or was it just explaining more about what you wanted to do? Was it slowly maybe implementing these in practices or changing constraints that made more sense to them and so they kind of weren’t noticing what was going on? So important.
John Mayer 11:35
And yeah, I mean, the best buy-in we’ve had is we’ve had success. So it’s hard to say they can’t control winning and losing. Bernie Holiday would say the enemy has a vote. Initially I was just super excited and told my staff, you know, this is what we’re going to do and kind of explaining to them how we’re going to do it. And they stopped me. They’re like, well, you’re going to explain it to the players. Like, oh no, they’re going to love it. It’s going to be fun. Like they’re going to get, you know, to explore and experiment. And so yeah, they talked to me into, you know, I did some whiteboard lessons. I think one of the first things I did, I borrowed this from a colleague who introduced me to a lot of this kind of Casey Crider, and he talked about this idea of a map. So on the whiteboard, I drew a map and I showed, you know, what we used to do is, you know, I drew a map. It was not a very well-drawn map, but maybe the U S and to Europe say, okay, if we’re going to go to Europe, we used to have this linear route, you know, we’d stay on it. If you went off the route and say, no, no, no, come back to, here’s the way to get to Germany, you got to do it this way. No, you did the wrong way and I’ll come back. Okay. That’s right. Yeah. We’re on track. There’s benefits to doing that way, but what we’re going to do now is we’re going to explore the whole map and we’re going to go to Australia and we’re going to go to Fiji and we’re going to go to, you know, Antarctica, and we’re going to be explorers and we’re going to experiment and we’re going to find some things that wasn’t helpful.
That’s not something where I’m going to continue to use. That’s useful knowledge. And then we’re also going to find these new tools that we wouldn’t have considered if we hadn’t explored the map. I think storytelling is a nice way to, you know, get across instead of saying, you know, we’re going to use nonlinear pedagogy. So did that. I also said, I’m happy to like sit in office and if anybody you want to understand, you know, more about the science, did some lessons on problem solving and talk about what’s the most important skill in our sport, maybe through some guiding, talked him into problem solving. I think they agreed like problem solving is one of the most important and talks about, Hey, if you’re going to solve problems or improve at solving problems, and I’m constantly telling you the answers, then I’m not helping you become a better problem solver. So we’re going to allow you to solve hard problems and talked about that idea of, you know, my role of the coach, I think I’ve gotten better at this now is to be the provider of problems, not the provider of solutions.
So it kind of did some of those lessons, you know, I think a lot of it probably that I, yeah, yeah, let’s go play volleyball. And about two weeks in, we typically do like once a week or every two weeks we ask for feedback. So we’ll put a prompt on the whiteboard. What’s something that’s been helpful in practice? What’s something that could be improved? What’s one change you want, you know, sometimes we’ll do it anonymous. Sometimes I’ll put their name on. And I think I remember that first one we did probably two weeks in of applying this and everyone was like, I want more feedback. I feel lost. Tell me what to do. And I’m just constantly like, give me more feedback.
So when I got that, I was like, okay, I’ve got a lot more work to do in explaining the why, explaining the benefits. And maybe also I went too far. I’ve got to find a little more middle ground in learning and about how to give feedback with this framework. Nick Winkelman’s book, the language of coaching, I don’t know if you guys have come across that book, but it’s really good. He’s a great, if someone to have on the podcast, Nick Winkelman, he’s someone who talks about external queuing, teaching through analogies, teaching through storytelling, using kind of more of the ecological framework, less internal feedback. So that was really helpful just to learn some new tools about, okay, what are ways that I can give feedback or guide people without being explicit and prescriptive and things like that.
Dan 14:42
Coach, I’d love to ask about the process for you from starting to use this to help skill emerge. You know, and I think that’s like the thing with all of this is that the learning and skill acquisition, it’s like these things emerge through the use of it rather than you drilling in on one specific skill.
But then the bridge from a skill emerging with one person versus the skill emerging like with a group and the sort of strategy of how to play and a synergy between players and two on the court, how they can play together and understand advantages, disadvantages. And so going from say maybe a single player or like a lot in basketball, we see a lot of this use for developing certain skills for a single player and then trying to move from someone by themselves and then someone with another player. Basketball, there’s four other players on the court obviously and there’s a lot more of that going on. And we mentioned before, that’s a little different being an evasion sport, but I guess just going back for you now, maybe just not a single person, but playing together as a team.
John Mayer 15:45
Yeah, I think the first thing and we’ve tried to really emphasize more recently is understanding the interactions in our sport. So for our sport, there’s two different interactions. There’s a synchronistic relationship. So synchronistic meaning I have to be really connected. Me as a passer with my partner who is going to be the setter. So we have to have this dynamic where we’re really connected. We’re aware of each other. And then again, the next synchronistic relationship would be the setter being in sync with the hitter. Is my hitter closer to me? Is my hitter farther from me? Is she coming in early? Is she coming in late? All these things are going to inform the way I connect and I set with my partner.
And the way volleyball has been done a lot is devoiting that relationship. People just setting to a target or passing to a target. And you don’t have that connection, that relationship, that opportunity to be sensitive to all the little subtleties of like, okay, in this situation, I got to pass it a little bit higher because my partner was in this position. So we really try to incorporate that relationship and lots of things we do. Even in weights, we do synchronistic activities. And then the other component would be the antagonistic relationship, which would be when I’m serving, I’m trying to antagonize the opposing side’s passer. When I’m spiking or attacking a volleyball, I’m trying to antagonize their blocker and defender. And same thing, a lot of people will practice serving to a cone or a target. And how do you know if it’s a good serve if you don’t see the response by the passer, right?
Over time, okay, they respond to that. Now it opens up this opportunity. I mean, that’s just like the starting point, but to really bring their awareness, their sensitivity to those relationships. Then from there, you can layer on all these different constraints and ways to do it. One example, you know, you think about the different ways to use constraints, the task, the environment, and the organism. I think this would be, not that it matters, but I think it would be an environmental constraint. I guess it does matter, but I don’t know if coaches need to know which one’s which. But an environmental constraint. So in our sport, there can be wind a lot when we’re outside and it really affects play, but sometimes like we practice on campus now, so we don’t get as much wind.
