The Tyranny of Talent: Dr. Joe Baker on Why Early Labels Are Failing Youth Athletes

Matt Cundill  00:01

This is the mental approach, where we discuss mindfulness, mental performance, and the tools available for coping in a high-performance world. Here's Todd Arkell.

 

Speaker 1  00:12

Today's guest is Dr. Joe Baker, a professor, researcher, and I'll say this - maybe it's true, maybe it's not - one of the world's leading voices on athlete development and performance, Dr. Baker is the Tanenbaum Research Chair at the University of Toronto, and a co-author of a book called The Tyranny of Talent, one of many books he's written, but one that's very interesting in the topic of today's show. It's a book that challenges one of sports, most deeply held beliefs that success is mostly about natural ability, and what I appreciate most about Joe's work is that it cuts through the myths, instead of chasing shortcuts or early labels, he asks harder questions about patience, perspective, and how we create environments where athletes, especially young ones, can grow. Welcome to the show, Joe.

 

Speaker 2  01:01

Thanks, Todd. I'm excited to, excited to be here.

 

Speaker 1  01:04

I big shout out to a listener, Val, who hooked me to your book and led me to booking you as a guest, so I got to give that. She's a longtime listener, first time caller, as they say, and it just fits so much around the theme of what we talk about on the show, you know, it's about mindfulness, it's mental performances, these different things, but it's really the fact that kids spend so much time on skill development, they don't spend much time on other areas of the game around how they handle things, and, and all the stuff that goes around it, you know, one of the big themes to your book is talent is overvalued. At least that's kind of what I took from it, right? Right off the hop, I'm going to say, if talent mattered as much as we think it does, why do so many can't miss kids disappear, and so many late bloomers end up at the top?

 

Speaker 2  01:55

I'll go back to the original premise of the question, right, that if talent exists, I think it does exist. It's just way more complicated and challenging for us to measure than we think, and if you know one of the things that I've learned over the last decade or so, focusing on this issue of talent, is coaches know this, they know it's hard to, it's hard to nurture, it's hard to identify players' talent, and it's the rest of the world, it's parents, it's the, it's the other, you know, the other obstacles in a coach's life that, that make it seem like this is something that's supposed to be simple. It's hard to understand how we nurture a player from who could be an absolute superstar at a u9 or U 11 to facilitate that process that continues for another 10 years to make them a superstar as an adult. There are so many more ways things can go wrong than for things to go right, and you know, we often look back from the success stories, you know, that are going to be at the Olympic, then we just sort of say, well, you know, it was, it was predestiny, no, this is the end result of somebody who's just everything happened to work out for them. There are so many athletes where, you know, it doesn't go that way.

 

Speaker 1  03:18

I couldn't agree more. I mean, thinking of Olympics, Elizabeth Manley. I remember watching that performance at the Olympics, where she came from literally nowhere to medal. It was, you know, and it's not to say she had to be talented to get there, but what were all the different things that kind of went into it? I think one of the.. for me, anyways, I think there's a lot of people talk about, you know, there's early labels put on kids, oh, they're a natural or they're terrible, they're not good at this game, right? And that kind of seems to, you know, can shape identity,

 

Speaker 2  03:52

sure,

 

Speaker 1  03:53

at a very young age, right? Like, oh, that guy, you know, a great example is, and I'll try to put it succinctly, I had a kid that I coached in baseball at seven and was not really a particularly great baseball player, but he was left-handed, so we felt in a couple of years he's could be a pitcher, right? Like you love to have left-handed pitching, so you know, keep the kid on the team and let's keep developing, and I had coaches who said no, no, no, you know, like he's not good enough, we can replace him with another kid, and I'm like, okay, well, we're eight or nine, and it really doesn't matter at this point, you know? Like, let's just get to see what we got, and you know what, he started pitching, and he was a decent pitcher, and he just kept developing and developing, and fall of 2025 he went to junior college in the US to play baseball, I maintain to this day, had we cut him at seven, he probably never would have picked up a baseball again, and yet he's done what, what is it, I don't, 7% or something is the number of people that play baseball in high school level make it to college, and so there's an example of somebody who. He just liked baseball, and we continued to give him a chance, and he grew into what he was going to be.

 

Speaker 2  05:06

Yeah, and I think that, you know, that's often the case, right? Like, we forget that most critical relationship that we're trying to develop across this process is someone's continued interest in the sport and continuing to show up every day, and you know you have to make sacrifices, you have to sacrifice time with your friends, or increasingly time on your gaming platform, so that you can practice, you can, you can go and work with a coach, you can take that time every week, it's the consistency of practice, and you know the thing that we're exploring at the moment in the lab is the power of these labels that we put on people, and it seems like people live up to the label that you put on them, so if you tell a kid and you seven, you know what, baseball, we don't think you have what it takes to play on this elite team, this traveling team this year, they live up to that label that you put on them. There's it's very rare that you get the, you know, the Michael Jordans of the world that get cut from their team, and it fuels a fire in them to sort of prove people wrong. That happens sometimes, but not very often. Well, you know that that feedback that we get is a really powerful motivator of behavior for

 

Speaker 1  06:21

us, and yet you know people who want to use Pump Up, they use that Michael Jordan story, the host of anything, right? Like, and I mean to say, hey, it's possible, yeah, and I think anything can be possible, but it takes an extraordinary, I think, drive within a kid to be able to overcome that. I agree, so when you hear a parent say, "My kid's really talented, what do you, what do you hear underneath

 

Speaker 2  06:46

it? Yeah, most of the time when parents say that, they're looking at the physical parts of talent, like the performance against kids in their age group, like that kind of stuff. So, we see it in the, you know, the performance outcomes, whether that's points in hockey or like points scored in basketball, like those kinds of things, which, yeah, there could be something there relative to the rest of their peer group that they're they're better at at that moment in time, but the thing that we know about athlete development is the thing that makes you a good 11 year old is not the same thing that makes you a good 21 year old, and so, well, yeah, you might have the gifts there at that age, but how do we continue to facilitate those gifts as you move forward, and so most of the time when parents use the word talent, they're talking about physical stuff or performance-related stuff, we want them to shift the conversation to more variables that predict the long-term engagement with the process, so these are almost always psychological. They're not obviously not separate in silos, but what we want is that kid that's going to show up for practice every day and work harder than the rest of the kids in their peer group, because what we've learned from over 125 years is that if you practice more you get better at something, and so how do we fuel the fire of practice that's maybe the best indicator of talent that we have. If you can tell me, who's the kid that's going to practice more, who's the kid that's going to be more interested in their sport, and not, you know, not see giving up their Saturday mornings as a sacrifice, so that they can practice more. Tell me, who that kid is, and I'll.. that's the one that I'll put my money on.

