On Being a Generalist

Coaching is problem solving. Coaching can be a lot of other things too, but I was attracted to coaching to solve problems and help others achieve their goals. I enjoy working with a player or team and deducing the problem holding them back and creating a solution to help them overcome the sticking point. Sport and sports performance are multifactorial, meaning the problem could relate to the biomechanics of one’s shot; psychological skills such as confidence, resilience, mindset, and more; general strength and coordination; game understanding as it relates to shot selection; movement skills; and more. There is no single answer. Every player is different, every team is different, and every environment is different. Every problem needs a new solution.

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I attended a top 25 NCAA Division I practice a few years ago under the impression I would meet with the head coach afterward. I took over three pages of notes, but the coach left as soon as practice ended. I reached out and offered to come back, but never received a reply. Now, I struggle to pay attention when I attend college practices, as most cycle through the same fake fundamentals, vary little in their substance, and the coaches are disinterested in discussing different practice designs. I watch out of curiosity, but mostly my mind wanders.

Last season, a coach actually asked my opinion. I admitted I had not watched closely, but offered one suggestion for their shooting, especially a few who shot near me during drills. I did not know the players, nor had any way to distinguish them, so my comment was general. My suggestion was nothing remarkable. However, most basketball coaches see basketball problems. They focus on technique cues: Follow-through, bend your knees, elbow in. I see a general movement because of my background in different sports, and specifically strength and conditioning.

The coach messaged the following week after a recruiting trip and said he now noticed the mistake everywhere. He worked with one of his players a few times, and reported that he made seven straight after instituting the slight change. The coach said the player thought he was a shooting guru!

Coaching originated as a generalist profession, but most are now specialists. One is not better than the other; each has its advantages. Specialists maximize their strengths — often their basketball-specific strategies — and hire for their weaknesses, such as movement skills. However, specialist coaches lack generality. Experienced coaches become “rigid under pressure and regress to what they know best,” according to David Epstein in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

I wrote, “Coaching is one of the last, great generalist professions,” in the mid ‘00s. Coaches understood the physical and the psychological, motivation and conditioning. They knew how to teach and instruct. Their knowledge was learned primarily through observation (assistant coaches watching a head coach) and experience (actually coaching). Some beliefs were more universal than others, some practices can be criticized, and some coaches were better or more knowledgeable than others, but coaches generally accrued significant implicit and explicit knowledge about conditioning, development, motivation, skill acquisition, teaching, and more. Coaches had extensive general knowledge across a wide range of domains, although few were experts in a single domain.

Coaches today know more about their sports (specialists), but few are better coaches than during my childhood and adolescence. Most are content specialists in their specific sport, not generalists. They can teach seven ways to attack a two-three zone defense, but cannot observe a player jump stop — a basic, basketball-specific skill — and identify the biomechanical (technique) error (Myers & Hawkins, 2010). Administrators encourage specialists to build on their strengths and hire for their weaknesses rather generalizing their approach. Teams now have a strength coach, a shooting coach, an offense coach, a defense coach, a recruiter, a guard coach, a post coach, etc. We specialize despite the generalist nature of coaching and sports performance.

“Sports performance is governed by a complex interaction of variables, such as physiological fitness, psychological preparedness, physical development, biomechanical proficiency, and tactical awareness, amongst others (e.g., nutrition, genetics, general health and wellbeing, sociocultural factors, etc.),” wrote Dr. Paul Glazier (2015). Coaching is not one thing, but the application of various specialist disciplines with the goal of improving the performance of an individual, individuals, or a team.

Many, if not most, of the generation of coaches before me were teachers first, and often physical education teachers. P.E. teachers are generalists, as they must know a little about a lot of sports, fitness, strength, physical activity, and more. Coaching developed out of physical education, whereas “the overwhelming trend historically has been for sports performance research to be mono-disciplinary in nature — that is, it has tended to be conducted within the confines of one of the sub-disciplines of sports science,” wrote Glazier (2017). Our knowledge is siloed.

I am a generalist. I am interested in all aspects of coaching and performance. I often struggle because I want to be involved in everything. I want to problem solve. Anyone who has subscribed to this newsletter for any length of time understands my interests vary widely in and out of basketball. Friends advise me to specialize, to make SABA or 180Shooter or Playmakers my brand, to speak and create content only around this topic. My friends are smarter than me, their advice in terms of success is correct, but I cannot limit my interests to one thing. As a friend said to me recently, “I can’t believe you have written so many books, and they are all different subjects.” I could not confine myself to one discipline as a doctoral student, let alone a specialization within a discipline, even at a time when expertise and specialization were valued most. I certainly cannot specialize within a generalist domain.

I have spoken at conferences and coaching clinics for strength & conditioning, coaching, skill development, and sports psychology. My topics have varied from motor learning in strength and conditioning to psychological conditions for skill development to long term athlete development to dynamic systems and skill acquisition. Similarly, I have never presented on the exact same topic at basketball clinics or conferences. I do not repeat the same presentation on shooting or small-sided games or the pack-line defense from city to city. I explore new ideas. I have too many interests to present on SABA or NADA over and over and over again. I am not building a brand. I am curious. “I contain multitudes,” (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself).