An important thing to do is to figure out how to utilize the wind. And sometimes it makes sense. So I don’t want to bore you with beach volleyball stuff, but to run a backset. So instead of hitting a set in front of you, you’d go behind your setter and go hit on the other side, because then you can hit into the wind or it’s easier to track the ball the way the wind blows it. So, you know, we could say stuff like you got to run back sets or. Yeah, we just say it. And again, that’s explicit, giving them the answer. And also a lot of times it’s the Franz Bosch coast. The body is surprisingly uninterested in what the coach has to say. You know, the body’s going to move towards safety. So we did like, what if we slanted the net? One side is really high, six, eight inches high. And one side is really low. And we just said, you know, go ahead and solve that problem.
And yeah, when you find emerges, they want to run a lot of backsets because they want to go ahead on the low part of the court and they’re doing things that are a little bit more uncomfortable. And then as a server, you know, you think about that, okay, it’s going to help our team learn this system or learn this new skill of, you know, attacking on a different part of the court, running a new route to go ahead. And that’s the initial thought when you set up the activity, then you see it and you’re like, oh, wow, this is also pushing the server to figure out how do I keep someone on the high part of the court? Like I have to serve to this location. So it’s hard to go over there. You know, when I’m attacking, do I want to attack at a player who’s on the high side or the low side, you know, creates all this decision-making you’re not aware of just because you change some sort of constraint in the environment. I think there’s all sorts of different directions to do it that can be team oriented, but I think if you start with that principle, like what are the principles of gameplay, you know, I think basketball would be a combination always of synchronistic and antagonistic skills going on.
Dan 19:21
You touched on it a little bit, and I think this is where Pat and I discuss a lot with coaches in the basketball world of ecological dynamics, the framework, bringing it to like where as a coach in basketball, having a strategy or understanding the weaknesses of an opponent and wanting to attack that weakness. And for you, when you get to a match where you know a certain opponent has a certain weakness and now you want to maybe layer a strategy on top of all this. How do you think about that? Do you layer in a strategy when you get to a game? Are they just still figuring it out themselves? Or is that when you might explicitly come in with some information that you think will help win the match, win the game for our purposes?
John Mayer 20:03
That’s a great question. I think that’s been an evolution for me too. I think initially I was like, Oh, I can’t tell them anything ever, but no, for sure. You got to coach. I think one kind of going back a step, I feel because we put them in all these different environments and they do constantly having to adapt and practice that we have the ability to play different styles. Or before when we had more of an overarching system, like we had one way to pass, one way to run our offense. I didn’t feel like we could adapt the way it was like, this is how we play. And I don’t know, they adjusted, you know, we’re a little bit stuck. I think when it comes to movement, when it comes to thinking about where your elbow is and things like that, I really try to avoid being, this is the one way to do it. Or here’s what you should do right now. When it comes to tactics and overarching systems, I’m definitely explicit. Hey, this is open. And it’s not like I’m saying, this is open. You should hit this shot. I’m saying kind of co-designing, working together. You know, in this situation, the defense is doing this a lot. What do you think would work for our team? And there’s definitely moments in match where you got to be more direct. We got to hit hard here. We can’t be doing this or whatever. No, I think definitely when it comes to tactics, it’s good to offer ideas and offer suggestions and be direct.
Pat 22:19
Of the environments you create, the constraints you use, you think about, let’s kind of use, give them four or five environments, or let’s just use these constraints. I mean, we’ll continue to tweak, but they know them. So you’re not going to waste time explaining a drill, them trying to get used to it. Rather, it’s like, okay, I already know this, or now you get the intensity in them trying to problem solve in a game-like environment.
John Mayer 22:39
I’ve definitely overdone it where it’s so many new things, they’re just drowning. I like the idea of maybe doing an activity we did last week and then adding another layer and even complementing them. You guys are really problem solved or you guys found a lot of good solutions, so we’re going to one-up it. We’re going to level up and we’re going to add in this dimension, one little thing.
But yeah, a lot of our sequences will keep the same, serve coming from here, then a transition ball coming from here. The way we’re going to rotate all the same and then you add some sort of adjust the net height, a different ball in play, some part of the court’s worth more points, all sorts of things like that where they’re not thinking about necessarily how the scoring works or the way things will rotate. They’ve done that enough. They’re just hopefully tuned in to the constraints that we’ve added and trying to solve that problem. And if they aren’t, I think sometimes it helps to, if they seem lost or all over the place, all really taking a midpoint timeout, like, all right, we’re going to take a timeout and go and meet with your partner and remind them, hey, you get three points for doing this. How do you want to solve that problem? What’s something you haven’t tried yet? What’s a new idea? What’s a new way you could explore this and hopefully come out of that timeout, you’ll see them all of a sudden, like more focused, more locked in. I think you can easily get into those and just go back to what you always do or get lost or lose track of what the purpose of the game was.
Dan 23:58
Because any differences using this approach, when you lose a game or players are struggling, the process for you to then go back to practice or post-match when you’re talking with coaches on how you want to fix things that went wrong in a game, in a match, and with this approach thinking, okay, next day when we come back, how we’re going to write that, that’s maybe how you did before.
John Mayer 24:21
The challenge with all coaching is there’s no shortcuts. Learning doesn’t happen quickly. And when you lose, you want to shortcut, you want to get there faster. I’m guilty of this for sure. Like you see something that’s really frustrating in match. And then I think I want to come into the next practice more explicit, more taking over, taking control. And maybe every once in a while that’s needed and maybe that could be helpful. But I think we have to all remember that learning takes time. You don’t know when the breakthrough is going to come. And I think the more your players get live movement problems, they get relevant. And so I guess my process now would be after a loss or a win, but probably more so after a loss is looking at data, looking at lots of film, and then making sure I come into the next practice, bringing the most important problem for them to solve. I think there could be 10 of them. I got to prioritize. This is going to lead to the most points. So I’ll try to set up activities or the focus, you know, we’ve got to serve the ball, we’ve got to get more out of system situations off our serve. So come in, you know, with that mission, like I’ll come in on a mission and there’ll be all sorts of activities and ways that our players have to figure out how to serve more effectively. But yeah, I think there’s definitely that natural instinct to want to come in. Okay. We’ve got to find a shortcut. I don’t know if that’s serving them and maybe it will serve them that day. Like they’ll look better at that practice, which as we know, looking good in practice doesn’t translate to performance. So yeah, I think it’s just remembering what learning is. Learning is messy. It takes time. The more opportunities they get to explore, then long-term they’re going to get better.