 

Speaker 1  08:30

It's interesting. I remember when my son first started playing baseball, and he was like, "I want to play baseball, and I go, "Well, you don't know how to catch, you know how to hit. So here, let me show you, right? Like, let's play a little catch. Let's do this, and he would go out at, like, you know, five years old, and he had a little started with the tennis ball off the back of the garage to field them field balls. And then I said, I'll get him one of those pitch and play things, the Nets, and he would literally go out there for hours on his own, diving and doing all this other stuff. So when he started playing T-ball, people are like, "Oh, like, how did your kid get so good? And I go, "Ah, it's all on him. It's got nothing to do with, like, he would just.. he, for whatever reason, he enjoyed that, and he went out and he did it, and you know.. and I guess that's kind of that thing. And then, how do you think about how do you instill that, right? How do they, how do they keep up? Because at some point it's like to your point, I'd rather go ride a bike with my buddy, or I'd rather play some video games, or whatever. And maybe that there's a drop off there. So, where do.. how do you nurture that, I guess, love for the process? It's

 

Speaker 2  09:37

one of the great challenges of athlete development, because sometimes you know the kid doesn't want to get out of bed, like they just don't want to go to, and that's normal stuff, right? Like, I don't blame them, and sometimes you got to be the parent and say no, you're going to practice today, you know, remember at the beginning of the season when we committed that you were going to finish and you were going to train hard, we. You're standing up to your commitment, right? Like, you still have to parent - they're not fully formed decision makers at 11 years old, or 13, or even we're learning, even at 20 years old, their brain is continuing to develop, and so sometimes you've got to be the parent in the situation, and but do you have to do that all the time, or is it once in a while? Like those are the questions that we don't really have a good handle on yet.

 

Speaker 1  10:25

What are some mental habits that you think that stars maybe don't often develop? Like, you're really great at a sport, so what are things that be? It's left behind because they're physically gifted.

 

Speaker 2  10:39

I think it's the persistence and the ability to work hard, right. Then that's maybe, you know, you mentioned it earlier on, like, how do we explain these kids that look like superstars early on that didn't go on to become anything? And I think that's the shift that they struggle with. Everything has become so, or everything has come so easy to them, they don't understand the importance of hard work, or they don't. They again, they live up to the label of being talented, which they read as I don't have to work hard because I've got talent. Well, no, the world will find where your weaknesses are eventually, and so you've got to develop the psychological skills of resilience and persistence and mental toughness and challenge, and I think you know kids that can develop those skills early are going to have an advantage when things get more difficult, which it inevitably will at some point in that development process. You know, we discuss this all the time with researchers around the world that you know we have to purposely put challenge into the athlete development pathway, so that they can develop these skills, because they don't happen organically, they have to be learned.

 

Speaker 1  11:48

Do you think being labeled talented at a young age increases that athlete's fear of failure?

 

Speaker 2  11:54

I don't know that we know enough about it yet, because you know, for every kid that we label as talented, that increases anxiety or fear of failure, that kind of stuff. There's another kid who you give them that label, and it's, it's feedback in their competence belief system, right? So they actually feel that, hey, you know what, I never saw myself as a high performer before, you told me that I am, I'm going to work harder to prove you right. So it's, you know, again, it comes back to one of the things that we try to emphasize in our work, which is there is no one size fits all strategy for every athlete. It's what does that kid in front of you need right now in order to increase the likelihood that they're going to come back and want to work harder tomorrow.

 

Speaker 1  12:36

How do you research? Like, I mean, this is, this is seems like a.. I'm not gonna say it's esoteric, but you know what I mean. It's like, okay, so are you interviewing athletes at all kinds of different ages? Like, talk through the process of how the research goes. A

 

Speaker 2  12:50

lot of the work that we do is because of the demands and the likelihood that most kids in sport are going to not end up being elite performers. Most of the work that we do is people that are at the highest level of performance, and then tracking backwards. Okay, so what are the things that they do that are different? Where do they come from? What part of the year are they born in? What did their parents do, like all that kind of basic demographic stuff. And then we get into when did they start training in their sport, when did they get their for their first elite coach? How many hours did they, they put in? Did they spend a lot of time with their peer groups, like all that sort of quality stuff around the training engagement and training environment. We go into that, and then you know, once we've got those sort of variables of interest, then we would say, okay, in kids today, can we predict who's more likely to get selected for a high performance program by looking at self regulation ability, for example, which seems to be a really important variable for long term prediction of success. How well are you able to self regulate your own training? So are you planning, are you monitoring, are you evaluating your own training, so that your coach doesn't have to do that for you, you're doing it for yourself, so those kinds of things, but yeah, it's interviews with athletes at every age group that it makes sense to do that in, it's personality inventories, it's training histories, it's all that kind of stuff, this is how complicated the question is. We to be able to understand that you have to measure all of those things, because they all matter.

 

Speaker 1  14:28

There was always this conversation that you know there was a higher rate of NHL hockey players that are born in January. Is there truth to that month?

 

Speaker 2  14:37

For sure, right? That's the relative age effect that we've done a lot of work in, and it's something that was identified over 40 years ago, that if anything has gotten worse over time, because of how important, okay, how important early selection is, right? And so there's a that's called the relative age effect, there's another bias that's related to that, that's based on how fast you're maturing. As a player, so there's a really cool study that showed that even within a one year age group there can be up to five or seven years variability in the maturation rates that are happening there, so kids that appear to be bigger, stronger, faster are more likely to just be maturing faster than the other kids,

 

Speaker 1  15:21

sure. I mean, I think I saw, I saw a video the other day, and it was, it was like a hockey trainer, and he goes, he goes, 'Hey, this is this kid on my team, and he's 13, and they was like six foot four or something. And then here's his teammate, and he looked like he was 10,

 

Speaker 2  15:39

yeah,

 

Speaker 1  15:40

and same same age group, right? Crazy, yeah.

 

Speaker 2  15:42

And so we're, I know, working with a, you know, with USA Hockey and Hockey Sweden, because they're they're doing an approach called bio banding, which would say we're putting the slow maturing kids with the slow maturing kids and the fast maturing kids with kids like them, so that they get better learning environments, more equal training environments, and that kind of thing. So, it's we're trying to control those things, which just requires a different approach.

