The threat of youth basketball
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>> But while the upsides of specialization are unclear, there are few doubts about the downsides.
What doubts? Winning. To be the best, and being the best is all that matters these days, you must focus on only one sport. For me it was swimming. To compete at the national level you have to train all year, 20+ hours a week. And to actually win at the national level you have to sub-specialize into particular events, specific stroke/distance combinations. Sure, some stars can win at everything, but the majority of swimmers focus. There aren't many champion 50m sprinters who can also medal in 400/800 IMs, not in the last decade or two.
So perhaps the NBA should stop taking only the best basketball players. Perhaps they should look at people who are not literally 'the best' and look at people who are well-rounded and therefor less likely to be injured in their first pro year. But that doesn't win championships. Professional players are essentially actors on a stage for an audience. They are tools for teams, businesses that will be around long after any individual players are injured/retired. What turns the most profit (winning) isn't necessarily what is best for the human players.
It's fine to play sports, but only so long as it's fun. If it ain't fun, you don't have enough native talent for it, and you're wasting your time.
(This isn't the case for other competitions that don't attract so many competitors. In those cases, sure, grind if you want.)
Want to be a good swimmer? Join a club and try hard. Want to be the best swimmer in your city? Get a private coach and a 50 meter lane all to yourself every afternoon. Want to win a medal? Be rich. Live across the street from the 50m pool, have control over that pool's water temperature, have 24/7 access to a full gym, a dietitian, and a sports medicine doctor who won't make you sit in a waiting room.
The long tail dominates competition. All elite swimmers look the same to you, so we can safely conclude that you are neither an elite swimmer nor an elite swimming coach. You seem to think it's possible to buy one's way into swimming dominance. It's not. Michael Phelps didn't win 23 gold medals by being rich and getting better coaching than all the competitors in 23 different Olympic fields. He is the child of a teacher and a cop (divorced), who held a national record by the age of 10, having learned to swim at age 7. He is a supremely talented swimmer.
Native talent is definitely a thing and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or trying to sell you something.
Doesn't mean that hard work isn't important, of course. But a natively talented guy with 10 hours of grinding will somehow be better than the untalented guy with 100 hours of grinding
Often to themselves in my experience. People who've not yet discovered any of their own talents are sometimes bitter at the suggestion that talent is a real thing.
And, FWIW, Shaq was notorious for his poor work ethic. He never practiced basic skills (free throw shooting) and always started a new season overweight and out of shape. Then there's the fastest person who ever lived, Usain Bolt, who trains less than a motivated amateur cross fitter.
I really don't think the difference between an Usain Bolt and a Tyson Gay is practice. Or that no one has been able to beat Federer/Nadal/Djokovic in a decade consistently because they're not practicing hard enough.
At the highest level, it's a game of milliseconds and 0.1% improvements. The truly great just somehow have that
Maybe it is a thing. But I doubt it's the most important thing.
I'm an amateur musician too (I think that's what you mean by part-time?). Yep, I've seen people with a native ability, who can just grab an instrument and play. At the same time, I've seen the same people never improve no matter how much they tried, mostly though because they never tried, while others who were not as "talented" spent the hours and got better and better and better, and eventually better than the talented person and then much better than that. Some of the talented persons are too talented for their own good and never figure out what "discipline" means, so their talent remains for ever precocious.
And I've also seen people get mightily impressed by others' talent and overlook their own abiilties, to the point that they severely underestimate them. I have a close example (not me!) of someone who is just good with theory, but gets awfully disappointed that she can't just sit at a piano and start playing without thinking about what she's doing, like a cousin and an aunt of hers do. On the other hand, when I play with her, she's always the one who figures out where a song should start from, how we should transport a melody to our respective instruments, and so on. She knows music. But she can't just "grab an instrument and play" so she thinks she doesn't have a talent. Well I can grab an instrument and just play, apparently, but I have no fucking idea what I'm playing (she usually is the one who figures it out for me).
I digress. My point is this. You observe a person who has a natural talent and a person who doesn't, at the start of their careers. At that point, you can not predict which of the two is going to be a master of their craft, sport, art, etc (or if both are, or neither). There are so many other factors involved that talent, on its own, means nothing.
