Everything I know about squash I learned in my first clinic

I recently served as a referee at the match up of two very highly ranked college teams.  It was a great deal of fun.  The level of squash was something I practically did not recognize from the last time I saw collegiate squash.  Here are the country’s top level amateurs: deft of racket, swift of foot, rife with grit, fire, and flair, but not at the expense of good conduct, directed both at their opponent and the referee.  All in all, it was three hours very well spent.  But, what was so remarkable was not the level of talent, but the stark reminder it served of some simple basics of the game.  In fact, I came away from the afternoon thinking of that book title, “All I really need to I know I learned in kindergarten,” because the stuff that won on this particular day is the stuff that wins on any given day, the stuff you’d pick up in an introductory clinic on what constitutes good, which is to say, winning squash.  Here’s the stuff:

Fitness: Given that these players train five days a week, you’d expect that they’d all be in super shape.  And, they were.  Nevertheless, you could definitely see that there were certain players that were fitter than others.  And for those who were less fit, that weakness got revealed and exploited through the match, and, in fact, could have been the deciding factor.  For the less fit player, he didn’t seem to understand that he was breaking down on that level, though from this side of the glass, it was obvious.  So, remember: you have to be willing to play a succession of very long, very hard points, and be just as physically able to play the next long, hard point without blinking.  There’s no long half time in squash, no tagging out to someone on the bench.  Essentially, there’s nowhere to hide in that ruthless, relentless, well-lit little box.  Everything falls apart when fitness does.

Fireworks from the racket: These players could do almost anything they wanted with the racket, digging the ball for improbable retrievals to send it anywhere in the court; cross-courts to the nick, soft, feathery drops, recovery shots between the legs, behind the back, and over head.  Nevertheless, the most punishing place to put the ball, the place that coughed up the loosest balls from the opponent were the basic, straight rails, those balls that hung tightly to the wall, and bounced well behind the service box.  Good, long, consistent length was the foundation for every other bit of flair from the racket.  It was all predicated on being able to hit tight rail after tight rail.

“Don’t hit tin.”  Hashim Khan’s famous dictum is as salient today as the day he uttered it.  It was astonishing watching how detrimental hitting the tin was: a momentum killer, a spirit suffocator, and a gift to the opponent that just kept on giving.  Invariably, the player who lost the match had hit the preponderance of the tins, and each tin further sealed his fate, rendering a comeback, new life, and hope impossible.  Of course, I was not privy to the heated strategy sessions that team mates and coaches had with the player during the game breaks, but I had the strong urge to barge into the losing player’s confab and say, “hit fewer tins!”  As always, some tins are forced errors from an opponent’s good shot, but it seemed like more often, the tin was the result of poor shot selection, going for too much, and therefore examples of poor sport cognition, a message of desperation that was clearly sent to the player who reaped the benefit.  So, DON’T HIT TIN.

Vocalizations were usually bad for the vocalizer.  I find it’s best to simply keep your mouth shut, no matter the intensity of the emotion you are feeling.  Again, it was usually the player on the losing end of the battle who was yelling or muttering.  Such utterances do not help the player, and only send the signal to your opponent that you are having a temper tantrum inside your head, and not adequately focused on right thinking.  Simple, “nice shot” to the opponent, reasonable appeals to the ref, and maybe a spirited “c’mon!” suffice.  But, generally, a cool head is the one that does not vocalize anything, and also does not say mean spirited things internally to the self if a mistake is made, or when under extreme pressure.  Keep the landscape of the mind cool, self-compassionate, and widely observant for the best results.  It is a great, beautiful, and necessary thing for an athlete to have fire.  The trick is to keep that fire as a smoldering, motivating heat, and not let it become an immolating conflagration.  Harsh and loud vocalizations fuel the fire toward the direction of a bonfire.  Save the vocalizations for the off-court celebration after your victory.

Just some tidbits I re-picked up from my first days of squash on this day of truly wonderful play.

Hard Work III: Liberate the Effort!