 

Speaker 1  16:09

That's actually really fascinating. Because when I think about things like, I think about here in Canada, the GTHL years ago said, oh, hey, you know, at, I think it was at 13, we're gonna, we're gonna go, no hitting it at a lot of the reason for that was you had such a disparity in the size of kids, right? So you get into the physical nature of hockey and you've got kids that look like adults, and then you have kids who still look like their age, or what you would expect their age to be, and so I think their idea was, hey, let's get some longevity in the sport, or whatever, for people that want to play, but I don't know, I still sometimes think that it doesn't make any sense, because they're the only ones who went that way, and nobody else in the country did, and if you live in the Toronto area and you play a hockey and there's no hitting, you have very little places to go outside of your own center to play teams, you know. If you're playing a hockey at 13, you might say, 'Wow, that you know they're not going to go pro. Well, that's not the point, though, right? Like, I mean, there could be a kid that actually does develop late, and you know, whatever, but then they're they're at a disadvantage because they haven't hit for years. I like this idea of bio banding. I mean, I think I'm going to dig into that a second, but I think, like, there's a port credit hockey in Mississauga has a program called Paperways, and it's four, five, and six year olds, hugely popular. There's a lot of things, it's crazy, I think the guy who runs it says one year that we didn't win the World Juniors, I don't know, it was like 10 years ago, he goes, that first time we haven't had a paper weight on the Canadian team, so there's a lot of kids that come through this program that over time they end up like they develop and they end up, you know, making rising to the kind of highest ranks. A lot of NHLers have come through, not that the program develops NHLers, it just so happens that that's kind of the way it's worked out, but what's really cool, my son started playing hockey at six, so he wasn't a great skater. So, on each team they have what they call a blue line, a white line, and a red line, and it's like blue is the lowest, and so it's the shufflers or the one leg skaters, right? And they literally sort the kids based on their ability, not their age, and then as they get better during the season, you actually can move up the scale, and you get, and you're right, and you start, so every time you're on the ice, you're playing against kids of a similar ability, right? Is kind of the idea, and it works out like really, really well, because if you're a six year old and you start playing hockey, and everybody's been playing for two years, you're going to be so far behind skating wise. And then, where's your love for the game? And you do, you kind of give it up. So, is it kind of like that they're trying to group kids based on not age but ability?

 

Speaker 2  18:54

Yeah, and to be honest, that might actually be a better way to do it, because it sounds like they're grouping kids based on competency and the skills, as opposed to saying, you know, this is your rate of maturation. Well, you're right. If I'm.. it doesn't matter if I'm a faster mature than you. If I.. if you spend more time practicing in hockey, then you're probably a better skater, a better puck handler. So, it's better to do it by competency if you can, which it sounds like this program does, but you know the best scenario that we could envision is if we had all of the skills that you need to be a, you know, an NHL player, even somebody who wants to play hockey for the next 50 years, and we could say at each age group these are the things that we want you to focus on, we want, you know, when you're young and you're in paper weights, we need you to focus on skill and skating and execution and your ability to handle a puck without losing it. Okay, once you've mastered that and you move up to, let's say, the atom level. Okay, now now we need you to, we need you to have a better understanding of tactics, you need to be. Not just an individual, but part of a line, and here's how lines work together, like if we, if we could say, for every skill that you need to have as an adult, here's the progression, and here's how we facilitate it on the ice and off the ice, that would be such an important development for us, but I'm not aware of a single sport, other than in physical sort of qualities that has that understanding of how humans develop in that sports space. Yeah, it's.. it is

 

Speaker 1  20:30

interesting, and I think about it like you.. you do develop at different rates, and it would be interesting. I think Hockey Canada is trying to do stuff around this pathways program, and they have different, you know, hey, no tryouts in the spring, try, you know, all you know, again, I have so many, but I don't think it goes quite deep enough. The other part is with all of that, it's still kind of delivered by the same coaches with the old mentalities and not wanting to change to the new mentalities, and then you have parents who kind of still have that old mentality, right. It's like, how do you, how do you change? We'll talk about parents and coaches later on, how that all kind of works in here, but I guess you can change the, the way that you go about it, but you have to get everybody to buy in.

 

Speaker 2  21:14

Yeah, it's like, and it's one of the greatest challenges for hockey in Canada, in my opinion, is the the pervasive culture that we have, the power of that culture has been so positive for getting kids into the sport for so long that we actually don't see the weaknesses and the gap in that culture from what are we doing wrong perspective, and but we're seeing it at the junior level, we're seeing it at the number of players that are converting to the NHL, like Canada, is losing market share in terms of the players that we develop, and do we have a program that could be better than the one that we have at the moment? And for me, that's the question we should be asking, not are we successful every once in a while.

 

Speaker 1  21:57

Yeah, no, I agree, and I do. You know, I've seen that. I mean, you just look at the, you know, the first round draft picks in the NHL, and there's a lot more USA Hockey people, and I mean, if you're, if you go into the USA Hockey program, they don't play 65 games, there's a whole different kind of way, and what's funny about some of the USA Hockey that people don't know is there's a bunch of Canadians behind running some of that program as well, which is, is kind of like traders, you're a trader anyways, but it is, I mean, they've taken a little bit of a different look at how it is, and I feel like I feel like here in Canada, it's just like, well, if you're the best, talent will rise, like there's not, not the same sort of long-term vision,

 

Speaker 2  22:44

yeah. And I love the hockey Canada, and what they try to do at the at their vision level, but you know, at the it seems to me that oftentimes players in Canada become superstars despite the system, not because of the system, and I think if you compare that to, you know, a country like Sweden, which I also have a lot of appreciation for, they, you know, I was chatting with the head of research for the Swedish Ice Hockey Association just a couple of weeks ago, and hit their whole platform for their program is we don't build great hockey players, we build great Swedes, and like that's the purpose of the program. And you know they have less hockey players in their whole country than we have in the GTA, and you look at the success that they've had, they have a very efficient player development model. There's lessons we can learn from those kind of countries.

 

Speaker 1  23:38

Late bloomers, how to. what advice do you have for kids, athletes who are overlooked at a younger age, but they've kept going, like, you know, you know, how do you, what would you say to motivate them to, to kind of keep belief in themselves, to kind of continue on and see how it plays out?

