If you’re interested in play, this is your morning.
Marti Canellas just published an essay by Ted Kroeten, CEO of Joy of the People, an organization dedicated to free play in soccer.
Ted’s essay is better than anything I can write on the topic and I highly recommend it.
The essay reminded me of a few things I’ve come across recently and not so recently.
Ted’s discussion of how the greats learned to play in novel ways reminded me of Pavel Datsyuk, the great Russian hockey player nicknamed the Magic Man. Datsyuk grew up in Yekaterinburg, Russia, with significant resource constraints. With little chance to get a new stick if he broke one, Datsyuk developed skills not seen before in the world of hockey. Mark O’Sullivan published a paper on Datsyuk that’s a bit thick with jargon, a necessity in modern academia. But there are still some interesting sections, including comments from Datsyuk himself on his developmental years.
If you want more details on deliberate practice, the Anders Ericsson theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, Ed Coughlan’s appearance last week on the Coach Your Brains Out podcast gives some background and advice on how to apply it in a better way that is typical. Part two of the discussion should appear this week.
For more stories and theories about what makes great athletes, including Pete Sampras and Michael Chang, The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made by Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore is the go-to book.
Finally one of my own brief stories on reaching out to people as suggested by Kasey Crider.
Nine years ago I watched a talk on the importance of play and the dangers of talent ID programs by former NBA first-round draft pick, Bob Bigelow. At the end of the talk, Bigelow misrepresented the junior career of Rafael Nadal, saying that he was a late developer, ranked outside the top 200 in the world junior rankings at age seventeen.
I wrote Bigelow a quick email, telling him I loved his message, but told him it wasn’t lack of skill keeping Nadal down in the junior rankings. Quite the opposite. Nadal, at age seventeen, was no longer playing junior tournaments. He was otherwise engaged, beating ATP world number one Roger Federer 6-3. 6-3 in March of 2004!
Thirty seconds after I hit send, my phone rang. It was Bob Bigelow. We talked, or he did, for over an hour. Bigelow was a fantastic and passionate advocate for children in sports and his book, Just Let the Kids Play, is a must-read if you ask me.
That’s it for now. If you’re interested in play, I hope you find some of these resources useful.