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3v3 or 4v4

Score on any net

Intentions: Perceive space and numerical advantages in certain areas of the ice and work to those areas to create chances

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Part 3: The SSG ideas

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A Devil's reject, ever since a kid I've been a loser
But I dealt with it, it's called developing a sense of humor
Learn to laugh a little bit, this shit is good for your health
If you can't take a joke, you need to take a look at yourself

Shit if I didn't have the haters, then I would probably withdraw
Shit dog, honestly I would probably miss y'all
Haters, really please, promise me you'll never quit, y'all
Here, I'll make fun of me with y'all

-Chris Webby, Triggered

I’ve been humbled by the Twitter anons and some non-anonymous actual ‘experts’ this week for takes like this, so fair warning before we get started. I have no idea what I’m doing and am certainly a ‘nobody’.

So, how do we do Skill Acquisition Specialist in the team setting whist keeping only A-players in your organization? My vote is having a coaching staff that knows the principles and giving one of them an additional title.

If all your dogs can’t EcoD hunt, and let’s say in October, you’re allowed to legally add more coaches to your college coaching staff at D1, I’d say you’re probably good because you are already executing a very aligned way of being.

For the others, I wouldn’t add a ‘Director of Player Development’ and stick him in a silo. But the people that don’t understand holistic, unified approaches to the organization will do just that.

I’d hire one of these if I’m already doing the whole ecological, unified thing and I still wanted to add:

The recommended path for the rest of this post is to read this paper first.

I’m not an expert but, “Director of Player Development” is a siloed role and name. One we’ve been giving out since those days when we didn’t know what we were doing. Note: Most still actually don’t know what they’re doing.

One of these titles, or any title that you can deploy in a more unified, holistic manner, would do wonders to give more Power to your organization. Literally, it will raise the calibration and energy field if you do this well.

So how?

What might they do?

Here are a couple of different ideas, and then I’ll give you mine. Here’s a graphic from the paper I’ll link here and at the conclusion of the post:

Here’s how one SAS describes their job:

If you are a D1 program that can add this position in October if this legal ruling passes, I wouldn’t waste it on an alum who just got done playing; throw him to the side in an office and not really bother with him.

I’d hire someone competent, but I’m not an expert, and that’s probably an outlandish take.

Someone who could not just design rep without rep on the ice, but design rep without rep in as many areas for the players as possible.

Someone who might have gone to school for Kinesiology or athletic training and then got into coaching so they can speak different languages within your team ecosystem to different ‘departments’ (which actually shouldn’t be called departments at all, but I’m digressing). Someone who can bridge communication gaps. A language translator and an interpreter for other staff members. Someone who can walk into the weight room after they were on the ice for practice and say, “quick heads up, our staff deviated from their orginal practice plan about 30 minutes into practice and the change of direction load on the ice became signifcantly higher than what we had planned for, maybe you cut the volume on anything in the (movement plane corresponding to the increased on ice volume).

Someone who has an understanding of video and how to guide attention and intention in video sessions with players, not just on the ice in a skill development/problem-solving session.

Someone who doesn’t look like the normalized version of ‘coach’ most of us hold in our minds:

Someone who understands this, or you’re really going to waste any money you invest in that human:

Someone who knows this:

And this:

Someone who could watch a playlist like this and design environments that would create failure yet simultaneously instill confidence and awareness so he is more adaptable and encouraged to get inside more:

And yeah, expert that’s going to come at me. I understand he was a freshman and got hurt and would have taken more steps than what he’s showing on this tape because Michigan has a staff that ‘gets it’. I’m using it as an example, so maybe if you watch the whole thing, you could come up with some ideas instead of complaining in my comments…

Someone who can read a book and not turn the definition of something into something completely different like half the world is right now with ‘underloading’

Just my observations…

Someone who knows that DL should no longer be on the DL.

Someone who understands it’s the SAID principle all the way down and skills are not actually acquired at all:

Someone who understands that muscle memory doesn’t exist:

Yes, everyone is wrong.

No, muscle memory is not a thing:

It’s like a cult at this point:

Someone that players like being around. This position can be key to player experience and retention, as they will interface 1-to-1 with players on-ice in problem-solving sessions and in 1-to-1 video sessions.