 

Speaker 2  23:56

I think the best advice I would give to those kinds of players, especially if they're already there, and they're staying right, like the biggest thing is to get them to continue to be interested in the sport, because that's that's that's actually rare for people to stick with a sport when they've been told this isn't the right activity, for you're not as good as your peers, that's hard, because most of the time we get that information, it's like, okay, well, I'm done, I'm going to try something different. If they're sticking with the sport, we've got, we've overcome the biggest hurdle already. What I would say to them at that point is there's just as much likelihood that, and maybe even more likelihood that you're going to rise to the top eventually if you stay practicing in the state, doing what you're doing, that doesn't mean everybody will. If you're, you know, it doesn't matter how much you love basketball, if you're not, you're not going to be above average in height. Then we can't fix that problem for you. But if it's, you know, you're not picking up the skills as well, you're not scoring as many baskets, well, those are things. We can change with practice, though we can make you a better decision maker on the court. We can help you read patterns better. We can give you the skills to be in the right place at the right time. You've got to spend the 1000s of hours practicing your shooting, but the other stuff we can help fix as a coach. For me, I think that's the most powerful thing we've learned over the last 30 years of sports sciences, that most of these things that we used to dismiss as you either have it or you don't are actually the result of long-term practice at that specific thing. So, if we can get you to practice more, get you interested in practicing more, we can fix those things. It's getting you to want to practice that's the biggest thing.

 

Speaker 1  25:39

A lot of parents say things like, well, I just don't want my kid to fall behind when you talk about sports specialization, so what do you, what do you say behind actually means, and who decided that timeline?

 

Speaker 2  25:50

Yeah, I think it's, you know, when parents look at, they're looking at it relative to the performance that other kids in that age group are getting, and I would say to parents, the, you know, the, there was a paper that was published in Science, I think, right before Christmas, that showed that kids that have early success are actually less likely to go on to have success at the adult level. What you want is that kid that is trailing a bit behind, but not, not really behind, but sort of at the average level of performance, and that those are actually the ones that go on to achieve the greater things, and it could be because of the skills that we talked about before, you know, they have to learn to be a bit more resilient, they have to be a bit more focused, because they're behind their peers, they're going to have to work harder to catch up, we don't know exactly what the mechanism of effect is, but what the research shows is that being a great junior performer is actually a poor predictor of who's a great adult performer.

 

Speaker 1  26:48

Interesting, so there you go. Parents, listen up. There's a, there's a researcher who's telling you, he's telling you. So, do you think there's a point where you know, pushing for more, more teams, more training, more exposure and everything, it actually slows development instead of helping it.

 

Speaker 2  27:05

I don't know, it slows development, but it certainly changes it, right? Like, it's you know, we talked to a lot of high-performance coaches around the world, and you know, we had this conversation with one of the best rugby coaches in Australia last year, and he said, well, you know, the system is great at producing rugby players, it's bad at producing athletes, and I think when we need people that you know, when you're athletic, you, you think more creatively. You might have a body that's a little more resistant to injury because you're, it's used to moving in more variable ways than that sort of straight ahead pathway that you get from your sport, your sport specialization. So, I think we need to make a distinction there, like you can early identify kids and put them into a high-performance training program, and they'll get great at that sport, but if they ever want to transfer to another sport, or if you want them to be more creative or better movers, well, we're compromising those kinds of things, and so you know the these specialized intensive programs come at a cost.

 

Speaker 1  28:07

Well, look at, I mean, we have programs even in Canada, and I'm sure they do in other countries as well, where we're taking athletes and all of a sudden somebody who's never cycled before becomes an Olympian in cycling, like we're, we're actually going, okay? What are your core competencies as an athlete? And have you ever thought about this sport?

 

Speaker 2  28:26

Yeah, yeah, that's your Kelsey Mitchell, right? Like, from went from soccer to the training ground, and then was gold medalist in cycling within a couple of years, and now she's trying, now she's trying to switch to bobsled, I hear.

 

Speaker 1  28:41

Well, that's interesting, and it well, it's funny, and I can't remember this girl's name, and it's too bad I should probably find it in the, in this, in the show notes. But I know that from my hometown, in your hometown, in Barrie, Ontario, years ago, a friend of mine coached this girl in basketball. She also played rugby. She went on and played NCAA basketball, I think, in Wisconsin somewhere. And anyways, she got a call, like, 'Hey, have you thought about coming out for this rugby program? So, rugby Canada, so she.. she went out and she was on the women's sevens team that won gold. So, yeah, like, she played basketball all the way through, and then went back to a sport that she'd played in high school and participated at a high level, so yeah, I think you can be great at hockey, and that's one thing, but that's super specific, you know, and I think of Wayne Gretzky always talking about, well, as soon as the season was over, my bag went in the basement, and I picked up a baseball glove, and that was that, right, and yeah, I just, I wonder what we're doing as a, as a society, just focusing on early specialization.

 

Speaker 2  29:46

Yeah, I agree, like, in, you know, this woman that you're talking about, but also players like, you know, the Dion Sanders, the Bo Jackson's, the, you know, one of the things that I learned researching the Tyranny of Talent book was about Dave. Infield, and how he was drafted into three different professional sports, basketball, football, and baseball. Like, we, I think we can probably confidently say that the way the sport system has changed is we're not producing those kind of athletes anymore.

 

Speaker 1  30:16

Yeah, that's probably true. I mean, like, you're, you're going, "Hey, you're really good at this, stick with it, kid, you get that's going to be your thing, right?

 

Speaker 2  30:23

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1  30:24

how do we mandate that, Joe? I have no idea.

 

Speaker 2  30:27

Yeah, it's.. I think we're pretty well aware of the risks and dangers of specialization now, in terms of child development, the increased injury, the, you know, the decreased motivation, too much pressure on winning, like all those kinds of things that we don't want the youth experience to be overly focused on. The problem, like you said, though, is it's a big ship to turn around, and it's got to start with the culture.

 

Matt Cundill  30:56

Now, more of the mental approach with Todd Arkell.