Pat 25:53
In a practice setting, how many activities do you look to use?
John Mayer 25:57
Yeah, a little bit on time of year. I mean, you guys know way more about load management than me. The typical like our structure, maybe we had a fun to run through it. Not so much the specifics, but we’ll start with some differential learning. I mean, it’s a bizarre concept. This is part of the area that I push back the most. Differential learning is basically, if I had someone going to serve a ball, and maybe the goal was, I’m trying to get them to serve with no spin on it. If you hit a serve and no spin, it moves more, so it’s harder to pass. The traditional way would be, I’d give them some explicit cues, hit it with the palm of your hand, swing through the ball. Differential learning, you’d say, okay, this serve tried to hit the side of the ball with lots of spin. Now try to hit the other side of the ball with lots of spin. Try to hit the bottom of the ball. Now toss the ball with spin, and try to hit it without spin. Now toss it with one hand. Now toss it with your other hand. Now do it with one eye closed, and you add all this noise around this idea of trying to hit it clean with no spin, and let them experiment, explore, and through the noise that starts to strengthen the signal, where they can find maybe a self-organized towards a solution that will help them find maybe the right height toss, or that contact that’s going to lead to hitting them with no spin.
We’ll usually start with some sort of differential learning. It’s not always like that with the serving, but that was just an example. Usually when we come into practice as a player, teenager, college player, even professional player, you come in around your peers and coaches, and there’s a lot of opportunities to feel like you’re being criticized and judged. People are watching me. What do people think of me? Even if I’ve been around this team a lot, like I want to impress people. And we know when you’re trying to impress people, it means you’re going to do what you’re already good at. It means you’re not going to be in a learning mode. So differential learning, it makes you do all these uncomfortable, funky things. And I guess what they found is it dims the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal cortex is kind of where we do all our thinking. So if you start to dim, like turn that mind off, because I’ve had to toss a ball behind my back and try to serve it. And just kind of open up this creative landscape, then kind of opens up that opportunity to be more exploratory as practice goes on. I’ve shut off that critical mind that allowed my mind to, you know, after doing 10, 15 minutes of differential learning, I could take on anything. Nothing’s going to look too silly after that. So we like starting with that for not only the benefits from a skill application standpoint, but also from a learning, setting their minds up for no one’s judging me.
I’m getting a chance to innovate. You know, I’m getting a chance to experiment and explore and then I can go. And then from there, usually we do something we call the lab. I used to call it, when I was coaching, the more informational processing way, I called it a tutor.
John Mayer 28:32
We would tutor them on how to pass. We would tutor them on how to set. You know, even then I didn’t love the name. It’s bringing up school, you know, being tutored just doesn’t sound fun. So as I made this shift, I kept a lot of the same framework. I was like, okay, I don’t want to call it a tutor. What are we going to be doing? Like, oh, we’re going to be in a laboratory. So we call it an exploratory lab. And we talked to them, you know, what happens in the lab? Like, oh, we have a hypothesis. We have a failure. We have an experiment. Like, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. And that’s where we do more individual constraints. Each player will have a different specific constraint for their more skill work than teamwork or systems work. So they’ll each have individual lab constraints. We say a successful lab would mean, for example, maybe if a player had never passed the ball with their left foot forward, they always pass to the right foot forward. If they pass one with their left foot forward, hey, that’s a win today. You tried something in a new way and added a new movement solution.
And then from there, we’d go into more of the games based. You know, it’s usually a two hour thing. So the differential learning 10 to 15 minutes, the lab, about a half hour, and that would be about an hour and 15 minutes for maybe three games. Some days I like like short hitters and we’ll start with like a, it’s like a 15 minute game. And I even like in the middle of that game, adding a tweak, you know, kind of looks like they got comfortable. Okay, now we’re going to shift it in this way. And then every once in a while, I like doing really long ones, kind of a grinder, where they have to work like 45 minutes through an activity. So try to mix it up where it’s like sometimes four 12 minute games or sometimes it’s one 45 minute, you’ve got to battle through it.
Pat 30:00
Using your example of trying to teach them the skill of hitting it without spin. Are you telling them beforehand, this is what we want to try to work on? And then are you recognizing when someone does like, is how are you connecting? Hey, that’s the skill we want, you know, so the players are registering. Now I know how to hit it with no spin, but they’re just doing a bunch of stuff and not really building the awareness that yeah, maybe they did develop a skill. Good question.
John Mayer 30:23
Going back four years ago in fall of 2020, if I had done this, my players, they would have been really reluctant to do it. And it’s interesting to see now four years later as there’s more buy-in, and I think I’ve gotten better explaining the why, and our culture has kind of bought in. I’ve been just amazed. I just told her to try to do it like that, and they will try it. They’re like, oh, cool. I’ll try that. They’re just so much more open. So that’s been really fun to observe, to see that just the buy-in go.
But yeah, your question, always try to keep that relationship in mind. Okay, this is going to be harder to do, but yeah, you’re going to toss with one hand, with spin, but the goal is to get the passer to pass out a system. We want to keep that relationship in mind. And then the second goal is to hit it with no spin. And that’s kind of what we’re working towards. But number one is we always keep that first interaction in mind. The goal of serving is to get the passer in trouble. Even if we’re adding some noise, I’m going to make it harder. And that’s another way to explain differential learning. We’re going to make it harder than the game, add this noise to make it more challenging. And then yeah, the ultimate goal, a lot of times it’s nice to finish with it. If that was okay, the goal today is to get you to hit it clean more often. And we’re going to add all this noise and do it in different ways. And then we’ll finish with five where you try to hit it clean. So kind of go through all that noise and finish with the goal in mind. And then if you do those last five, really asking them after each, okay, that one, what’d you see there? Did it have any spin? And they’re more aware because they hit one with side spin, backspin, topspin. Because we went through all that, you know, I could say, Oh, what kind of spin did that have? Oh, it had a little backspin. So they’re more sensitive to when it does come up, because they got a chance to experiment and feel all those different sorts of spins. I think keeping the goal in mind is really important.