Remember the Power law in hiring, brought to you by great principles thinker, Sam Hinkie…

Sam Hinkie argues that the best candidate isn’t slightly better in terms of:

• Cultural fit

• Skill stack

• EQ

• IQ

• Leadership ability

• Mindset

They are 10x-100x better than the 2nd-best candidate. This is the power of the power law.

It can land you a game-changer.

Now, if you haven’t clicked on the full paper on the SAS, last chance…

Here’s the abstract copied and pasted before you go to lower the friction to potentially click:

https://www.journalofexpertise.org/articles/volume7_issue3/JoE_7_3_Otte_etal.html

The next part of this series will actually be 7.5, I’m not to the bottom of this one yet…

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A small-sided game with intermedi…

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Before I scored a backdoor tap, before Erling Haaland, there was another great underloader who never got his flowers in our game. He scored in that AHL game video above, taking 2 of the least powerful strides the game has ever seen. Don’t worry about me, I’m no threat… And then the puck is in the back of the net.

I recently went and visited one of the coolest places on earth.

Located directly between the Twin Cities sits a soccer player’s paradise.

Outdoor fields, indoor futsal courts, and top-flight European games playing on the TV in the players' lounge. Lunch with your friends, zero cellphones in sight. And the best part was the word ‘elite’ didn’t appear on any of the walls or come out of anyone’s mouth the entire time.

It’s not a multimillion-dollar megaplex; it’s something that would fit into Rasmus Ankersen’s ‘The Gold Mine Effect’ book. The paradox the book was hitting at… The non-elite-looking places just happen to produce the most elite talent.

There’s Power in that.

And something Powerful is happening there. If you want all of the details on the process, read Ted’s ( ) book, “The Talent Thief”.

Here are some of the conversation topics from my visit and thoughts I’ve had in the days since visiting.

1. Our talk about Josh Ho-Sang

Josh played too early to have people appreciate his ‘underload’ abilities. He played ‘easy as possible’

His controller isn’t dead; he’s about to score an underloaded one:

Not skating real hard, but manipulating 3 defenders:

2. The energy of Joy trumps any masterful EcoD/CLA practice design

Energy first, then design. Go ahead… Invert this quick if you don’t believe me. The best-designed CLA SSG will not yield the skill adaptation you’re looking for if kids are afraid to make mistakes. Energy is the conduit. Failure is a requirement. If kids are ‘fearless’ like the play kids at Joy of the People are, they will try hours of 1v1 movement solutions that don’t ‘work’ today. But they’ll work in 3 months, 3 years, and 13 years. Because failure leads to adaptations for improved 1v1 fitness.

Ted and the ‘coaches’ at Joy… Who don’t explicitly teach, by the way… Are developing the most dangerous species of player… The ‘Target Player’:

What is a Target Player?

The music is on, the coaches aren’t ‘coaching’, they’re playing with the kids. Zero parents are in the building. Fear doesn’t exist; there are no conditions for it to be created:

Here’s another way to manipulate current conditions to make adaptation more likely:

Losing makes people ‘go for it’. If kids aren’t perceiving and acting on back cuts and other off-puck movement that could get them into more dangerous space to score, instead of lecturing them, just pull on a lever and see what emerges. If you want a certain cohort of players to take offensive steps, make them start the game down a few goals.

3. Space and Speed Poor = Deception Rich

The first principle of player development is simple. You have to be immersed in it to adapt to it. You won’t learn to survive or thrive on a deserted island by living on a yacht.

You will not increase your ability to desync from a check if you’re on offense and need some space by faking out the ‘air’. And you can’t ‘teach’ it explicitly.

Josh Ho-Sang was 1 of 1. He had his own style, skating stride; he was full of creativity… Now players look like they were made in a factory. If we want to understand how we get back to more Josh Ho-Sang’s emerging… We might consider play as the vehicle to drive us to that beautiful destination.

Play kids have the highest fitness.

‘Play kids’ have 17 beaks.

They have warm and cold blood.

Scales, wings, fins, lungs, blowholes, gills.

They can eat any diet. Digest anything that enters their system.

Can live at the bottom of the ocean and the top of a mountain.

Adapt or die.

