Characteristics of a bad coach | dstill.ai shared chat

(someone): We've got so many amazing guests and more to come. Listen to Films To Be Buried With with Brett Goldstein and Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

(someone): Hey there, my name is Jody Avergan, and I'm the host of a new podcast from TED called Good Sport. I've learned a ton of life lessons from playing sports, from watching sports, and from covering sports in my career as a journalist. During our first season of Good Sport, we'll look at hotbeds of talent, how a new sport like F1 can break through, how to deal with aging out of playing sports at the highest level, and lots more. Check out Good Sport wherever you listen.

(someone): Let's recap our findings thus far. Men are especially capable of thinking they know things they really don't. They feel a weird compulsion to explain subjects to people who know more about those subjects than they do. And they are more likely than people who are not men to think they know things that are totally unknowable. Sometimes they even act on that belief and lose huge piles of money. But it's not really men's fault, or rather, it's not the fault of any individual man. If a man is deluded into believing he knows more than he actually does, it's because he's surrounded by people who share his delusion, who encourage his overconfidence. The writer Maria Konnikova wrote a whole book about this. The Confidence Game, it was called. It was all about con artists, but it was also about what con artists tell us about our culture.

(someone): And so you're kind of seeing it, but without an explanation as obvious as steroids. Exactly, yeah. Ben started looking into what these players were doing, the ones who were dramatically exceeding the analysts' expectations. The over-performers all had something in common, coaches who used new technology.

(someone): One of the really big innovations has been the high-speed camera. So a company called Edgertronic, which developed these cameras for scientific purposes, has found that much of its business has come from baseball teams, because baseball teams have found that if you train these high-speed cameras on players, you can perceive things about players' movement that they didn't know about themselves.

(someone): And the coaches using these cameras were very different from the old school baseball coaches, the sinecure guys. For a start, the new coaches weren't former big league players. In some cases, they didn't even know any big league players.

(someone): My name's Kyle Bodie. Like this guy. I was 22 years old, started coaching Little League, and I realized quickly that I just didn't know anything about coaching.

(someone): Kyle had just moved from Ohio to Seattle, where he'd landed a part-time job as a Little League coach. Yep, that's how he started in life, as a Little League baseball coach.

(someone): I had played some. My father was a coach. But I figured I owed it to the kids to learn just a little bit more about keeping their arms healthy.

(someone): And he had some questions, like, how many pitches should a kid be allowed to throw? And what was the best way to throw them?

The Coach in Your Head

(someone): Right. It's kind of like they're tied together.

(someone): But if this happens, then this won't happen.

(someone): You're pointing to an important point here, which is that superstitions often give us the impression that we cannot be successful if we don't do them, whereas routines are more flexible.

(someone): Ben studied astrophysics and psychology at Williams College, where he also played baseball and football. At Williams, he noticed that some of his teammates were just way better in practice than they were in games. Why was that? He left Williams and got a master's in sports psychology. Now he coaches the minds of players for the Boston Red Sox and the New York Giants, also a bunch of lawyers and doctors, and some actors and singers you've heard of. Benaliva does the same work with firefighters that he does with everyone else, starting with trying to eliminate interference.

(someone): What are the things that pop into your head that you end up focusing on that you don't have full control of? Decisions at a fire that already have been made and executed. Past decisions. Excellent. Other people's readiness. Other people's readiness. OK, so like other people's performance. Yeah. Yeah.

(someone): Other people. Time of year.

(someone): So external factors in the environment. Weather. Excellent. That screws so many athletes up. Oh, it's cold. I can't play well.

The Coach Effect

(someone): Pushkin.

(someone): Our last episode was about an explosion, an explosion of coaching in modern life. All sorts of people are getting paid to be coaches in places that never used to have coaches. Big corporations, Wall Street trading floors, fire stations. People are declaring themselves coaches not just of skills but of states of mind and getting paid to do it. So it's now more noticeable when you come across situations that cry out for a coach and no coach is around. When total amateurs who don't think of themselves as coaches are forced to coach for free because no one's doing it for money. Like this woman.