Dan 32:01
Thanks for all your thoughts there. We want to transition out to a segment on the show that we call Start Sub or Sit
John Mayer 32:07
Heard you guys do this. I’m the most nervous about this segment
Dan 32:10
Well, you’ll be great. We’ll give you three options around a central topic, ask you to start one, sub one and then sit one and then we’ll discuss your answer from there. And so coach, this first one, we know will be probably a tough one for you to answer, but on your team webpage, you have some of your core values. You have primary core values and you have secondary core values. And we’re going to ask you about your secondary core values right now and ask you to start, sub or sit. You have three of them and we’re going to give you those three. And I know it’s kind of an impossible question, but start, sub or sit your secondary core values, which are anti-fragility, option one, option two is exploration, and then option three is collaboration. Those are your secondary core values, start, sub, sit, those four if possible.
John Mayer 33:00
Oh man. That is impossible. I was just rambling on about anti-fragility, essentially. Hmm. That was really tough. I guess my… I’m going back and forth. I’m going to go number one is collaboration. And I initially was going to say number three, I guess because it’s what makes sport fun. And it’s what kind of we’re missing a lot in our current world with the less opportunity to connect in person and more social media interactions. And I think it’s also, you know, my understanding of the history of our species, like the way we became who we are as a species, like we could collaborate in large groups, we could work together. It’s not that humans are the strongest in the jungle, lions and tigers. And there’s all these other species that are much physically stronger, but because we could collaborate, because we could work together, we could work in large groups. And that’s essentially how we took over the world. And I guess what teams are special and what makes teams fun is that you get to collaborate with others and you work with different personalities and you get to be pushed by someone next to you and you get to be picked up when you’re struggling.
So I’ll do that as start. Oh man, the next year. These are near and dear to my heart. Man, it’s hard to put anti-fragility last, but I’m going to go exploration. It’s probably the word we use the most in our practice. You know, what are you going to explore today? What haven’t you explored yet? Our exploratory lab, you know, opportunity to explore something new. And like I said, humans move towards safety and players, especially and coaches too. Like we come into practice wanting to do what we’re good at and what feels safe. And we’re trying to push them to try things in new ways and solve problems in new ways. So I’d put that second and then anti-fragility that’s made a big impact on me.
So I’ll put it in number three, but I think it’s third because I think the other two are just so important. But yeah, anti-fragility, meaning when you experience stress, when you take on something challenging, you can come back even stronger. The way I’ll explain it to our players, I think it’s Greek mythology. The Phoenix gets too close to the sun. And again, I’m probably blowing this, but it gets burned and it goes down to ashes and then it comes back. That’s an example of resilience. So that’s like a resilient, you know, you experience some stress and you come back to the same. Where anti-fragility is the Hydra, the dragon where the head gets chopped off and it comes back with two, head gets chopped off, it comes back with three. And so we’ll talk about, you know, we’re going to put you in these challenging environments in practice. We’re going to throw you into stress. We’re going to throw you in the fire. And because of that, you’re going to come back even stronger, even more prepared for whatever challenges get thrown at you.
Dan 35:27
Before we dive in your answer a little bit, I like to zoom out because these are like we mentioned on your site, you have secondary core values, and then on top of those, you have your core values, which are learning, teammate, and industrious. And could you talk to us about stacking those together? Your core values, and then you have your secondary values, how you discuss that, how you came up with that with the team and how they interact with each other.
John Mayer 35:51
Yeah. And I got distracted, as you said, industrious. That’s a John Wooden one for me. I mean, he’s been probably one of the biggest influences for me, why I wanted to coach, you know, as part of the pyramid. I liked that so much more than hard work. Because I think you could work hard and not produce anything or industry. You’re working hard and you’re producing something meaningful or something productive.
Yeah. How do we layer it? I don’t know if it’s like super well thought out, overarching our program, it’s about learning. And that’s been the pettative excellence for us, like in Wooden’s pyramid, you know, be like learning is our foundation from there. Yeah. I don’t know if I have a real good sequence other than I like all six of those. And the first three seemed like the priorities. We’re constantly talking about learning. Probably those are just the things we bring up the most, like being a great teammate is a skill within your control and as a way that everyone can add value, whether you’re a starter or not. And learning is just a lifelong skill that, you know, as a staff, as a player on this team, you’re going to invest in learning, becoming a better learner and taking it beyond this sport of volleyball. It’s something that’s deep to our program. And then those three just seem like the building blocks. And then the other three kind of get into more, maybe specifics of like our training methods and things like that.
Dan 36:59
Just going back now to the original question and the history of your program, it’s documenting when you took over, there was really nothing there, no budget, starting from the bottom and building it to where it is now. The value of these things, we talked about your mindset as a coach and using ecological dynamics and all those things.
I know that these things interrelate, but having these core values when you’re building, and I know there’s a lot of coaches listening right now that are maybe trying to do that with whatever program or level that they’re at and how those relate to trying to build a program.
John Mayer 37:34
Yourvalues, they’re guiding lights. We’re going to feel all sorts of things. I’m going to feel frustrated. I’m going to feel like I’m not enough. I’m going to feel like I don’t have the capability and I could feel all these things. Those don’t have to define my actions.
If I’ve decided a core value to who I am is to be a learner, then even when I feel hired, when I feel fatigued, when I feel like I’m not good enough, I’m going to go invest in trying to learn and reading up and connecting with people like Bernie Holiday and Andy Bass. I’m going to find people who can mentor me and I’m going to look for ways to learn. They’re the things that guide us when all the other distractions come up. When people doubt you, when you don’t have the financial support you need, it’s like, I can’t control that. I can’t control the other noise outside. What I can’t control is to be the best learner I can be to help instill that into my culture, into the players I get to work with. That’s within my control, and that’s what we’ll be about.
I think if we do it at a high level, maybe some of those resources will come and maybe external stuff will start to show up. It slowly did for us, but I guess that wasn’t why we did it. I just want to be the best coach I can be. I feel like if I’m a really good learner, then I’m going to create a great program. Having clarity on your values, acting upon them, those are all huge steps in creating the program you want to create.
Pat 38:50
I’d like to follow up with collaboration earlier you had mentioned when we were discussing synchronized relationships that you guys have a method that you apply in the weight room to kind of build this synchronization this relationship or collaboration I just like to kind of circle back to what you guys do in the weight room to work on collaboration.
John Mayer 39:07
This has been a big project of mine this year, especially as adopted the ecological framework. Going into our weights is like, this doesn’t really make sense. Once you put on those glasses and you see the world that way, like, man, again, we’re doing like a ballet. It doesn’t look like volleyball. We’re doing pre-scripted movements. There’s lots of internal cueing. There’s lots of, you got to move perfectly. And I understand there’s a safety element with strength training. I think you have to be very sensitive to that. But it felt like there was a real disconnect and even just culturally, the traditional language and strength and conditioning is around a lot of those.