 

Speaker 1  31:00

Here's here's an interesting point. I mean, you could, as a parent, make a decision and say, well, I'm not going to let my kids specialize. He's going to play soccer in the summer, he's going to play baseball, whatever, and he's going to play hockey. The challenge, which I find, and when I, when I coach baseball, and I coached a high level, you know, coach AAA baseball, highest level you can play in this province, we get into the fall, and hockey would see, you know, we're getting into the end of our season, and provincials, and all those things. And then you got kids who played hockey, like I'd always have the conversations with the parents, look at, we got to talk to the hockey coach, because here's the deal, when it's the spring, and baseball doesn't matter that much like it's just whatever regular season or practice you can, you can miss all the baseball you want. I'm cool with that, like that's fine. Like, you got playoffs, all those other things for hockey, that's great. And then you know, but your coach has to buy in that when it's playoffs for me.

 

Speaker 2  31:56

Yep,

 

Speaker 1  31:56

I don't care about that tournament, that early bird tournament in August or whatever, to play hockey, and you got to be okay with that, and you know what, we, you could find some cooperation, like in some cases, but you really had to call it out, and I think that I think if coaches were more understanding of, hey, you know what, this kid's a great athlete, he's not, you know, I'm okay. It doesn't matter. Oh, yes, he's a good player on our team, but winning a tournament in August doesn't do shit for anybody. That's just the way it is. And you know, I think you really have to start to change a lot of that thought processes, so the parents can have the right intention, but then the pressure becomes from the coach saying, well, you're Johnny's not gonna, or Sally's not gonna get the playing time if they're not at everything. Right,

 

Speaker 2  32:48

you're right. It can rarely happen that coaches will connect with each other and say, hey, you know, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. And you know, the reality is that we need to have a conversation about the value of playing baseball in the off season, when you're a hockey player, like it's not a, I'm going to, I'm going to let you get away with this, it's no, I want to help facilitate that all my players are thinking of another sport in their off season, because they're going to come back better hockey players, and how do we facilitate that, so you know it's baseball, they're going to learn teamwork, they're going to get some time off, that their body's going to get a rest from the pressure of the hockey season, they're going to, you know, they're going to still maintain their fitness, so that they come back, like, there's there's reasons to rationalize why playing baseball in the off season actually makes them a better hockey player, and vice versa, like those are the conversations that we should be having, not a I need to sacrifice my off season because you want to go and play baseball, it's no, I want you to go and play baseball because of it's I'm going to get these benefits when you show up at my hockey program, even if it's a couple of weeks late,

 

Speaker 1  33:57

I guess the question is, What are we really afraid would happen if a 12 year old doesn't specialize, right?

 

Speaker 2  34:02

Yeah, yeah, and most of the time, unfortunately, most of the time in North America, it's a bean counting exercise, right? I need the kids in my program because that's how I make my money, which, unfortunately, is more about wins and losses in that season than it is about developing that player over the long term.

 

Speaker 1  34:20

Yeah, I think about it a lot. My brother-in-law said something to me years ago. He said, 'Whose business is it for your kid to play hockey in the summer? And I kind of looked at him and I said, 'Don't, not sure how.. I don't know if I follow. And he goes, 'The guy whose business it is for you to have your kid play hockey in the summer? And it literally was just like, oh my god, yes. Why do we have that? Yeah, I mean, my kid played multiple sports, he played hockey, we didn't skate in the summer.

 

Speaker 2  34:49

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1  34:49

was it like, I mean, they might a little bit early get on the ice and whatever, just to kind of get conditioning, because I do remember one fall, I think it was like general. Evan, the first practice, not that the coach was bag skating them, but he was skating them, and then he came off the ice and threw up, threw his cage into a garbage can, and then went back onto the ice, and I was like, oh my god, right, but he was so out of shape, from, you know, like, like hockey shape, not necessarily shape, because he was playing soccer and baseball in the summer, so he was active, he just wasn't in hockey shape, and yeah, yeah, it's so I can, I can see why, okay, maybe we want to get you a couple of times on the ice, or whatever, to get you into, into that, that kind of thing, but yeah, I just, I feel like there is, there is certainly that, is that we've allowed, I'm using all the euphemisms now, but I, you know, I talk about the professionalism of youth sport. It's, it's feels like that because it's a business for a lot, a lot of it is hockey, but it's become into other ones, like I see there's elite football programs and elite volleyball programs in basketball and everything else, right? So it's like, hey, we need you to be doing this, and so you know, I don't think we can legislate it, but I think part of that, this discussion is hopefully somebody gets something out of it, and goes, oh, maybe we should not do that, you know, maybe we should be a little bit more relaxed,

 

Speaker 2  36:12

like there has been a few developments in, you know, the international organization on the rights of the child, and that kind of stuff, and what that means for the professionalization of youth sport. Like, are we putting kids in situations where they're being exploited, like that kind of stuff? Which, you know, you look at sport and you say it's a voluntary activity, it's supposed to be driven by fun, it's supposed to be driven by enjoyment. And then you go to some of these professionalized academies and you say, well, that's those aren't kids being kids anymore. And so I think there is a conversation, and you know what, you, you sort of said that in a funny way, but it could, it actually could be legislation that says, you know, these are the things that that we do with kids in education, we have very clear policies of what what can happen and what can't? Maybe we need to have similar sorts of policies in youth sport.

 

Speaker 1  37:05

I'm not a big fan of government intervening and everything, like I'm just.. that's not my world, but I do agree, like work that you do at least brings to light perhaps the reason why there needs to be some protectionism, you know, protecting kids from, you know, their parents' goals or their coach's goals, or those types of things, and at least hopefully just education alone will get people to eventually make some changes, as opposed to having to be so drastic about it, and say thou shalt not,

 

Speaker 2  37:40

it's the certainly it's not an argument for bubble wrapping kids, right? Like, no, it's we need to, we need to expose them to the challenges of life and give them opportunities to develop skills, but we also have to do that in a framework and an environment that recognizes these are kids and they have kid-driven learning needs, not ones that can be imposed on them by adults.

 

Speaker 1  38:04

If you had no rankings, no scouts, no scholarships, all that stuff in the picture. How differently do you think we would coach kids?