In my last post (http://altiusperformanceworks.blogspot.com), I wrote about the mystery of motivation regarding the hard work it takes to be a successful athlete.   One of the crucial aspects of hard work is the motivation to do it, and one of the things that impedes doing that hard work is the very effort required to do it.  When athletes come up against the effort of doing strength work, speed work, and the hard, focused repetitions of whatever task, it often feels like hitting a wall.  Many stop at that wall, while others push through to the other side.  For those who stop at that wall, it may feel like a lack of motivation.  And it may look like a lack of motivation to others.  But, in fact, it might be the lack of skills necessary to persevere.  It may feel like one more ounce of effort is needed when the tank already feels empty.  Instead, I am going to suggest in this post that what’s needed is the skill, or set of skills, to separate the effort from the task itself, or, to liberate the effort from the efforting.

            Notice the panic: One of the reasons that people stop at that effort-wall is that their minds start to panic.  The self-talk gets very anxious, and the mind says things like, “I can’t do this anymore,” or “this hurts,” or, “OH MY GOD!!!!”  Good athletes notice this panic and find a way to talk back to these sentiments, and say things like, “keep going,” “almost there,” and “you can do this.”  In essence, they say things that any coach, friend or family member might say.  Can you imagine a coach saying to an athlete, “yeah, you’re right: you can’t do this”?  No.

            Lean in to the effort: Another way to push through that wall is to prepare for it and welcome it.  You know beforehand that your practice or match is going to be hard so that when it comes, you can talk back to it, and have your back-talk ready: “I’ve got this,” or “even harder.”  Many athletes even get to the point where they enjoy that moment when the work gets intense.  By leaning in, you continue to push the wall farther away from you.  While the wall might represent some real physiological limits, leaning in to them will make them seem smaller rather than bigger.

            Breathe through the effort: Everyone knows the expression, “just breathe,” or “take a deep breath.”  But not everyone knows how to breathe diaphragmatically.  This skill is a life-saver in all contexts in order to properly oxygenate the blood and maintain composure.  Short, choppy breaths, even if you think you’re breathing deeply, will increase the feeling of effort rather than decrease it.  Learn deep breathing, employ it in all realms of your life to get you through difficult moments, and especially during moments of extreme exertion or stress.  Even putting your attention on the breath will take your mind away from the din of anxious thoughts urging you to give up.

            The mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn has taught us all to separate pain from suffering, by pointing out that pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.  I am making a similar claim about hard work: hard moments in sport, and life, are inevitable, but separating the panic of the effort from the effort is optional.  Liberate the effort.  And yourself.

Tiger Woods II: Hard Work

Ben Hogan was known to say, “I’ve noticed that the harder I work, the luckier I get.”  The essence of Hogan’s communication is that good things happen when the sweat equity has been put in.  Tiger Woods brought a new level to hard work in golf, not just putting in the requisite hours on the range, but transforming the golfer into all-around athlete, adding strength conditioning, ab-work, leg strength and even speed work, thus making golf not just a sport for swing wonky nerd, but for the big-boy looking to hit the long ball, and appealing to the football, basketball and baseball fan.  It is also clear that many of the incredible shots Tiger pulled off to win golf tournaments were the direct result of the hard work, both on the range and in the gym, that he had put into his game.  Here are some of the benefits of hard work I encourage you to consider:

Confidence:  Any athlete will tell you that their regimen of hard work produced in them an invaluable sense of confidence.  Confidence is such an obviously vital state of mind that it almost doesn’t bear mentioning.  However, many people feel as though confidence is a character trait rather than something that can be honed.  But, again, think about Tiger Woods: he may be confident by temperament, but his hard work undergirds every shot he takes, every stride he walks.

Motivation: All teachers, therapists, bosses and coaches want to unlock the mystery of motivation, and solve the question of what makes people want to change, improve, and excel.  Often, though, it’s almost impossible even for people themselves to say why they do what they do.  So, maybe we can say that hard work itself breeds hard work.  Hard work, and the dividends it pays off, flicks a switch in an athlete to hunger for even more hard work.  Think again of Tiger Woods: he may be the only golfer you can name who, at the peak his abilities, refashioned his swing no less than three times.  Only someone who loves hard work would subject himself to something like that in search of better results.

Audacity: Readers might reasonably argue with me that audacity and confidence are versions of the same thing.  I am going to claim that from a performance standpoint, they are quite different skills.  Confidence provides the belief that you belong out there and can win, whereas audacity gives you the belief that you can pull off the stunning athletic moment that steals the show and knocks the wind out of your opponent’s sails.  Consider just two of the following examples from his amazing repertoire of audacious shots:

http://youtu.be/vRCjJi_uDp8

http://youtu.be/bHZ3x-A_-AM

Remember: there is a difference between audacity and vainglory.  That difference is hard work.