There’s one way to do it and here’s the right way. So this season especially worked really hard with our strength coach to make the goal of his to get us better at getting kills, getting aces and digging balls. The goal of his wasn’t to get us better at cleaning front squats or pull-ups. And maybe if he could convince me that, okay, if we can do more pull-ups, that’s going to lead to better shoulder health and we’ll hit harder than, okay, I get it. That’s got to be the reason we’re doing it, not to get better at the form of cleaning. So then I think just kind of with that concept in mind, we are doing this idea of like microdosing where you lift before every practice and we are just saying practice starts when weight starts. It used to be a real silo. Weights is at this time and they do their thing and with the strength coach and practice we do our thing. Now it’s just, it’s all together, it’s integrated. We start with mindfulness before beach practice on the sand and now mindfulness into weights and practice at some point bleeds into it.
Within that, what I’ve really pushed with our strength coaches, we got to make sure to have lots of interactions. Our players are never going to prescript move somewhere. They’re going to move because the server, serve the ball over there. They’re going to move because the blockers in this direction. So I want to have these either synchronistic activities or antagonistic. So we do lots of, even like examples of, you know, maybe in the warmup, traditionally you do like dynamic stretching or jogging. We’ll do something called AB tag. So one person’s A and one person’s B. They each have a group, they do their own partner. So this would be an antagonistic activity and all yell out or the strength coach to yell out A. And when A is called their it and they’re trying to tag the person as many times as they can. And then B, A, B, B. And so they’re just playing a game of tag and there’s all this agility and movement and I’m moving because you’re moving and I’m reacting and trying to adjust and adapt. So instead of just running line to line with no purpose, now it’s an interaction. And there’s that dynamic and that antagonistic skill being built. Like I’ve got to figure out how to make it hard on them. And she’s got to figure out how to make it hard on me. And I’ve got to respond to that. So maybe we’re not getting better at passing the ball but we’re building that antagonistic concept and learning how to respond to things. So trying to build that in as often as possible to strength training. I like that.
Dan 41:52
I’d like to ask you to go back to the mindfulness before practice. What’s going on? How long is it? What do you do? Any details on that?
John Mayer 41:58
Another one I was super skeptical of, we had an indoor coach who brought it about eight, nine years ago. I was like, we’re sitting in a circle breathing. Shouldn’t we be getting better at volleyball? It was a waste of time.
And I just kind of went along with it and shows again, it’s good to rethink and I always question your current thoughts. What we do, we start every practice, it’s five to 10 minutes, somewhere in that range. We do two different sorts. One is a guided mindfulness. Usually me or one of my assistant coaches, we start with some gratitudes. We’re all in a circle that sit down, close your eyes, find a comfortable spot, like typical mindfulness stuff, connect to one thing you’re grateful for. So we’ll give them about 15 seconds. But we’ll talk about the reasons why we have the negativity bias. We’re good at noticing the negatives. So hunting the good stuff, as Bernie would say, is a skill we want to build and there’s lots of benefits to gratitude, as people know. And then we move into some more classical mindfulness where have them connect to their breath and notice the cold air coming in their nose and the warm air coming out. We’ll even do different sorts of breathing regulation. If you feel like you’re low energy today, emphasize focus on your inhale to try to bring energy in. Or if you feel like you’re a little anxious, overwhelmed, emphasize your exhale. We’ll do different sorts of mindfulness or connect to sounds. So it’ll be like two to three minutes of building the skill of focus, building the skill of staying present. And then we’ll finish with some visualization the last couple minutes. The visualization usually is built off whatever skill. So if we’re working on serving that day, before the mindfulness started at all, have them talk with their partner about something they want to explore within serving with something you stretch serve or something you’re looking to get better at within that skill. So then when we get to the final sections of gratitude, mindfulness and visualization, try to bring it to life. Imagine you’re on the courts, you can feel the sand beneath your feet, the cold sand, the sun at your back. Now pick up the ball, see yourself, explore the serve that you’re looking to develop. And I really try to bring the interaction. How does the pastor respond? Do things like, okay, now the score is 14 all in the final set, and everyone’s on your court watching you, you know, how do you watch yourself be successful in that environment? So different ways to kind of prep for practice and visualize.
That’s the one day of our mindfulness sequence. And then we alternate the next day, we do a social practice called social loading. This one we do in small groups, it’ll be like three or four small groups. The example of an activity would be, if it was the three of us, we even have done it on zoom, I would inhale, exhale, and count one. And then it would go to Dan and he would inhale, exhale, count two, and then go to Patrick, he’d inhale, exhale, count three. And we do that for five minutes. Once you get to 10, you start over. So it’s just a breathing exercise.
So we’ll do that or another one would be same thing. We go in that circle. And when it was my turn, I would name a mind state, which would be like an attitude or a state of mind. So I’d say, it was my turn and breathe for a second and say, nervous. And then the next person would go and they’d say excited and then the next person said forward. And so we just get better self awareness and noticing our emotions. And the thing I really like about the social practice is the pressure of us having to go and being around your friends, it heightens the level of focus.
So for five minutes, you have to have a really deep focus. Because if you start to zone out, then the whole thing gets messed up and it gets pretty awkward. Where in the guided mindfulness, which I do some mindfulness each day to start all be all over the place. And you’re thinking about breakfast and dinner the next day and you’ll lose track. There’s lots of benefits to losing track and coming back. But with the social one, you’ve got to be locked in and there’s a deep focus for five minutes.
And there’s different ways. We have about 20 different exercises we do where you can build some self-awareness, breathing exercises. And now we’ve gotten to the point right now, I used to be a little skeptical of it where the feedback we get from our players is like, I don’t know if I could even go into practice without doing it. It helps me leave the midterm. I don’t have to think about the midterm, you know, I left that at home or the stress with my family or boyfriend or like it allows me to get into this practice or like I’m here, I’m here with my team and I’m locked in on the day ahead.
Also, hopefully, we’ve introduced them to using this as a lifelong tool, where they’ll continue to do it. And they go through our program, you talk about, I don’t know, 132 practices in five to 10 minutes a day. They spend a lot of time training their mind, a little bit each day adds up and a lot of the tools we’ll use, you’ll hear them use it and matches the breathing or some of the social noting stuff, they’ll use some of those as kind of mental skills that they apply. So I’ve come a long while now.