One of the key messages that was repeated from the late founder of the restaurant was his mantra that ‘anyone can cook’, dude wrote the book on it:

Listen, some of these ‘experts’ out here shitposting people trying to bring EcoD and other complex systems concepts (relationism, conceptual offense, synergies, co-adaptation, etc) to more people by putting together videos like this…

Are the problem… If someone partners with a club in Sweden that’s just like, ‘come in, here’s what we do’… Then maybe we don’t shitpost that over semantics.

Let’s agree that you can argue that a ‘concept’, ‘principle’, and ‘intention’ CAN be the same thing. ‘Draw 2’ fits all 3 of those… If we need an example.

Let’s agree that a 20 min video isn’t a dissertation where every thought process can go to the bottom.

Let’s also agree that if people are trying to get this sort of information out to people who still throw kids in lines and weave them through a cone course, we don’t shitpost them.

To quote a famous Mighty Duck in D2, ‘pick another target’.

Shitpost the people who aren’t even trying at this point:

Okay, I’m done with that… On to the next.

“Anyone can cook”

Back to Chef Gusteau. Anyone can cook using EcoD theory and the CLA framework. Let’s talk Newell first w/ a graphic from :

As coaches, we can most easily manipulate ‘task’ constraints. To use a screencap of the Swedish soccer club video from above, making the field smaller is a common task constraint. The cones on the field are not for dribbling with your head down through, they are a boundary, and when you manipulate a boundary, different things become more and less likely to emerge:

A long narrow field might afford more transition moments; see here with the Sabres:

A small, one net area created conditions for more creativity:

If you’re space and speed poor, you create condtions to be deception rich:

You can manipulate equipment:

You can manipulate rules:

Can’t exit until you create the conditions for give and go.

Or, first team to pick gets an extra player:

Or, first side change gets you an extra guy:

You can even give your constraints names to guide attention and intention to be like Patrick Kane:

Possibilities are endless; just keep offense AND defense. Content AND context. Problems to solve. Multiple ways to solve them.

Anyone can cook. Chef also adds to the quote…

In this world, it’s okay to try things. It’s okay to fail. Iterate and go again.

You can manipulate surfaces:

Beach hockey.

Or maybe you fancy… Pro Beach Hockey:

Floorball: Different ball and surface

You can manipulate footwear: Skate tightness or no skates (boot hockey practice) or socks at basketball practice

You can manipulate who starts with the puck or how the game starts:

You can play cross-ice and change how many players go each rep. 3v3, 3v4, 4v2, 4v4, etc

You can do just about anything you can dream up, quickly change the space and the intention:

If you want to get more in the weeds, you can check out our series on the process we use here:

Watch that video from The Purist; regardless of what David Garcia says, there’s some value and some things that will make most people think… Which is a good thing. Here it is again if you don’t want to scroll up:

P.S. I promised this would be the SAS post; that will be the next one. After starting to write, I knew I needed to break the Local and Global aspects of How to EcoD into 2 posts… Next time:

Other great places to ‘How EcoD’ here:

1. Kane change of speed constraint: Oftentimes Kane can be seen going from skating across the blue with possession to keeping both feet on the ice, shaving ice, riding edges and rerouting to hold up defenders and create space for the puck to go behind defenders. On rush entries, you can make a rule where the player that carries the puck in must keep both feet on ice after he crosses blueline. If player on puck is slowing down, it might be a good idea if I’m off puck to speed up. Opposites attract goals.

2. Skating side change before you can attack. Must skate across slot line

3. Must hold up play in high ice for 3 seconds before looking to attack

4. Play more in youth hockey practice… Kane, Ho-Sang and the great underloaders of our game are masters of high ice manipulation (keep the context):

“A flower is a weed with an advertising budget.”

-Rory Sutherland

Going through some Saginaw video again because I heard the new coach drop the ‘S’ word (systems) during his press conference.

So just trying to enjoy the last of the Lazary era stuff. Pepoy started to jump out at me watching a game.

So I watched all his scoring chances yesterday; they’re open-sourced here:

Inspiration: and what others are choosing to do with his videos. This picture is worth a billion words.