 

Speaker 2  38:12

It's a fun thought exercise. We do this in my lab all the time, and I think that conclusion that we've come to is eventually there needs to be some kind of ranking system, just by how much our behavior is driven by developing senses of competence, and we measure ourselves against our peer group, but that doesn't start out in youth, we're talking about late adolescence, sort of early adulthood, where we actually have to make decisions about who gets scholarships and who gets to be on national teams and those kinds of things. If you were to set up that kind of a system, I don't know that you'd see too much change at the youth level, right? Because kids know how they perform relative to their peer group. If we gave them more, you can take away the score sheets? Kids know who won every game, they know who scored more goals, like that's because we're our brains are wired to keep track of those kinds of things, and so what it does is it changes the way that we structure the environment, though, instead of it being imposed on them by the coaches, by the system, by the administrators, it's kids deciding for themselves what they want to do, and so you'll still get great hockey players staying in hockey, because hockey is the sport that they get the most competence in, and it's interesting. We did this exercise with the Rugby Football Union in the UK, probably 15 years ago now, where we got them to change the age that they were making national team selections up to 15, and they thought this is going to be a disaster, because all the rugby union kids are going to go to rugby league, they're going to go to soccer, they're going to, they're going to go to basketball, and that's not what happened, their program got better because kids that were best suited for. Rugby union stayed in rugby union. Kids that were better suited to league went to league. Kids that were better suited to sevens went to sevens. Like, it's give them more opportunities to find the pathway that's the best fit for their interest and competence and body type and all those kinds of things. They will find it. The problem is we try to find it for them too often, and that leads to mismatches between what they're actually best suited for.

 

Speaker 1  40:26

You know, I'm gonna.. I'm just being a heretic today. I'm burning everybody down with my opinions, but I mean, I think back to.. oh boy, what year would it have been? Probably around 98 maybe 1998 Ontario soccer decided, hey, we're, you know, we're not gonna, we're not gonna have any rep until I think it was 14 or some ridiculous age. And okay, I go, okay, why are we doing that? And then I have a friend whose daughters were both identified by Canada women's soccer at 12, so if we're not going to have rep till 14, how are we going to, you know, like, not that there's no.. I think the idea was, hey, we want to focus on development, grassroots, blah blah blah. The problem is, is the better coaches are not coaching house league soccer, that's usually dads and moms, or whatever, and you have to take some training, and you learn, learn a little way, and you kind of, you're a caretaker more than you know, you're trying to help with development, but at some point you go, hey, there's a whole bunch of kids, so at one point, you know, I was, I was coaching House League Soccer, and the rep coach at u8 had said to me, Hey, you should put together like a select team, and I was like, oh, you think so. So, anyways, we talked to the league, and they go, they didn't, they didn't really love the idea, but they go, okay, fine. So, we went in some rep tournaments, as it was kind of just I, and it was really no tryouts. I just called all the coaches and said, Who are your three best players? Again, we're identifying talent, but again, at eight eight, you, it's like, Who are the three best players you have? I got all the best players from the teams in the house league, and then we made a team, and then we went to these rep tournaments, and we did like really well, like really well, to the point where we played the rep team in Barrie in one of the tournaments and tied them in this tournament.

 

Speaker 2  42:19

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1  42:20

now the interesting part is he was a, he was sly as a fox because he wanted to figure out how do I get kids, you know, how do I identify these kids that would play rep? The other part was being in the summer, a lot of parents would say, oh, I don't want my kid to play rep soccer, you know, we want to go to the cottage, we wanted, you know, summer sports take a hit because in Canada everybody wants to enjoy the warm weather, right. And so what ended up happening is I had a bunch of families that ended up on his 9u team the next year because they went that wasn't so bad playing in like three tournaments or whatever, and the commitment. So he actually kind of was trying to trial convince parents that this was not a bad thing, but you know from that perspective that all went away, right? So you had all these kids that were really good, and now we created this multi-tier system in soccer, at least in the province of Ontario, where there's all these academies, so again we get back to this business related, so parents are paying $20,000 a year for their kids to play soccer all year round as 10 year olds, because the actual governing body doesn't provide an opportunity for development. So somewhere there's got to be a question in there, but it's like, so how do we change this? Like, I mean, you're like, how do we get back to development at a young age, and it can include a rep system, I think, of because kids care, like the end parents care,

 

Speaker 2  43:49

you know. For me, the critical thing is, what's the point of the engagement at that age level, right? Like, what are the things that we're trying to develop and facilitate in that age level, and I think for me the and we do a bit of work with Ontario soccer, and what I've always liked about them was they're they're not afraid to try things to see what works and what doesn't, and I think the, you know, they have a new player development pathway which looks really evidence-based and quite thoughtful in the way it was designed. I think we should be allowing sports to try things as long as they're following up and figuring out what worked and what didn't, so that we're always progressing in a more positive way. Because I can tell you from, you know, almost 30 years in this field that no sport has this figured out, and so you know the biggest challenge for us is sports are afraid to try things, try things, try things that make sense based on what we know right now, but follow up and assess what you're doing, so that you can say what worked and what didn't, and don't be afraid to draw a line through something and say, well, we blew it there, let's never do that. Again, for me, I think that's important. The other thing is, you know, if you look at the academy system in sports, like in countries like England, which is way more intensive than the kinds of things that we're doing, at least in soccer, in Canada, if you follow the kids that are involved in those academies, even the ones that get cut later, they, they report positive experiences from that, right? They become better students, they become better people. It's not a, you either make the Premier League or it's a disaster. No, that people are getting something out of that experience. And so, when we develop academies here, I think we need to be looking at from that same perspective, is not just how do we make you a better soccer player, but how do we make you a better person through this experience? If we do that, then what's the downside, other than the massive cost, in which case it's only really an option for families that can afford it. You know, if we see academies doing this and they have success, those successes will trickle down to the community level. It's okay, we know now that we've got to treat these people as holistic developing organisms. Okay, we can't just - they can't just sacrifice player or they can't sacrifice personal health for player performance. Well, that's a lesson we need to learn throughout the system. In some places, only at academy level type engagement, can we learn those lessons?

 

Speaker 1  46:23

You know, it's a great, it's a great discussion, because I think about things too, because you bring up the cost, right? I mean, I see people all the time, well, you know, like, you don't see hockey as a predominantly white sport,

 

Speaker 2  46:36

yeah,

 

Speaker 1  46:36

that could be economic, it could be just society based. Hey, I see white people, and I, oh, I'm going to put my.. you know, like, you don't get as many new immigrants playing hockey, but I think it's cost. I mean, you got $300 helmets and $500 sticks and $1,200 skates, and you know, when you can give your kid a pair of shoes and a ball for basketball or soccer, those sports are going to be way more popular for somebody from a from a socioeconomic perspective that might not have the money to put their kid in there, and I just feel like with some of these sports it would be great if there was ways that you could identify talent in a kid and then have that be supported financially if there's not the ability for the parent to pay, because then you're getting the best athletes, or at least the best talent.