(someone): I am Mehrsa Baradaran, author of several books and articles on banking and inequality, racial wealth gap, etc.

(someone): Marissa came to the United States from Iran as a child. Her family were political refugees. She's now a professor at the UC Irvine Law School, but it's not her job that matters here. Marissa's brother-in-law is the sheriff of a small town east of Los Angeles. He called her one day to say he'd taken in a high school student.

The Invisible Coach

(someone): and that it kept him awake when he was a kid. Jason had not set out to become a coach, but he saw that a coach is exactly what he'd become. The definition of a good coach is one who makes their players feel like they don't need the coach. And the way I think you do that is, first, you take out all the hard work and all the distractions. Second, you make it easy to have good behaviors. And third, is you make people want to have good behaviors. And that's the thing about coaching that makes it so hard to pin down. The best coaches don't leave you needing them. You start with some fear or sense of inadequacy. They help you get past it. Then they recede. And in the future, every single one of us is going to have this hyper smart service that's doing all these complex things in the background and nudging us and making us feel really good about, you know, eating our financial broccoli, so to speak. And we're going to feel great about it, but we're not even going to see it. It's an invisible coach. A coach that could maybe even help stop people from grinding their teeth at night.

(someone): To be honest, I think I said this to you on the phone. I have no idea what's in my bank account.

(someone): Last October, we introduced Katie Hyland to Jason's company, Tally. She decided she needed a coach, but her husband had to sign her up because he was the only one with the nerve to look at their bank account.

The Coach Effect

(someone): Scholar matches started out almost as a technical advisor for kids on how to apply to college, how to apply for loans and grants, but in short order it became something else, a place where students could be coached as they tried to move from one social class to another. The new coaches became deeply involved in the lives of the students, and they had astonishing effects. The graduation rate for scholar-match kids went from 60% to 81%, which beat the national average for all college students, never mind first-generation ones. Coaching these kids all the way to a college diploma costs scholar-match roughly $13,000 a student. The expected lifetime earnings of a person with a college degree is $1.2 million more than a person who doesn't graduate from college. But it's not only that. A college degree in a family that's never had one? That has even more ripple effects. For instance, it makes it a lot more likely that younger siblings will go to college. But the scholar match coaching was also having effects that were harder to measure.

(someone): I didn't really see myself going to college at all. None of my friends that I grew up with did. This is Luis Mendez.

(someone): Pushkin.

(someone): For roughly 5,000 years, people called themselves doctors and pretended to know all sorts of things that they didn't know and were as likely to kill you as to cure you. These doctors existed because sick people desperately wanted to believe in them. Coaching feels the same way to me. For decades, people just sort of hoped that if a man was hollering at them, he must be helping them to win. Maybe he was sometimes. But that's not my point. My point is that even if coaches have no effect on performance, even if they're doing more harm than good, we might still insist on having them, because we need someone on our side to believe in. But coaching's changing, in the same way medicine changed 100 years ago. Coaches are discovering science, and science is discovering them. I'm Michael Lewis, and this is Against the Rules, a show about various authority figures in American life. This season is about the rise of coaches, and this episode is about data and pitching. A while back in 2003, I published a book called Moneyball.

The Unfair Coach

(someone): So when you've got things like tug of war and model boat racing, you know, we did all right because we created that program. But once we started to compete against other nations, so particularly 1952, after Helsinki, 1948, the other London Olympics, there was a real call for something needs to change.

(someone): The British were basically losing at everything by the 1950s. They hired coaches to fix the problem. One coach was appointed to improve the training of athletes in the entire country.

(someone): Part of his contract was that for £10 a week, so probably about $7 a week, he could be rented out to Cambridge University. However, if he was rented out to Cambridge University, he was told that he had to use the service entrance to enter the university because he was not considered a member of staff and that he could only speak to the athletes if they spoke to him first.