Players getting a workout in can watch football and get it through osmosis instead of watching CNN or whatever else they put on. (Ted) talks about when you’re the ‘oldest kid in the game’ (the coach) at his facility, he controls the music playlist and the kids learn to enjoy it.

To apply this thought elsewhere, the ‘coach’ probably throws these playlists on the TVs while kids are in the facility; it’s what he (the coach) wants on, but it eventually becomes what the kids want to watch too.

In Ted’s book, The Talent Thief, he also mentions how setting up the field to invite play naturally is design for your culture. The players come onto the field and it ‘invites’ them to play.

If you get out on the ice a few minutes before your players walk out of the locker room and instead of putting nets on the creases, peg them cross-ice, it invites kids to start playing a quick game as soon as they get out there. The design work is done by you so they can just play.

To apply this thought to another area of your facility, if there’s a Celebrini playlist playing in the player lounge, kids might gather around it and watch and talk and stay off their phones. To reference that Sutherland quote at the top, instead of a weed, you’ve created a flower garden that people will congregate in. You’ve employed a bit of alchemy.

Or if you set up the video room 10 minutes before the meeting starts with one of these playlists on, players can watch something useful while they wait for team video to start. They might start talking in a small group in there, they might go up and pause your laptop and rewind the last clip. They might start coming early. Weed to flower. Nothing into beauty. Alchemy.

Design the environments, see what emerges.

What would I love to come in and be surprised to see one day in our facility?

How can I create favorable conditions for that to emerge?

Turn a weed into a flower. Something you walk by to something you stop at and appreciate. Something you don’t notice to something you do.

Something that invites.

P.S. If players or coaches want another resource for the whole osmosis thing, check out the conceptual hockey library:

Because it addresses the fundamental problem:

Why EcoD?

Because it is.

It is problems over fundamentals. Instead of the inverted world we currently live in. Which is fundamentals first, we’ll see if we ever get to problems, and fun only happens in the last 10 minutes if you’re good soldiers today and do my drills.

The world that gets you demoted after providing the best player development experience a group of kids has ever experienced for cones, obstacles, and air:

Compared to IP or not having a theory and just clipping drills out of ‘1001 Drills for Hockey Coaches’…

It is more joyful to coach and be coached in an EcoD environment:

Also, when kids experience the representativeness of a great training session, they can’t go back… And legitimately won’t ‘go’.

We had 18-year-old kids last year ask if ‘we’ were running the evening player development skate or the ‘other guy’. Kids who were paying money either way, would literally choose not to come to something they were paying for if it wasn’t the former designing the skate.

They know. Do they ever know.

Why EcoD?

It holistically represents conditions players will encounter and have to navigate in the game.

It has transformative stories that ‘yeah, we just did flow drills, skated around cones all year and 5v0 breakouts’ doesn’t quite accomplish:

It is not boring. It does not waste time.

It is alive. Constantly creating new conditions to adapt to and adapting to new conditions:

When the puck is on the ice in play, each shapes the game, each is shaped by the game.

Why EcoD?

It is… Not making you better at ‘skills’ but better at problem-solving. More attuned to valuable information, like when you’re in dominoes, can you exploit it before the defense recovers back to neutral… That is the difference between goal and no goal, scoring chance vs. no chance, between making money playing hockey and not:

Why EcoD? Because you can get what happens in the 2 above by designing a game for the players to search for, exploit when they are there, and create them when they aren’t there…

Why EcoD?

Because ‘when to do’ is more important than being ‘able to do’.

It has 1v1 dyadic relationships, opponents to manipulate then separate from:

It is giving and going to space the defender affords, not the anywhere you want to go without context:

Why EcoD?

It is reality.

Why EcoD?

Because it avoids the pretend.

If you need another animal heuristic… Does practice look like the dog agility above or the Puppy Bowl?

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1/2 of the equation? Ecological psychology. Founder, J.J. Gibson:

Gibson contributes direct perception to this new baby. One of Gibson’s famous quotes is:

Some smart people (The EcoD people) thought to mix Gibson’s work with the person who observed and discovered dynamical systems theory. Founder: Henri Poincaré.

A student of this dynamical systems theory would study how systems evolve over time. Broken down into linear and non-linear subsections. We in sports would be more concerned with the non-linear… Basically, non-linear systems feature complex interactions and feedback loops.