Music is weird in the way that there are people with little to no training who can still write incredible melodies. And there are musicians who can write books on music theory but not be able to write a memorable melody.
But you are 100% right in that an untalented musician who works at her craft can become good, while a talented one who never practices with the intention of improving will remain stuck.
Combine talent with focused practice, however, and you get magic :)
The GP post indicated was mentioning not that raw talent is unimportant, but that it is assumed at the top level. All of Phelps' competitors are extremely talented swimmers. Training and diet and dedication in general are also extremely important, and the final difference may well end up being there (assuming you have enough raw talent).
Of course, it is also important to remember the incredible amount of medical technology thrown at these competitors, and the difference that things like clothing can make even for swimming.
Others ITT overestimate the importance of practice. Yeah, sure, Phelps practiced swimming a great deal. We know for a fact that he practiced each particular event less than most of his competitors in that particular event, just from the sheer range of different events he dominated. He only has the same 24 hours in a day that anyone else has.
Perhaps there is a symmetry between "many competitors with maximum talent, differentiated by preparation" and "many competitors with maximum preparation, differentiated by talent". I would nominate auto racing, modern yacht racing, or doping-allowed bicycle racing as sports that fit in the first category, although I'm sure there are aficionados who would disagree. Swimming, and any sport that features human bodies without chemical modification maneuvering under their own power through some medium, is firmly in the second. That comes both from nature and from our collective sense of fairness. Fortunately they've outlawed the polyurethane suits, in no small part due to Phelps's boycott of events allowing them. When he claimed that his records had only been broken through the use of technology, most swim fans agreed.
In fact, in most sports, talent varies to such an extent that superior talent dominates superior preparation, so long as the preparation varies only by a limited amount.
And yet there are still enormous differences in how talented people are within this already extremely highly selected pool. Differences so huge that all the money in the world, and all the coaching, grit, determination and hard work can’t buy elite level athletic success.
Michael Phelps is the son of a middle school principal and a state trooper and he holds 28 Olympic gold medals. I’m sure his family made enormous sacrifices to help him train but there were if not thousands, at least hundreds, of children with families with more money chasing the same swimming dream.
Success in sports is a competition of extraordinary people against other extraordinary people, and the best make them look mundane in their talents. You can no more buy the athletic skills of Lionel Messi or Usain Bolt than you can the academic ones of Terence Tao. All of those people worked and trained very hard to get where they are but none of them came from the very wealthiest classes. They’re just the extreme right tail of a distribution of talent.
That is just factually wrong. The MLB draft has 40 rounds because there are over 5 thousand players in professional baseball which is more than double the NFL and more than 10 times the NBA. Athletic skill traditionally follows a normal distribution which means the similarity in players' skill levels converges the deeper you go into the bell curve. The result is there is generally a smaller gap in talent between the 500th and the 1000th player selected than their is between the 1st and 100th player selected. If Mahomes had the skill of a 3rd rounder, there were way more than a 100 guys in front of him for an eventual MVP.
Here [1] is an article looking at the value of MLB draft picks that supports my point.
[1] - https://blogs.fangraphs.com/an-update-on-how-to-value-draft-...
Power law phenomena in known skills at the long tail of a normal distribution are a red herring in this case; the much much bigger factor is uncertainty about the probability of developing skills years later (can a pitcher add a breaking ball that complements his fastball? will a hitter be able to track MLB curveballs thrown faster than 95% of the fastballs he's seen?). Draft position and prospect status are based on imperfect guesses at the shape of the very very very wide distribution of potential outcomes for an individual player with very little data to go on.
The MLB draft is what what the NBA draft would be if they had to select 9th graders based on their performance at HORSE with a kickball on a 9 foot rim and a dunk contest on an 8 foot rim.
All that said, you are certainly right that a projection of a player's skill is inherently more difficult to make the earlier that prediction must be made.