 

Speaker 2  47:24

Yeah, I agree. And I think that's for me, if I'm looking in the crystal ball and saying 10 years from now that's the biggest risk in our system, is that parents and sports are doubling down on this idea that I need to put my kid into an elite program if they're going to have any hope, and when you do that, you reinforce the value of that elite program. You only get kids that are coming from that kind of an environment, which is the exact opposite of what the research says. The research says we should provide as many kids as many opportunities as possible, and keeping them involved for as long as possible, because we don't know who's going to be an elite performer early on, but we create a pathway where that's the only way you can achieve success. Then those are obviously those are the ones that are going to look successful, but has nothing to do with the program and everything to do with the fact that we've constrained the options available.

 

Speaker 1  48:17

Oh boy, let me unpack that one. Yeah, I mean it's interesting. I think, yeah, I'm like, that's like, okay, I'm gobsmacked people, I can't think of thinking about that, it's truly true. I do think, you know, like, I'll use baseball in this country because I know it, and I think to myself, you know, I tell parents all the time, there's there's this big move afoot where you've got these, you know, we'll call it pay to play, but it is their academies, and they are there's.. there's certainly.. I understand the value, because my kids gone through that, and you know, I'd be a hypocrite if I said, "Oh, I'm not.. I'm not against it at all. I think it makes sense. There's programs with people that have vast experience, you get better training options, you do play against a higher level competition, you go into markets where you're playing against, you know, in a bigger pond, right, to see where you kind of fit. So, a lot of that stuff makes a lot of sense, you know. Part of my thing has always been, well, if my, my, you know, my son was talented enough to play at that level, that's great, but it was more about, well, doesn't matter what the outcome is. Going back to you, we're trying to develop good humans, not necessarily professional athletes, but it was really also about, well, you're not going to parties and you're not this, or you know, like there's a certain level of, hey, there was a focus, you know, at least in from my case, from my son, his grades in high school, he was highly motivated for grades, because he was thinking about, you know, maybe at some point I might have an opportunity for scholarship. I don't know if that's a reality, but I need to focus, you know, so there was a big focus on for him on grades, and you could see it where things changed in how he, how he kind of behaved in school, so again. So you're creating, I have a goal. How do I get to the goal? So you're creating more, more of a, you know, an adult way of kind of getting things, and how to be a better adult, or how to set goals and kind of go to those goals, part of living life beyond sport. So there's, there's definitely that. I just think that a lot of these programs are pushing younger and younger and younger to create a bigger cohort, and I feel like there's got to be a sweet spot somewhere. I feel like 15 for me, anyways, and you're the expert. I feel like 1516, is kind of like, okay, if we're, if we're serious about this, you know, should we go this way? I don't know. What do you think?

 

Speaker 2  50:39

Yeah, I think the, you know, the taking into account the maturity rate and all that kind of stuff. I think you're probably right, like 1516, if you think about the development of a kid's personal identity, and you know, obviously boys and girls are going to develop at a little bit different rate at that age. 1516, is when they take stuff on their own, right? Like, I'm doing this because I want to. It's not because I'm, you know, I'm not playing hockey anymore because it was my dad's sport. I'm doing it. I'm doing it for me. I'm doing it for my peer group. I'm doing it because I enjoy it. I think that's probably around the time where we can get a bit more serious, but the need to get serious is coming from the from the kid, not from the parents. For me, that's the critical element is where's the motivation for that coming from.

 

Speaker 1  51:24

Yeah, so here's an interesting.. we think about ages. I'm thinking about it, right? You're drafted to major junior hockey in Canada at 16.

 

Speaker 2  51:33

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1  51:33

now lots of changes in that world now, where kids are leaving to go to university, so yeah, now or the NCAA scholarships. Let me, let me put the actual point on that. So, you get a kid who, before at 16, might say, 'Oh no, I'm looking to go the hockey road in the US and get a scholarship and do that. That's what I want to do. I want to trade my athletic ability for an education. Okay, great. Now, allowing a kid to have played major junior hockey in Canada, and then going on it almost creates the Canadian Hockey League to be, you know, through the Western Hockey League, Ontario Hockey League, or Major Junior. It, it almost is a development league for 16 and 17 year olds to then go to the NCAA, so it's like, do we want to continue to draft 16 year olds or do we want to leave them doing something, you know what I mean, because do we want to, because they got to leave home, they've got to, there's all these things they got to do at a young age, but again, NHL draft is 18, so well, you want to play the highest level you can, those two years leading up, so there's there's a lot of competing things going on there, but I feel like it's starting to change the pathway for hockey players, right? Like, as far as what success might look like or what path to take,

 

Speaker 2  52:52

there's a lot of moving parts at the moment with the, you know, the development of and big changes in the NCAA, in terms of the amount that players can earn during their time there, it's the education is obviously the most critical part, but there's that you can make more in the NCAA now than you might have made as a junior player, and, and so it's, you know, I think we're at a point of a lot of change and perturbation in the system, but when it all sort of settles out, I think you're going to see player development systems in Canada and the US look very different than they do right now, because they're going to have to figure out how to make those parts work together in some kind of cohesive way. They're not doing that at the moment, but eventually I think they're going to have to figure that out.

 

Speaker 1  53:42

Yeah, I mean, I think it even like in the baseball world. I mean, you've got you're going into 2007 or 2027 or 2027 What am I talking about? You know, I always think in terms of, oh, that the kids in oh seven, that kids, you know, whatever. So I'm always the two digit and I'm trying to go forward, and I outsmarted myself, but after this year we have no collective bargaining agreement in MLB, and there's a lot of conversations about, do we allow kids that are playing minor league baseball to be eligible to play at the NCAA level, that might be high, you know, do we get rid of the high school age draft, do we, you know, because we're trying to, you know, they're trying to shrink their minor league system to obviously take the expense out of development and try to get more fully developed players that they can kind of move right into the system, and it's skewing college baseball to be older, so yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of uncertainty, I think, for, for a lot of sports, as to how, where, where the players are going to come from, and what the path looks like.