(someone): This was the British idea about coaches, that they were a form of cheating. or a sign of natural inferiority. The notion was so highly transmissible that it infected Harold Abrahams himself, the same runner who in Chariots of Fire had hired a coach to help him win the gold medal. After Abrahams' running career ended, he was put in charge of all of British amateur sports.

(someone): So he was happy to employ a coach and use a coach all the time it got him further in sport. But when he was on the other side of it, he then kind of reverted to his amateur principles in the sense of we don't like coaches. We control coaches. They know their place. The administrators are in charge. The coaches are their servants. That's what they used to refer to them as.

The Coach in Your Head

(someone): It was four o'clock in the afternoon. I'd been teaching all day, not coaching. And it gets a little boring telling people where the weight on their foot should be and where they should hit the ball and the racket.

(someone): On the afternoon in question, Tim was teaching a guy with a sliced backhand who wanted to learn how to hit topspin. The guy was taking his racket back too high. Ordinarily, Tim Galway would just have told the man, hey, don't take the racket back too high. But he'd lost interest in the sound of his own voice and pretty much everything else. So he just kept quietly tossing balls at the guy's backhand.

(someone): Within three or four minutes, a strange thing happened. He was hitting topspin backhands. I had said nothing. But then I said something in my head. You lazy bum. You missed your chance. If you had only taught him before, then you would have gotten the credit for his topspin backhand. I said, wow. And this was maybe the key point. I'm more interested in teaching than I am in the student learning.

(someone): That was the moment that Tim Galway had an idea.

(someone): Because I just said, OK, I'm going to see how much improvement I can see in front of me with how little teaching.

(someone): It's sort of reversing your usual approach. How little can you tell them rather than how much can you tell them? Exactly.

(someone): This season is about the rise of coaches, and this episode is about data and pitching. A while back in 2003, I published a book called Moneyball. It's about how the Oakland A's baseball team had used data analysis to get an edge on everyone else. They were a poorly funded team in a small market. They had no money to spend on players, but their new and better statistics enabled them to value baseball players more accurately. So they could sell the players that were overvalued and trade for the ones that were undervalued. I remember at the time being shocked at the notion that baseball players could be misvalued. I mean, baseball players have been doing the same job for a century, out in the open, in front of millions of people. But suddenly, all over, a thing that had been done a certain way forever was now being done a totally different way. Everyone in baseball started using data and getting all sorts of insights from it. And the insights led not just to better valuations of baseball players, it eventually led to a new kind of coaching.

(someone): In the past, it used to be that many coaching positions were almost a sinecure.

(someone): That's Ben Lindbergh, co-author of a book called The MVP Machine. It's about a revolution in how the world's best baseball players get coached.

(someone): It was the coaches who were the manager's pals, his drinking buddies would become the coaches. And there wasn't that much coaching going on at the major league level. It was sort of reinforcing lessons that had already been taught. and keeping guys in line, but there wasn't that much expectation that coaches would improve players once they got to that level.

(someone): And he had some questions, like, how many pitches should a kid be allowed to throw? And what was the best way to throw them? I mean, I was once a pitcher, and I spent half my life with my arm in an ice bucket. To this day, I can't sleep on my right shoulder. Throwing a ball overhand, it might look like a natural and healthy thing to do, but it's not. Kyle Bodie looked around for research on the subject.

(someone): But unfortunately, it was all very nonspecific, kind of very academic research. And then the training programs and the coaching programs that were out there were very bland, not based on any sort of evidence. It really shocked me.

(someone): So Kyle started to do research on his own. Then he got a promotion from Little League to the freshman team at a Seattle high school. But he found himself at war with the JV and varsity coaches at the high school. They were coaching the old-fashioned way, telling players what to do, hollering at them when they screwed up, praising them when they didn't.

(someone): Actively coaching athletes just typically makes them worse. Intervention is typically one of the worst things you can do.

(someone): What are the points of friction with the old coaching model? Like what specifically kind of things would you do that were heretical?