Work hard.  Be confident.  Be audacious!

On Rivals & Rivalry

When I arrived as the new coach of a squash team, I entered unknowingly into a long-standing rivalry between my new team and that from another local prep school.  The bitterness between the two teams ran long and deep, with charges of thievery at games, boyfriend stealing, slurs on social media, and the standard suspicion that somehow the other side was gaining some competitive advantage through unfair means.  I was, quite frankly, shocked at the level of nastiness to which this rivalry had descended, particularly in the genteel sport of girls' prep school squash, and dedicated my first season to cleaning up the tenor of the rivalry and getting my team focused on the squash and not the banter.  For it seemed obvious to me that not only was this grudge antithetical to the entire mission of the school, we were the ones whose squash was suffering the most and who always came up on the losing end of our close encounters.  I often wondered if my team had decided that they would never beat this team and so had decided to take the consolation prize of winning the smear campaign.  The recent and very public kerfuffle between Sergio Garcia and Tiger Woods has brought my old experience back to me quite vividly, and so I thought I'd share some things I tried to impress to my team back then about what a fantastic opportunity a rival represents and how to transform the negative feelings a rival elicits into performance gains.

    Violation of the first commandment.  Becoming embroiled in the negative aspects of a rival violates the first commandment of good sport cognition, namely, to focus on the things you can control, not the things you can't.  Though we need to be mindful of our opponent's moves and gamesmanship, a rivalry starts hurting our performance when our focus moves exclusively on that behavior rather than the appropriate performance response, which will usually just be to commit to focusing on the task at hand.

    Elevate the rival.   Two important distortions occur when a rivalry has gone south.  The first is that a rival is in our way and the second is that the rival is somehow less than human.  We see this latter in the terrible name calling we engage in toward the rival and in attributing evil intent to the rival.  Both of these thoughts elicit hostility, a motivator sometimes, but more often a distraction.  Instead, we have to shift the thinking and recognize that a rival offers a great opportunity to strengthen weaknesses in our own games and train harder, focus more clearly and play better.  In essence, the rival is calling us to a higher place, knowing all the while that if we engage in the negative thoughts and behavior that a rivalry offers, we are actually descending to a lower place.  Use the rival to motivate improvement, not to feed the impulses of judgment and rancor, which, if we are going to achieve our highest potential, need less attention rather than more.

    Take the higher ground.  Always take the high ground in these instances.  Always resort to better sportsmanship when you are being lured into gamesmanship.  Compliment rather than criticize  ("nice shot," rather than "lucky bounce!").  Don't take away your opponent's humanity by imparting evil intent to them.  Doing so is not only better for the game, it's better for your game.  You will find yourself less caught up in your opponent's shenanigans and more focused on your own play.  And, you will not have a moral hangover for slights and injuries that you were lured into, behaviors that linger into subsequent points and games and drain your focus away from the moment at hand.

    To return to the earlier example of Sergio and Tiger.  I think it was fairly clear to everyone on Saturday at the Players Championship that Sergio's blaming Tiger for his own bad shot on the 38th hole of the tournament was an example of bad sport cognition which bit him very bitterly on the 71st.  I have written in these bytes before about Sergio's bad thinking, but his behavior at the Players and his subsequent offhand and racist comments really reached a new level, and in it we should recognize the self-destructive power of the kind of negative thinking involved when a rivalry goes awry.  Think of him what you may, but Tiger Woods is clearly calling the golfing world to a higher level (of golf) and if Sergio could only transform his negative thoughts about Tiger into motivating ones, he might be the one raising the jug on Sunday.  Believe me, no one would be more motivated to play better golf by such a sight than Tiger.

Sport Parents II: Ego & Mastery Orientations

In my last post, I wrote about the importance for sport parents of setting the proper framework for their young athlete.  This framework is the one where the player inculcates the values and attitudes of the parents and uses it as their own internal compass for their ideas and feelings about such important matters as winning and losing, the treatment of opponents and officials, and the overall meaning of the endeavor.  In that post, I called the framework around the young athlete “the amniotic air” that they breathe as they engage in their sport because while parents and children may not think or talk much about it, the athlete absorbs it with every interaction with the parent.  So, as we can see, we are dealing with a very high stakes enterprise and one that bears thoughtful consideration.  In this post, I will discuss the two most common cognitive frameworks that sport psychologists have identified as the ones that parents set for their children.

