Book Review - Two by Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers: The Story of Success is a book by Malcolm Gladwell talking about people who are outliers, or individuals who are outside of a standard statistical distribution. The book talks about elite athletes in professional sports, the Beatles, and guys like Bill Gates and Robert Oppenheimer. Outliers have some advantageous situation that gives them an edge in their arena.

Of interest to coaches especially is the part about Canadian hockey. The central thesis is that in youth hockey leagues there is an advantage to being born just after the calendar based age cut off. Those athletes are going to be at the older end of potential players. This translates to being bigger and stronger, and it therefore means these kids are more likely to get picked for the more competitive travelling teams. These kids get extra practice time, more games played during the season, and they theoretically play against tougher competition. As the years go by, this advantage compounds. What starts as a size gap becomes a skill gap.

I kept going back to this throughout the book. I imagine this is a possible reality of club volleyball. High school probably hides this phenomenon with multiple years of athletes on the same team. Still this is something to keep in mind. Does the varsity squad get an inordinate amount of practice time compared to junior varsity? Is there something that can be done to mitigate this in the name of improving the program?

Another aspect of outliers is that they have some unique access to resources or some unusual opportunity. Speaking to this he talks about the Beatles having the opportunity to play hours long gigs over days and weeks. In this opportunity they played live over a thousand times for hours on end. Most aspiring musicians never get close to this kind of opportunity to play live. This speaks to the popular notion of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice being needed to become an expert at s specific skill or field. Based on a 40 hour work week, this amounts to 5 years of full time effort to attain mastery. I don't know how well researched this idea is, but I think it has value regardless. Mastery takes time. Whether or not those 10,000 hours are a hard and fast rule, it takes time to become an expert. Stripped down to its bare bones there are only about 6 skills in volleyball (serve, serve receive, setting, hitting, blocking, and digging), and the breakdown of when one skill is needed over another is fairly obvious, but it is going to take a lot of reps to improve in each of those skills to the point of mastery. The take home here is that coaches need to give players opportunities to get reps in the skills. Motor learning tells us that we can perform the skills better if we practice them in game like conditions. Give your players good reps early and often.

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is another one dealing more with perceived disadvantages and how they can sometimes become advantages. Of particular note in this book is the story of a girls basketball team. The team was small, and not very skilled. The coach took his own set of understanding and observations that were outside basketball orthodoxy and coached his team of small, inexperienced girls close to a championship. He did things very differently. It was so different that sometimes other coaches and parents would sometimes get angry with his coaching decisions. If he played a conventional game as their opponents expected, they would have been soundly defeated every time.

I took from this the thought to look at what my teams can and can't do, and to then look for ways I can leverage those strengths to beat teams that might otherwise be favored to win.

Another thought brought up in one book or the other, IQ is an advantage to a certain point. After that point the graph of the advantage for the next IQ point levels off. Likewise, height is an advantage in basketball, but after a point the advantage flattens. The same sounds reasonable for volleyball. Is there really that much of a difference between a 6'8" middle blocker and a 7' middle blocker? Both can reach over the net without jumping. Both can reach higher than most hitters can reach on a spike. Hitters that can reach higher than that aren't often set to take advantage of that additional reach, and jumping that high that often will fatigue hitters faster. The 7' player will be able to block a bigger area of the net because of reach, but that is going to be situation, and the advantage infrequent. A 6'8" middle with great speed, reading ability, and decision making is still going to have an advantage.

I really enjoyed both books. They are written in the same style, and with the same authorial voice, and in many ways I can't remember what examples come from one book as opposed to the other. I can't speak to the accuracy of the ideas expressed, but they are good food for thought. You might enjoy them and get something useful to use in your coaching as well. I think they are worth a look.