(someone): So informing the athlete that like whatever they're doing is not good enough and then just seeing how they change over time and how they will self-organize was a real heretical idea, right? Because most coaches think

The Unfair Coach

(someone): Pushkin.

(someone): Even if you're not into that, it has one of the best coaching scenes ever filmed. Harold Abrahams, a British sprinter, is about to run the 100-meter final in the 1924 Olympics. His coach gazes out of his hotel room window at the stadium next door. The pistol sounds. The coach watches the sky over the stadium. Then he spies the British flag rising. That's how the coach learns that his runner has won the gold. There's a reason the coach isn't inside the stadium watching the race. He's been banned. Because he's a coach. In 1924, professional coaches are taboo. They're considered a form of cheating. The steroids of the age.

(someone): It's all to do with this idea of this emerging gentleman amateur. So you were considered a gentleman if you were like upper class, born into money.

(someone): Teagan Carpenter George is the co-author of a book on the history of coaching.

The Unfair Coach

(someone): So Mike at that point was a middle reliever. He threw 29 pitches. Of the 29 pitches, there were bangs, which indicated that it was going to be a breaking ball. The bang was sent from the dugout of the Astros by banging on a trash can. to the batter to signify what pitch was going to be thrown. And so there were 40 percent of his pitches, there were bangs on.

(someone): If you're wondering whether a big league pitcher has ever before hired a lawyer to sue an opposing team for the behavior of their coaches, well, no. This is a first. But then the coaches have never been able to generate this kind of edge.

(someone): It was a disastrous outing. And after a performance that was so embarrassing like that, the team lost confidence in him. Frankly, all scouts in the majors lost confidence in him. He was demoted to the minor leagues, played well right after that in the minors, but then couldn't find work in the majors because he was viewed as having lost his last shot that game. And for all Mike knew until recently, he just thought he couldn't perform that day.

(someone): So he did, in the moment, did he have any sense that anything peculiar was going on?

(someone): He believed that they were the greatest team he's ever played against. He was just, you know, shocked that they, he would say that it seemed that they knew the pitches that he was throwing, but he attributed it to their great skill and their great determination and being a great team, and that he just didn't have what it takes anymore.

The Invisible Coach

(someone): But the moment he did that, he felt exposed and vulnerable, like his mom. He was 18 years old. I would drive home every single weekend, starting in January, and I would go home to my hometown where I grew up, and it was about two, two and a half hour drive, and I would spend the weekend knocking on doors, handing out flyers, saying, hey, would you hire me to paint your house? Jason had never painted a house, but then there was a time when he didn't know how to stuff an animal, and he'd figured out how to do that. And there's just, you know, there's six feet of snow outside and this kid is trying to convince you to paint his house. And they're like, number one, come back to me in the summer. Number two, how many houses have you painted? Like, I've never painted a house in my life, but I promise I'm going to hire people who do know how to paint their house. Maybe the oddest thing about Jason Brown is he found nothing odd about any of this. An 18-year-old convincing grown-ups in the snow to trust him with their homes. So I brought snowshoes, and I would have a pair for me and a pair for them. And I knew as long as I could convince the homeowner to put on their shoes and coat and go around the house with me in snowshoes, that they would then, by the end of that, have a pretty good chance of hiring me. He was still a kid, but pretty soon, this wasn't a kid's business.

(someone): And maybe 10 years later, we finally figured out what those values were.

(someone): Former players said things to David like, he taught me life. Parents said things to David like, he did all the hard work.

(someone): All in, couldn't agree with you more. Can't believe the school is letting you do it.

(someone): Which brings me to the second phone call from a former teammate of mine. He said he'd heard that the Newman School was on the verge of firing Billy Fitzgerald. Some parents had complained to the headmaster. The headmaster was sympathetic. How did Newman get itself into the position where it listened to those parents?

(someone): Oh, fundraising. I don't think it's Newman in particular. Do you?