Pat 47:06
We call this tough to teach from a performance standpoint. I’ll give you three examples.
Performance under pressure. Performance after failure or performance after success. Maintaining performance after success, probably for that last one. Can I say it depends? We’ve heard that plenty of times.
John Mayer 47:27
Yeah, I think that’s where the art of it is, right? How well do you know the person and the human? I think that’s a big component of coaching, you know, with this player, what’s more important versus another player. But I guess I was thinking generally, and it’s basically like how they’re responding to that.
Yeah. And my answer would be what’s hardest to teach or what.
Pat 47:47
Will it be the hardest so to get them to perform under pressure or to get them to bounce back after failure or to keep them you know when teams win a lot they get complacent.
John Mayer 47:57
Maybe I’ll go success might be the hardest because I try not to fall into this trap, but I think we all do that. You just, like you said, you can get complacent and that would be the most difficult, maybe the player same, like it’s complacent and stops exploring or doesn’t have the same motivation or drive. And then the second most difficult, maybe failure, and it would depend how much, I think too much failure can be debilitating. And that’s through that like challenge point hypothesis is really important to understand, finding that right mix of success and failure, you know, not drowning.
I feel like pressure is the, to me, the easiest to train. I guess some of the ways we’ve done it, I like doing is we’ll do some of the mindfulness around it. And then we’ll do, we’re traveling up to Cal Poly this weekend and we’ll finish practice where, you know, finished with some sort of game and the loser is in charge of the med kit and the tent and the travel supplies or the loser has to lead mindfulness next week. I think you can find ways to bring that organismic constraint to practice so they get opportunities to interact with pressure. No, it’s not the same, like the same sort of pressure stress you feel on a match, but I think there’s ways to maybe manufacture it and bring pressure and get them opportunities to interact with it. This is a tough one.
Pat 49:09
I’d like to pull up with the failure and you mentioned the challenge point hypothesis, but basically if we go back to our initial conversation, what do you look for when the activity is too hard for them and they’re not getting what they want or what is the right amount of struggle you’re looking for where, yeah, okay, it’s hard, but they’re still working. They’re hopefully getting towards the goal versus it’s too much for them. It’s more breeding frustration rather than exploration.
John Mayer 49:34
Yeah. And I think that’s again, like how well, you know, the person, some people have a much larger tolerance. And I think it’s really observing their emotional state and checking in and using kind of observational statements, maybe more asking, it seems like you’re a little frustrated, we want to adjust this. So I guess if you start to see like either some disengagement or kind of giving up or giving in, or such a high level of frustration that they seem in tunnel vision, it’s like they’re just trying the same thing over and over.
That’s the definition of failure, right? When you keep doing the same thing, thinking you’re going to get a different result. So if you see them constantly, there’s a clear affordance here, there’s a clear different way to attack this. And they’re not, they’re probably at such a heightened and like foggy state frustration wise, that there’s not much learning going on. And that’s where a vulnerability check in or like a validating check in, it seems like you’re frustrated. How are you feeling? Am I off on that? Because sometimes I’m like, no, I’m good. You’re probably frustrated. So yeah, maybe you need to dial back how tough the service coming, or even offer a suggestion. What if you tried this or what’s something you haven’t tried yet to give them maybe something they could put their focus on instead of I think you can get in that cycle of I’m just focused on frustration. You’re not learning I think because you’re so lost.
Dan 50:44
This question was posed to you and your staff in dealing with success and you have had a lot of success and are you continued we talked about complacency or moving forward and you also mentioned earlier about the tough thing is I think it was Bernie holiday quote you mentioned the enemy has a vote too I guess it just your process as a coach now of dealing with success moving forward you know finding new ways to try to explore and win personally
John Mayer 51:07
Like I said, I don’t feel like I’m anywhere near the coach I want to be or the coach I could be, or I don’t think I’m running the program optimally. I think there’s just so many things, so many areas, like I still want to learn about and get better at, you know, we haven’t won a national championship.
No team at LMU has ever won a national championship in any sport. So even if we did, we’ve been fairly close, I would still know there’s like so many areas to upgrade, to improve as a coach within the program. I mean, I could tell you 10 right off the top of my head. Sometimes it’s to a fault, like I’m a little too self-deprecating, but I think it’s also a little bit of a strength it pushes me to want to always be growing. I think that’s why coaching is so cool is there’s just so many, I mean, psychology, analytics, anatomy, business, there’s just so many areas you could dive so deep in motor learning. And I’m on the surface of some of them and deeper in others. And, you know, once you go deep in one, you find a hole in another area. So I think there’s just so many areas and that’s why it’s such a dynamic and important profession, important because you can have such an influence on people’s lives.
Dan 52:11
Coach, you’re off the start, summer, sit, hot seat. Thanks for playing. Coach, we’ve got a final question before we close the show. Before we do, this was awesome. Really, really enjoyed our conversation today. So thank you again for coming on.
John Mayer 52:22
Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me. This is really cool. I could do this every day.
Dan 52:25
Coach, our final question that we ask all the guests is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career as a coach?
John Mayer 52:32
It’s a hard question. Investment, you think of money and I don’t buy anything. I don’t buy much. I buy food. The two things that came to mind, one was, and I think I might’ve got it from the library. So I didn’t buy it as the book Mindset by Carol Dweck. I had a coaching mentor, a guy named Tom Black. I was still playing professionally. He suggested I read it. Definitely made a huge impact on my life.
I think at that point, I was like in the middle of my professional career and sort of saw practice as like maintenance. Like, ah, I’m not, you know, kind of am where I am as a player and go in and just keep the level I’m at. And I was, I was very fixed mindset about a lot of areas in my personal life and also the way I played, like, oh, I’m just not good at this part of the game. Reading that book really opened up my eyes and even just opened up the idea of being a learner. I don’t think I took advantage of college the way I wish I would have, you know, went to it so I could play volleyball and got, you know, whatever got to get a B. Okay. I’ll get a B. I didn’t really engage in it as an opportunity to grow and learn. And I wish I would have.