Before Branch Rickey pioneered the concept of "farm systems" in the late 1930s, a quarter century after the NCAA was established and around 75 years after the first collegiate baseball game, minor league teams weren't affiliated with MLB teams at all; instead, they were just other leagues with younger/worse players whose rights would be available to the highest bidder. The MLB draft to distribute talent didn't start until 1965, by which time all the teams had well-established farm systems via affiliations with minor league teams.
The unpredictability of the gap in performance between high school and pro, though, is IMO larger than in football or basketball due to the fact that the core talents for making it in MLB are not based on pure run-fast-jump-high easy-to-measure athleticism, but rather on reactive skills that even if present in high school are not observable against meaningful competition.
This is more of that "wet streets cause rain" logic we hear about. Baseball has 57 different minor leagues with 1253 minor teams because baseball scouts don't know who is going to be the best player ahead of time. If they did know, they could save themselves a lot of hassle. Hockey has a similar phenomenon, but it's less pronounced. Football has plenty of money, but somehow they feel like all of the player development and testing they need can be accomplished at the collegiate level. They are actually sort of offended by the existence of "minor" football leagues like arena and whatever Vince McMahon has planned.
And, of course, this is all beside the point, as mentioned in a sibling thread.
It is cheaper for them to let taxpayers deal with player/coach development and testing.
The truth is that it's a lot closer to five thousand guys, a shoulder, and an elbow between a third/fourth round high school pitcher and an "eventual MVP". Take a look at the third rounds of 2010 [1], 2011 [2], 2012 [3] drafts, which are fairly representative: only ~40% have made the majors at all, and there's one All-Star reliever (zero chance at MVP) and one reserve All-Star catcher (with zero MVP votes in his career) of the lot.
There are 750 active MLBers at any one time and the odds are 60-40 against a third/fourth round high school pitcher, the riskiest kind of prospect, joining them. And of the 58 league MVPs awarded since 1990, exactly three have gone to pitchers.
[1] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [2] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year... [3] https://www.baseball-reference.com/draft/?draft_round=3&year...
[1] https://www.kansascity.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/sam-mell... [2] http://www.big12sports.com/fls/10410/
“We’d be pretty similar pitchers now,” said Michael Kopech, a high school rival of Mahomes’ and now baseball’s No. 10 prospect according to MLB.com. “He was just a bulldog. To be honest, I think anyone who ever played with or against Patrick would’ve assumed he would’ve been a pro in any sport he played.”
Again, native talent not specialized practice. Or you could go with the example in TFA, Kobe Bryant who played more soccer than basketball until his junior year of high school. He still had some basketball success!
The point from the NBA’s perspective is not that the US players who are not specializing are better prospects, but that the guys who eventually do develop the running and jumping ability good enough for the NBA would have been better off not specializing until a much later age. In this case, the NBA’s interests in rookie health and long careers for stars are well aligned with those of the players but not aligned with those of AAU coaches and/or parents trying to get a college scholarship.
The youth trend in swimming is an aberration. New training methodologies developed recently that focus on technique/stoke rather than athletic ability. These techniques work well enough that they have become a commodity. Parents can buy a good coach for their kid, turning them into an olympian in a handful of years. That will change with time. As these techniques become more widespread, as the kids with the new stroke grow up, the ages will rise. It isn't like gymnastics where body movements and dimensions are so vital. Swimming is literally the slowest sport. The kids don't have that much of an advantage.
How much money have you spent on swimming instruction?
Possibly because old are still stronger. The old are not 40 years old, they are like 20 something years old.
Intuitively, I think this makes sense. Imagine skill as a logarithmic function with the x axis being time. Every unit of work you put in to train starts becoming less and less efficient. By training in different skills you are making more efficient use of your training time. And even if the skills appear to be orthogonal to see each, there’s definitely a cross training effect, for both mental and physical tasks.
A good example is programming. For longer than I care to admit I was one of those guys who could code but wasn’t that strong in math. I was frustrated because it felt like I wasn’t getting better. I decided to strongly focus on math, started exercising, and did brain training with dual n-back tests to increase my fluid intelligence.
I was pleasantly surprised that all these unrelated activities boosted my programming ability to a significant degree, in a comparatively marginal amount of time.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jul/12/general...