Relevant subsections of the overarching dynamical systems theory that are also of interest. Non-linear dynamics and chaos theory. In the following two tweets, I attempt to give those theories to you in just a few words.

Here is a diagram from Mark that puts some more meat on complex systems and their counterparts:

The issue with complex systems is that coaches are culturally rooted in this thing called control. Most coaches love control:

Complex systems are like weather. The conditions may be favorable for rain, but water may not fall from the sky that day. You can’t control the weather. The best you can do as an ecological coach is create favorable conditions for a behavior to emerge. Then you have to let go.

Putting the Direct Perception Thingy and the Action Thingy Together

Okay, we have the proverbial egg and sperm of this new hybrid baby called ecological dynamics, so what happens when you actually put them together? I offered a thread to the internet from a number of people inside and outside of sport that share a holistic ‘learning’ or ecological perspective and the internet didn’t like it…

You get called a heretic by the mob of legacy coaches that don’t want to change:

The responses are fun:

Rick taught me that holistic training design is actually one-dimensional thinking:

I’m digressing slightly.

The point is most people aren’t ready for the new thing. Even though it’s not that new. The average speed of change is painfully slow:

Norman’s book discusses numerous examples of currently available technology to make elevators better and communicate with each other if there are more than 2 or 3 (like in the lobby of a large hotel).

He also talked about how HDTV technology was sitting around ready to go for the better part of 30 years before we put it into people’s living rooms. Because like, we’d have to change some things… Here’s what we knew in 2011 and 1998… Written from a Carl Woods paper:

The good news is that the cost of an ecological coach isn’t massive. You just trade the person making your players go through cones and run 5v0 breakouts for someone who has a grasp of designing environments which help your players solve problems better over time by exposing them to variability, and a boatload of context representative of the game. And I don’t know… A mistake or 200 at practice:

And yes, I’m perceiving the reader’s thoughts right now… Drew, please don’t get to the end of Part 4 without giving us an idea of what this thing is…

Okay, fine.

What is Ecological Dynamics?

Here’s Carl Woods from the same paper:

Great, Drew. What does that all mean in a less sciencey sounding explanation that I can understand?

1. Senses guide movement, and movement changes what is perceived in real time. The perception-action loop happens at the same time. Looking and moving all at once.

2. Self-organization is recognized over pre-planned movements. Movement solutions, not movements. The body naturally finds the solution to each 1 of 1 problem it faces. This creative pass ‘technique’ (technique in air quotes because its a made-up term, his ‘technique’ to solve this particular problem emerges in the moment based on current conditions and constraints) hasn’t been practiced once from this player in the video below, he perceives a teammate in space as he’s attempting to beat his check and, mid-fall, self-organizes into a creative solution to get the puck to that space.

3. The CLA is used within this overarching theory. The CLA manipulates the individual, environment, or task to create space and variability for learning to take place.

Key Intentions in Your Environmental Design

1. Repetition without repetition- The goal might be to beat your defender in a 1v1 and earn a shot in the slot, but there are 1000s of ways to beat that defender when the rep goes live. Commander’s intent is deployed to allow you to accomplish the goal in a variety of different ways and however you see fit based on the affordances presented to you

From that same Woods article:

2. Task Exploration- Functional solution to the problem over mechanical perfection. The perfect slapshot that is broken down frame by frame in the textbook might not be available to you with a defender in your face; you still need to score. EcoD trains you to be adaptable and finish in 1000’s of different ways from different joint angles, stick pressure, hand positions on the stick, etc

And listen, if this is your first exposure to this stuff, it’s going to maybe seem a bit overwhelming. So, I’ll try to ease your mind with this…

When in doubt, if it’s play-centered design, and there’s a chance of ‘failure’ or a ‘mistake’, you’re doing this thingy:

Reminder: opponents are the connection to the game.

Put bluntly… If there aren’t defenders in what you’re doing, class is officially NOT in session, and nobody is learning a thing. If there’s a chance of failure, you’re giving your players a chance at future success.

This next part is especially true for invasion sports… If it doesn’t evolve their perception, it doesn’t evolve the athlete.

Which is what we’re supposed to be doing… I think.

Carl Woods and colleagues think so too: