Saturday, February 7, 2015

The Vivid Disguise...

“The more salient, or more vivid something is, the easier it is for us to recall. For instance, if we see an earthquake happening in the news, then somehow, because that’s very vivid, we tend to overestimate the probability of an earthquake occurring.” Fredrick Chen, Economist from Wake Forest University.

We are easily fooled.

One of the biggest fears of human beings is spiders. Psychologists will explain it’s because of the way they look, and move and the “creepy” factor. But the facts are:

· There are 35,000 species of spiders in the world.

· Of that 35,000, only 27 have been known to cause a human fatality.

· Of those 27, there are only 2 in Arizona that are considered dangerous to humans.

· In the United States, 6.6 people TOTAL will die from spider bites this year. (Eight times as many will die from bee and wasp stings!)

· To sum up, there is a 1 in 28,794,122 chance of a person being killed from a spider bite.

This rational explanation of the facts probably won’t dissuade you from your fear of spiders because of the reasons stated above, they ARE creepy. But logic and facts prove those fears to be vastly overrated and unsubstantiated.

As Coaches, we are also fooled often by the vivid. That booming kill down the line forces a coach to call a time out and adjust their blocking and defense to accommodate that line rip when in fact, that may have been the ONLY hit down the line the entire match. Is it worth changing everything for because of that one swing?

ASU Head Coach Jason Watson has experienced this head on. “I think one of the aspects that makes coaching hard, is the need to develop a coaching eye. Can you be attuned to the right things while in the gym with your team. It’s easier when there are more coaches – you can have assistants focus on one aspect of the game while you coach another. With club teams and high school programs, you don’t always have that luxury.”

“For that reason, I think it’s so important for coaches to look for trends, or play to the mean.” Watson says. “For example, at some levels, hitting from the back row can be a significant point-scoring event. For many of us, we don’t have the athletes to be consistently scoring points from the back row. But we set the back row. In fact, we set it more than we should for our level of play. Why? Because we are influenced by the outlier: the one or two times in a match when we may score from the back row. What we overlook are the errors or the easy opportunities for our opponents in transition.”

Joe Trinsey is the technical coordinator for the USA Women’s National team and an assistant coach for the Pepprdine’s Men’s program. He studies trends and statistics in video and presents his findings to USA Volleyball and their coaches and teams.

“I think the biggest example of Coaching to the Outlier vs. Coaching to the Mean, is the deep deflection off the block.” Trinsey says from experience. “For some reason, there seems to be something psychologically damaging about the ball that gets deflected and goes just over the head of the middle back player. There's this natural tendency that we MUST move that player back farther and farther until no balls could possibly go over his or her head. For some reason the ball that gets hit in front of them and out of reach doesn't stand out as much. It seems like the instinctual reaction for many coaches, including myself, is that the ball that gets over the player's head is an error in positioning, while the ball in front that isn't played is more of an error in technique- the player did not get their platform out early enough or sprawl fast enough.”

Trinsey recalls dozens of matches where he felt this way. “During the match, I was sure that we were too shallow and we needed to adjust back. After the match, I would watch the video and realize that we only got beat on two or three deep, but there were still all these balls going shorter. It's so important to watch in a setting away from the emotions of the match where you can view everything with a clear mind and see exactly what happened, rather than what you think happened.​”

Trinsey and Watson are at  or approaching the pinnacles of their coaching careers and yet still have to keep their perspective about coaching to the mean and not the outlier. It’s easy to be fooled by the vivid disguise but take a few more minutes to process and take the emotion out before you make a decision. We all can be better at our Coaches eye.

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