According to the experts, there are essentially two different frameworks that parents adopt and that they do so by the implicit and explicit systems of rewards they establish around their child’s sport participation.  The first one, often called an ego orientation, places as high emphasis on winning, compares their child’s results to those of other children and sees success in sport as being better than others.  The second framework, often called a mastery orientation, stresses improvement over performance, process over product, and values a child’s sport participation for the larger lessons about life and the self that sport participation offers.*  For ego-oriented parents, sport is about teaching their child to be a winner, while for mastery-oriented parents, sport is about the process of adaptive growth.  The ego-oriented parent judges the success of the endeavor on results, the mastery-oriented parent on how the child’s  sport involvement supports emotional maturation and successful social integration.  People have come to sum up the positions this way: the mastery-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything, it’s how you play the game,” while the ego-oriented parent says, “winning isn’t everything...it’s the only thing.”

Now, of course, many parents adopt an ego orientation quite consciously because they feel as though it’s the only way to raise a successful athlete and person, caught as we are in this cut-throat, race-to-nowhere culture.  They feel that in order to raise a winner, they need to forefront winning, and that ruthlessness trumps process every day.  But this is not true, and my research on young athletes and their social milieu suggested this truth to me pretty strongly.  Indeed, psychologists in the realms of both education and sport have strongly argued that mastery orientations provide greater motivation toward goal-directed behavior over a longer duration.**  Furthermore, parents, athletes and coaches who privilege winning to the exclusion of all else often overlook the incredible value of losing for motivating improvement, the data it provides for skill & strategy interventions, and the bright light it can shine on the athlete’s thoughts and feelings in the heat of competition.  Of course, if you have a mastery orientation, you are much more likely to attend to and mine this useful data, whereas an ego orientation seeks to sweep a loss under the carpet of easy excuses as quickly as possible.  (For a view of what some of this work looks like, see my prior post from August, 2012 “Scott’s Lytham Opportunity.”)

The next question, then, is how to put into practice some of these insights.  The first is to frame as many of your interactions about your child’s sport performance in terms of questions rather than statements.  For example: “what do you think it would take to beat so-and-so?” rather than “I think you can beat so-and-so.”  “What do you think happened in that match?” rather than “I think you could have won that match.”  “What do you think you need to work harder at?” and “where would you like to see yourself in your age group?” over “If you’d only do what I’ve been telling you to, you’d be top ten.”  “How do you think you could have better handled that bad bounce/bad call/poor seeding?” over “you were robbed!”  Additionally, you should monitor (and control) your child’s bad conduct, because behind bad conduct lie some of the most ego-oriented cognitive distortions, apart from the fact that bad conduct is almost always the tell-tale sign of poor performance.  (For more on this, see my prior post to this blog “Scattering & Husbanding” November, 2012.)  But, one thing is for sure: you cannot fake it for your young athlete.  If you engage superficially in mastery-oriented questions, but have ego-oriented answers in your heart, your reward structure and your outward behavior towards tournament officials, referees, your child’s opponents and their entourages, then your child will absorb your actions far more strongly than your words.

Often, when people compare ego and mastery orientations, they feel as though the “mastery” people stand on the side of losing over winning; that inculcating process over product teaches complacency with a middling result.  In fact, nothing is further from the truth, and let’s be clear that I’m very pro winning and strongly prefer it to the alternative.  It’s just that winning is only one aspect of successful sport performance and very often isn’t nearly the most salient feature of a particular performance.  I firmly believe, based on my years of competitive play, coaching and qualitative research, that a parent’s adoption of a mastery orientation provides a more stable base for the young athlete’s best performance to emerge, greater enjoyment of the sport for a greater length of time, more successful integration into a competitive and complex world, and even, a better relationship between parent and athlete.  And if that’s not winning, then I’m sure I don’t know what is.

*Roberts, G. & Treasure, D. (1995): Achievement goals, motivational climate and achievement strategies and behaviors in sport. International Journal of Sports Psychology, 26, 64-80.

**Turner, E., Chandler, M., & Heffer, R. (2009). The influence of parenting styles, achievement motivation, and self-efficacy on academic performance in college students. Journal of College Student Development, 50, 3, 337-346.