I defend coaching as a generalist discipline and believe generalists have a great deal to offer, but everything in my experience suggests society prefers specialists, despite Epstein’s conclusions in Range. I applied for a scouting internship with an NBA team in my early 20s, and was rejected because they said my resume suggested a coach, not a scout. They believed knowledge outside the specific domain would cause conflict. Epstein wrote, “Modern work demands knowledge transfer: The ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains.” Knowledge across disciplines would seem to be advantageous, not a hindrance.

I applied for an entry-level strength and conditioning job with a different NBA team after completing my Master’s degree in Sports Coaching, my initial strength and conditioning certification (CSCS), and a subsequent certification (USA Weightlifting). I had acquired some experience as a volunteer strength coach and a personal trainer. The NBA strength and conditioning coach told me to get another certification, the NASM-PES, which I completed. I spent the year training basketball players and teaching Spinning classes, then re-applied the following offseason. The strength coach then said I had too much basketball experience. An NBA team saw basketball experience as a negative!

Subsequently, I applied to another organization to fill a shooting coach position, but again my lack of specialization interfered. I had been a head coach and had multiple strength and conditioning certifications, including a Level 1 certification from USA Track & Field. My background was considered too diverse to be a specialist; my experience moved beyond a specialist position because I had other experience in related fields. The NBA clearly demonstrated a preference for specialists.

Coaching has moved away from being a generalist profession, and lost most of the essence of its attractiveness to me when I started out. Now, coaches are specialists and hire specialist assistants or consultants to fill gaps. Why hire a well-rounded coach with general knowledge as an assistant when the head coach can hire a sports psychologist on retainer, a strength and conditioning coach on staff, an X’s and O’s expert, a player development expert, and a portal/recruiting expert? Coaches now develop with limited knowledge and experience because they are siloed in the same way researchers have siloed sports performance research.

No coach will be an expert in every discipline, but coaches must know something, whether explicitly or intuitively, about all of them. Years ago, I watched a coach who had coached me at camps when I was a child train a group of children and end with “plyometrics” to “improve their speed”. He then told me the parents loved his workouts because the players left tired. I had not taken a science class since high school, but I knew intuitively that training speed through plyometrics at the end of a two-hour workout that fatigued the players was incorrect. Because I sensed he was misguided, but I did not have the correct answer to support my intuition, I furthered my education and pursued my initial strength and conditioning certification. My curiosity motivated me. My intuition was insufficient; I wanted to know the correct answer.

Basketball (possibly all sports) has two types of coaches: The first believes basketball is unique, and essentially a discipline unto itself, and the second positions basketball as an invasion game with similarities across sports. My initial arguments about the step-slide and drop step fractured along these lines. I learned the step-slide and drop step as a player, but I improved as a defender once I was cut and stopped trying to follow my coach’s directions.

I watched other sports and saw different movements, including players crossing their feet. Why could a soccer defender or a football cornerback cross his feet without falling down when I was assured repeatedly for my entire basketball career that I would trip and fall if I crossed my feet on defense?

I repeatedly was assured basketball was different. Basketball was a specialty unto itself, and one could not learn from other sports. This is the point from which I split from traditional orthodoxy, the moment when Fake Fundamentals took hold, although the book was not written for another 20 years. I did not believe basketball was governed by a different set of natural laws than other sports, and instead, I intuitively knew movements that generalized across sports were more likely to be correct.

A few years later, I heard an NCAA Division 1 college basketball head coach tell a strength and conditioning coach with a professional rugby background that he did not understand basketball. The coach wanted her basketball players to run miles and miles on the track in the offseason because “that’s just what basketball players do,” whereas the strength coach wanted to focus on power, speed, and vertical jump. These coaches see basketball as a specific endeavor, and separate from concepts related to biomechanics, education, motor learning, sports psychology, and more. They trust what they know rather than exploring. They see basketball as their specialty and ignore the complex interaction of multiple sub-disciplines affecting sports performance.

I am not an expert in any specific discipline. I am a generalist. I have an interest in many areas related to sports performance, and I study, think, and write about many of them. I only wish coaching retained its generalist sensibilities rather than following the path of research to become siloed specialties. Someone on a coaching staff should have the knowledge and experience to transfer different domains and disciplines and speak the language of experts and non-experts to sustain the flow of information. Increasingly, unfortunately, the experts butt heads, as basketball coaches believe their expertise in basketball supersedes the strength coach’s knowledge of movement and physiology. We now believe a basketball specialty overrides the general application of specialist expertise from other domains, and we lack the generalists to see the multifactorial explanations.

Reference

Glazier, P.S. (2017). Towards a grand unified theory of sports performance. Human Movement Science, 56, 139-56.

Myers, C.A. & Hawkins, D. (2010). Alterations to movement mechanics can greatly reduce anterior cruciate ligament loading without reducing performance. Journal of Biomechanics, 43(14), 2657-64.