(someone): No, I think it's money. Yeah, I think it's money. It was the money, but it was more than the money. It was about what people think coaches are for. I flew back to New Orleans to try to make sense of the situation. Eight parents of current players had formed a coalition. A few of them were rich people who might give the school a lot of money. They'd gone to the headmaster to complain, but not about anything Coach Fitz had done. That was one of the strange things about the situation, because it turned out Coach Fitz had sort of mellowed. His days of breaking trophies were now over.

(someone): And my mom's great. It's not her fault. I just don't much care about anything except performing the occasional acts of vandalism. The only human being on the planet that I don't feel I can safely ignore is my baseball coach. I'd quit playing baseball a few years earlier, but Fitz found me at school one day and asked me to come out for his summer team. I'm one of the younger players, and he's new to me. He's indeed tough. He's indeed scary when he wants to be. He suspends kids who break the rules, no matter how good they are. He never lays a hand on a player, but he breaks all kinds of things, especially after games that don't go well. No object in the locker room is safe. He destroys an ancient wall clock with a catcher's mitt and a big orange water jug with a single swing of an aluminum bat. He takes us out onto a hard field at 10 o'clock at night after a game. There we slide until our uniforms are red and brown with dirt and blood. Then he declares that they aren't to be washed until we meet his expectations. Ten games later, our uniforms are so filthy that people will come to our games just to see them. We look less like a team than a cult of insane rich kids who refuse to bathe. But not once, and I really mean not once, do I have the feeling that this was about anything but me and my teammates. Coach Fitz never talks about himself.

(someone): That was one of the strange things about the situation, because it turned out Coach Fitz had sort of mellowed. His days of breaking trophies were now over. His crime seemed to be that he held kids accountable, suspended them when they violated training rules, for example, or pointed out that they'd put on 10 pounds of fat when they promised to lose 15. The other odd thing was that one of his teams had just won the Louisiana State Baseball Championship. In sports, it's almost a natural law. Winning teams are happy, and losing teams are not. After the fact, everyone says the team won because of its great chemistry, but what usually happened is that winning has just made everybody like each other more. But here was a team that had just won it all, and it was falling apart.

(someone): It was Mardi Gras time at the time. I remember there was drinking going on, there were young kids that were doing things they shouldn't have been doing just like anywhere.

(someone): Jeremy Bleich was a junior on Newman's winning baseball team that year. It was a Lord of the Flies situation and he was Ralph. Piggy and a few of the other younger players were on his side, but scared to say it, because the older players, the seniors, were in revolt.

(someone): You know, as high schoolers, we signed training rules that said we wouldn't drink. Like, that's asinine to begin with. Right? So anyways, so we signed training rules to not drink alcohol at 16, 17 and 18 years old.

(someone): You mean it's asinine because you shouldn't have to sign a document.

(someone): Exactly.

(someone): But not once, and I really mean not once, do I have the feeling that this was about anything but me and my teammates. Coach Fitz never talks about himself. He never tells us how close he got to playing in the big leagues for the Oakland A's, for example. Other people talk about it. His young players spend lots of time swapping stories about him. Crazy stories which everyone repeats his gospel. That in high school, Fitz refused to ride the team bus after they lost, and instead walked many miles across the city of New Orleans in his catcher's gear. That Rusty Staub, who went on to have a famous big league career, made the mistake of taunting Fitz, and Fitz ran out onto the field and beat the crap out of him. But then there was the most incredible story, the one we love the best, that during a college basketball game, Fitz had not only single-handedly kicked Pete Maravich's ass, but also beaten up Maravich's dad, the LSU coach, in the same brawl. To this day, Pete Maravich holds the college hoop scoring record. Getting into a fight with him? Well, it felt then like getting into a fight with LeBron James would now. It made Fitz a legend in our minds. The incident that summer night that I want to tell you about, it's made possible by all these other stories. Our baseball team's actually very good, but we're playing the only team in the league that might be better. I'm the new young pitcher, and I really don't belong in the game. Our older, better pitcher has it all under control.

Ref, You Suck!