I know I’ve become a much better learner since then. And it’s helped me as a husband, as a dad and as a coach. So when we, my wife and I had our daughter, my wife’s Puerto Rican and she speaks Spanish. Her big goal was to make sure our daughter grew up learning Spanish and she spoke Spanish straight. And my big goal was to have our daughter grow up in a learning environment, a place where you could, you saw skills as something you could grow and I’m not as fixed. That made a huge impact for me.
And the other one is just, I thought of, as you guys said it, imagine you guys would feel the same just doing the coaching podcast we do. We started nine years ago, 2015, and I just have learned and grown so much because of it. Just all the amazing people I’ve gotten to ask questions of and even preparing for podcasts, like you guys did, you need prepared for this and you have to learn about the person and read up on maybe their research or depending on who it is, just pushes you. And just to have that professional development worked into each week, as a coach, there’s so many things with recruiting and administrative stuff and buying flights and the development side gets pushed off and it’s harder to find that. I think podcasts have helped a lot, but for me to have gotten to do the podcast and have that built in like, okay, I got to find someone I want to talk to, someone I want to learn from, I get to develop this week. Or like, I’m curious about differential learning. I’ll reach out to Wolfgang Schulhorn and just all these things that I’ve gotten to learn because of the start of me and my buddy. We had an iPhone and talked about coaching and it’s not like when we started it that I thought all this would come. Just been super beneficial for me to have that development my week each week.
Dan 55:09
All right, Pat, always fun for us when we get someone on who’s outside of basketball, but obviously the theories and the practical stuff that he talked about transitions over and he’s had a ton of success. He’s all in on the stuff that he does.
And it was a great episode to hear him talk about sort of the things also that were hard for him and dipping his toe into CLA and ecological dynamics and all these things that I think you and I are in this world and we’re as basketball coaches trying to figure out the right dose of it and how we continue to use it and to have someone as well spoken, as successful and as open is rare and I really enjoyed today’s conversation. Credit to you.
Pat 55:51
Dan too with where we chose to start this conversation. I think we wanted to have a conversation with a coach who’s a practitioner and not necessarily a conversation about the theories. Of course, we’re gonna talk about the theories to understand what’s going on. I mean, I still don’t know everything. Like he said too, he’d read the abstracts and not really understand what’s going on. And his process through it is learnings with it. And I thought it was really smart for you to start with, oh, let’s go back to like day one. Like he said, coming out of COVID when he decided like I’m gonna go all in and what that learning looked like for him. And how best to apply these theories or how he’s applying them and what he’s learned along the way.
Dan 56:27
100%. And I think when you and I were thinking about this, all the conversations we’ve had, all the research we’ve done, all the coaches we get to talk to, which is an awesome part of running this platform, one of the things that comes up over and over again is trying to figure out where this fits within a team landscape. Because I think there’s a lot out there on skill acquisition and it’s well-documented people talking about the benefits of it. But I think the hard part is knowing where to start with it, because you hear someone talk who’s really good at this stuff and has all the constraints and knows how to tweak this and tweak that and have this beautiful drill design that the environment’s great. I mean, you’re jacked up on a podcast going, that sounds great. But then you go back to your practice and go, where do I start? I’m not an expert. And I think that’s where we all fall back on to what has made us successful or whatever it is in the past. And it’s just easier. And I’m not saying that’s wrong either. But I think it’s nice to say like, where do you start? What are some things that just simply get you in? And then as you as a coach, learn and know yourself and your team, how you can tweak things. And I think that’s like you just mentioned, was an interesting point for him of how he got to where he got to. And then those first days of practice and those first thoughts of where to start with this stuff.
Pat 57:41
Yeah, he nailed it right off the bat when he said, I was thinking about this for six months, and for sure the last six months, my players were not thinking about any of this stuff. He just threw them into these environments, and he said it was a mess, and realizing that he had to then pull back a little bit or more clarify, explain the why, and he mentioned use storytelling. The map analogy I wrote down where you could usually was, all right, we want to go US to Germany. If you get off track, it’s like, no, you got to get back on, but now it’s exploring. Then also, I thought he was cleverly used feedback to find out where the bumps are, where the resistance is, and how he needs to work through it, how maybe he needs to clarify more, explain more wise. Again, going back to what you said, this is where his struggles were, and this is how he solved it to keep pushing forward, and building these environments, and applying these methods that he wanted to, because he obviously believed it would make a difference. But it’s also a conversation we’re also having a lot is, but the most important piece is still the player buy-in, and getting them to believe in it, or apply the intensity appropriate to the drill, the environment, so you are actually learning and reproducing a game environment.
Dan 58:47
Yeah, what I really like about all of this stuff is it really, what it is, it’s got theory for how people learn. So the theory of all these things of constraints and the design of practice is that this is actually a way that one skill emerges to that people learn and retain that information. And then I think the kicker is, and this is where that’s all great, but I think for coaches, the end result is players that can react and perform more in a game and players that can perform in rack more in a game are more skilled. Well, we hope at the end is what leads to winning. And I think like for us as, as basketball coaches, and this is obviously basketball podcasts is thinking about how to continually find ways that this works for honestly like higher levels of basketball to the professional level, the NBA level, the college level, where for us coaching grown men and trying to motivate them and get them into some of these things and keep them learning and all that. And I think there’s a common area, common ground of that. And we talk about coaches all the time. Okay. You run, I’ve got motion or you run a lot of delay action. How do you use the CLA or how do you use these approaches to, or find small sided games that teach split cuts, zoom action, stack screens, pick and rolls, all these reads and things like that, and throw them in these environments. So then it connects to how you want to play. And I think that’s the fun part for us. And I think that was what coach talked about today, the synchronization and the antagonizing piece that he brought up about how you’re synchronizing with your teammates and then how you’re antagonizing an opponent with certain actions and all kind of blending that together.
Pat 01:00:19
I think it’s important, some of this stuff has been going on before, I mean of course with drills and trying to simulate different environments, but I think where this stuff is handy is like it’s studied, it’s learned from that and understood what was going on that maybe we weren’t aware of and bringing that awareness now and conversation we had at the end where maybe a player is struggling, keep the drill, it’s a good drill, pull the player aside, but now where maybe these new studies don’t tell him what to do, use it to ask him questions and try to see if he can self-discover it and put him back in a drill, but it’s just like bringing an awareness, highlighting what’s really been the benefit of these drills, these environments we’ve been building and kind of maximizing that, not getting hung up on maybe some of the stuff that doesn’t have the most benefit.