Epstein makes the point that the world need both types of people, but that early specalizers are a little too 'en vogue' right now. He points out that in games like golf and chess, where the objectives and next steps are very clear and where the information in the activity is minimally hidden, being an early specalizer is a good thing to bet on. In other games and sports like tennis and poker, where the objectives and next steps are not clear and where information is hidden and not accessible, then going through a sampling period and then deciding is a better method. Obviously the world is mix of those things among many others.
In basketball, I'd argue that the sport is not clear and the information is hidden. Practicing shots is essential, but the inter-person play and the mental gamesmenship is a feature of the sport. It's the bluffing, the flopping, the timming, the brinksmanship that make elite basketball a great sport to watch. Information about specific plays is hidden, the next move to make is about juking and fooling people, and the team aspect makes coordinating many high level players nearly impossible. As such, players that have a lot of other experience besides just shooting field goals really well, will do better. You still have to be very good at basketball, of course. But trying out a few sports, cross-training not just the body but also the mind, and developing other neural pathways is essential for elite players.
Absolutely. It shocks me how many people buy up the “our” team stuff and don’t realize that a lot of the narrative around interviews and sports-talk and drama are just advertising campaigns.
This is big business.
But to the topic; You’re right, if it’s really about winning it has to be one sport and be one section inside that. It shouldn’t be about winning national championships for kids, because millions will try for the spots a couple hundred will fill, but that’s not really any of my concern I guess.
I get sports fandom that's fundamentally arbitrary and/or fictional. I mean that's been with us since at least Rome, and probably before. Happens naturally on the school yard, even. I'll gladly join in. It's fun.
What I don't get is pro sports fans who don't seem to be "in on the joke", the way, say, your average pro wrestling fan is "in on the joke", so far as the framing narrative of their sport and team being fiction. The kind who will get actually-mad over the stuff, or start fights and spend the night in jail over it. But maybe they're just way better at maintaining kayfabe.
Violence in sports 100% sucks, but I can pretty much say that most of these people do not see it as a joke. Talking about history, here's one very famous and pretty old sports-related rivalry that was not a joke at all, as tens of thousands of people ended up dying [1]:
> The Nika riots, or Nika revolt, took place against Emperor Justinian I in Constantinople over the course of a week in 532 AD. They were the most violent riots in the city's history, with nearly half of Constantinople being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed. (...) There were initially four major factional teams of chariot racing, differentiated by the colour of the uniform in which they competed; the colours were also worn by their supporters. These were the Blues, the Greens, the Reds, and the Whites, although by the Byzantine era the only teams with any influence were the Blues and Greens. Emperor Justinian I was a supporter of the Blues.
On a more optimistic note sports supporting done right can absolutely give some sort of purpose to one's life (I know these are big words, but that's how I see things), for example if you look at these Aris Thessaloniki supporters chanting and supporting their (basketball) team [2] it's almost impossible not to get hyped up. Or these San Lorenzo fans [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcvAOpnnMK0
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9RMPBoTAVE&feature=youtu.be...
There was a study of a soccer club leagues in Europe. They found the higher in competition you go, the slower twitch the players were. Why? Probably because they could simply play more without injury, even though faster twitch should provide an advantage in speed, etc. Instead though, faster twitch athletes can’t handle the work load and become injured.
One suggestion would be to measure this, and tailor the training load individually. Many athletes would benefit from less training because that is how they are built.
Well, not true of course. I've been playing basketball my whole life, and I've seen 15 year olds jumping from the free throw line, doing windmills and double pump reverse dunks not only 20 years ago, but 30 years ago. And all of them were white, since I live in Europe.
Do we really expect children of today to not become the fragile adults of tomorrow, when children rarely go out and play? when we were young, we were out for the better part of the day, playing, running, jumping, lifting, you name it. And the generation before us were even more physical, doing lots of work outside. And from these generations came out the super athletes that we all know and love today.
I think you are looking through rose colored glasses if you believe there was a glut of 14 year old European dudes with the hops for 360 dunks in 1989...
Maybe the issue is not specialization, but too much sports in general?