Dan 01:01:05
Yeah. And I think he also propped, but there are still times where you can explicitly give information or, or step in as a coach just to hit on one more point. I just really love the differential learning part of what he talked about. Yes.
Pat 01:01:18
He went through his practice, man.
Dan 01:01:19
Yeah, the differential learning and then the lab work. I love the word lab too. I think that cognitively for players and coaches, it’s less, I don’t know, it feels like it’s exploratory in nature or like that you’re getting better. So I love the differential learning and the lab work, and it’s not a miss by him or by us really. It’s just, man, if we could have went a longer, I think that would have been another area that I would have liked to explore even more.
Pat 01:01:44
Yeah, I enjoyed his thoughts within the differential learning on just how he goes about trying to get the players to recognize the skill they’re working on or, you know, the two goals, he said, kind of with differential learning so they are taking away something from it and not just, oh, we hit balls in a crazy way. That was fun. Programming your mind to recognize when you’ve achieved the skill or hit the goal. Absolutely.
Dan 01:02:05
Let’s move to start subset and I’ll kick it to you on the first one. Any thoughts on, you know, we looked up, you know, his core values and then his secondary core values and thought we’d give him the impossible question of ranking his three secondary core values, which we all thought were all interesting. So takeaways there.
Pat 01:02:24
Always fun with whenever we get into their coaches’ values or cultures or belief systems just kind of picking their brains on how they settled on this or that or why three. You talk about the first core and then a secondary core. I mean, I know what we’re thinking about too and how you build a program and all these things ancillary to just team and practice and games. It’s important to think about and hear how coaches are building their programs and what they’re valuing and why. The gem of this start subset was when we got into what they’re doing in the weight room, always applying psychological approaches to everything. And then when we got into his mindfulness.
Dan 01:03:02
Yes, the mindfulness and all of that I think was really insightful and just getting a sense of how he starts practice and his thoughts on how they warm up, how they’re mindful. I’ll give you quick another miss of mine. I wish we could have talked about the micro dosing in the weight room too, a little bit more of what that looks like and we don’t have time for every single thing that he does. But I just love hearing how coaches like him structured the intro to a practice and what that looks like. You and I right now too, we’re putting out a new video series with coach Nick Popovich, some of the intros of practice, like movements, things like that. I think it’s just always interesting to view that. And so the mindfulness thing is something that I know a lot of coaches are thinking about how they can put it in, what feels right for them. Yeah.
Pat 01:03:48
For me, this was also amiss with the mindfulness and kind of similar to the conversation we had beginning with just the player buy-in and how that process of onboarding the mindfulness for players and also as well for himself and how he got to a place comfortable enough to lead a mindfulness session. And was it day one, was it kind of all in? Was it like we had mentioned too, was it just, you know, hey, we’ll just do two minutes of breathing and just kind of going from there. But the onboarding process, I wish I followed up with more with players and then also with himself and just getting comfortable to lead mindfulness.
And I mean, of course, a lot of it has to do with, like he mentioned, he’s being a constant learner and just redoing the research himself. But it’s an interesting topic, one I think personally a lot about. I’ve never heard also the social noting, not that I’m an expert or should have, I just think about it, I don’t do any research about it. I thought the social noting exercises was really interesting as well. And I like what he said, pressure of being in a social, like the small group setting kind of heightened their focus because they didn’t want to get zoned out and get caught, you know, it was their turn to say something and they’re just out to lunch.
Dan 01:04:58
Yeah, I feel that when we’re doing this podcast, we’re like, we really have to focus for like an hour and a half because It needed an app after these podcasts. Yeah, our second start subset was the tough to teach performance under pressure. We just thought, you know, someone that thinks about this a lot and he’s got a great podcast as well coach your brains out for those that want to look it up and they’ve done some stuff on performing under pressure and things like that. And we kind of took some of it from his own podcast. But he started the success of the failure and sat under pressure. And I like the quick discussion about the success and, you know, how it can be difficult. I think all coaches still listening to this. First of all, thank you. It’s deep into this conversation. But I guess it’s a problem that you’d like to have dealing with performance after success because it’s easier. Well, it’s that you’re having a better season. If you’re dealing with that question, then that you want the problem versus yeah, right. This one. Yeah, give me that one where we have to motivate them out on a seven game win streak, you know, like the other way is tougher. But I did like his thoughts on just that’s for like, I think it tied into his pillars or his core values of where constant learners were constantly growing. And that is what is driving us other than just the wins. Yeah.
Pat 01:06:13
Yeah. And for me, I enjoyed, I mean, we, I talked on a little brief, a little bit earlier, but when we talked about the challenge point hypothesis and just observing the emotional state of your players within these environments and his methods, kind of, yeah, the art, again, using that word a lot of, you know, when to maybe this player needs some help or they’re too frustrated or like he said, they’re getting too blinded by just trying to solve it, solve the drill or whatever, you know, maybe, again, just kind of digging at this challenge point hypothesis.
What does it mean? What does it look like? How’s he kind of working with it on a day to day with a player, a group, and then also back to back practices when, you know, he said he usually doesn’t really want to dial down a drill, but a drill that had bred some frustration or was messy. What’s it look like the next day when he wants to hit it again? And I like what he said, he’ll use questions, but he didn’t necessarily want the answers. He didn’t want them to, you know, in the group, give the explicit answer of what maybe they’ve learned yesterday in that drill, but just kind of pose the question and then get them out there doing the drill to get the rest, solve it versus let’s talk about the solution. Yeah.
Dan 01:07:17
Well, this was such a fun conversation. I know you and I back in the day used to play some beach volleyball ourselves and, you know.
Pat 01:07:26
Who knew we were just one scanted net away from being a DBP players?
Dan 01:07:31
We needed that slanted net. We were always being antagonized by the opponents. We weren’t doing much antagonizing or synergizing in our 2-1-2. Well, once again, thank coach Mayer for coming on and we both kind of gave a couple misses, but anything else on your end? You hit it.
Pat 01:07:49
There were so many like rabbit holes. We went down that I would have loved to explore further. I mean differential learning the Mindfulness how he implemented that but those are the two that stood out but fixing affordances I wrote down to like how he corrects affordances that they’re not finding But those were just a couple that stood out to me
Dan 01:08:07
Sounds good. Well, we really appreciate coach Mayer for coming on and thank you all for listening. We’ll see you next time.