 

Speaker 2  54:47

Part of that, I think, comes from the fact that even these very American sports are becoming more global, right? Like, the interesting thing is the number of academies in Europe that are popping up for. NCAA, or sorry, NBA for the NFL. We're starting to see Australian Football League academies showing up in Europe, like these sports that used to be able to get away with a single pathway and a single sort of set of options for players can't get away with that anymore, because you could constrain a player's development if they're coming from the US, but you know, are better batters and pitchers coming from the Dominican Republic, where we don't have to constrain them, we can actually develop them in a completely different environment. Like, these are questions that we need to ask, because now, if you look at it from a business perspective, it comes down, what's the most efficient use of the limited resources you get in your system,

 

Speaker 1  55:42

definitely. No, no constraints in the Dominican. These kids are, but again, different rules, right? They're getting a MLB contract at 16, so you know they're at 1213, years old. The best of the best are in these academies, and they're they're working out eight hours a day, right, like playing, you know, doing drills and everything else, and because the idea is that you know you've got a little four year window, and again I think that that leads to your, you know, conversation around these are the more physically mature kids that are getting that look, you know, a 12 year old that's six feet tall, as opposed to more physically gifted talent, and the teams are betting on that talent more than they are what that person might become, right? So, I mean, yeah, imagine you're spending millions of dollars on a 16 year old, it's like it's modern day gambling, anyways. I mean, they're trying to guess, guess as to who comes out of it, and like, how do you create a system where you're actually getting value out of that, right? And how do you measure it?

 

Speaker 2  56:50

You know, is it a better financial risk to put that into a single player coming from the American system, or for the equivalent of four or five players come from coming from the DR right, like it's, but these are the questions that you know teams are having to make. Is it make more sense to develop that kid in the Canadian system for the NHL, or to draft two Swedes that are maybe coming as more well-rounded and equally proficient players? Like the globalness of the sports means that these are now options where they wouldn't have been a generation ago.

 

Speaker 1  57:26

So, what's one mindset, mindset shift every young athlete needs to make? You think the

 

Speaker 2  57:33

biggest one for me, I think, is the importance of hard work. Nobody gets to anywhere without having to put in the hours of training, it doesn't matter how much talent you have. Eventually, the world will find the limits, and you've got to work hard to overcome those things. For me, that's the biggest mindset. Is it's not talent or hard work, it's a combination.

 

Speaker 1  57:57

What's one thing parents should remember when their kid isn't excelling yet?

 

Speaker 2  58:01

There's a reason we don't put kids into career options when they're in grade five and grade six. It's because they're still developing, and we need to be thinking about them as athletes in exactly the same way. You can't tell anything about a person's performance when they're, you know, I would go back to our under 1516, years of age, we don't want to make predictions about the person they're going to become at that point. We don't do that in education. We shouldn't do it in sport.

 

Speaker 1  58:29

Yeah, there's a baseball guy, Steve Springer. He says things like, you don't know what you have until you get your man body.

 

Speaker 2  58:37

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1  58:37

right. So it's good, you know, it's always that interesting. You know, that kind of stuck with me, right? Like, puberty changes everything. One kid goes through a gross bird early, whatever, and sometimes you don't know what, what that athlete has until they're, till they're fully formed as a, you know, young adult, right, type of thing.

 

Speaker 2  58:54

Yeah, physical, like I would say, the only thing I would add there is the physical part, but also the psychological part, like adolescence, people become completely different people after that period. So, is this somebody who's going to be able to thrive in a high-performance environment? Are they going to be able to sacrifice and work hard every day and eat the same meal every day, because that's the kind of, you know, protein they need, like, is this somebody who's going to want that for a lifestyle, because if not, then they're probably not suited to that environment.

 

Speaker 1  59:28

What's one thing coaches should prioritize over talent?

 

Speaker 2  59:32

Again, the mindset of almost every single thing, barring height and maybe stature, we can improve on through learning environments. Don't write off kids if they are bad decision makers or not in the right place at the right time. Those are some of the easiest things to fix with a training intervention.

 

Speaker 1  59:53

So, if an athlete never becomes elite but stays confident, resilient, and in love with their. Board or in love with athleticism, would we call that a failure?

 

Speaker 2  1:00:04

Not me, I would. You know, it's.. it's amazing how many gold medalists, or some of the best in their sport ever, that I've talked to, or talked to about, that hate their sport at the end of it. They never swim again after they, they're, they leave their Olympic career. We can't call that a success. What we want are people that are able to do that. Yes, but still love their sport at the end of the day. And for me, that's the biggest challenge, is how do we figure out how to do both of those things?

 

Speaker 1  1:00:36

I think if you watch the movie Field of Dreams, Ray Liotta, as Sheila Joe's, goes, I would have played for free. Yeah,

 

Speaker 2  1:00:43

that's

 

Speaker 1  1:00:45

right.

 

Speaker 2  1:00:45

Absolutely. Like, how do you build that level of motivation in a person, so that they're not doing it for the paycheck, they're not doing it for the metal, they're doing it for the love. And I think we used to see that. I don't know how much we see that anymore. It would be interesting to know.

 

Speaker 1  1:00:59

There's a new book for you, Joe. You got to do the research on that. I don't know, like, you know, I feel like, like, when I was younger, I think coming up and playing different sports, and you know, I knew some people that went on and played in the NHL and different things like that, and it was more hockey related than any other sport, I think, just because of where we were kind of at, but you know, a lot of good baseball players and different things like that, that kind of came up. None ever really made pro, but there wasn't this focus on you're playing hockey because you love playing hockey. There wasn't like I got to be on this team and this is going to happen, and I feel like there's this this external bubble around things now, pushing you're playing this sport because you're trying to become a professional hockey player, but you're eight or nine years old.

 

Speaker 2  1:01:47

Yeah, and that's another thing that we get oftentimes when we talk to young people in sport. It's, you know, why? Why would I do that? I'm not going to the Olympics. Well, no, that's not the way, that's not the reason you do your sport. Like, we've, we've given you the wrong message, if you think that that's why you do it. Yeah, you might go to the Olympics, but that's not why you do your sport. You do it because it makes you a better person in almost every other domain of your life.

 

Speaker 1  1:02:10

You know, I always, I always joke with people, I go, I can always tell who grew up not playing team sports, and it's, you know, just the way they govern themselves, or whatever. Like, you learn a lot of lessons in that, you know, to me that's the biggest thing about sport, and if you happen to be able to take it from here to there to the next, whatever that next level is, I think that that's really just a bonus that you get to play the game longer, you know, I think that that's that that's a great thing, and I think, but that it shouldn't be the be all and end all focus, right? Like, you can have that goal, and it's okay with it. I mean, a mental performance coach from the Baltimore Orioles, who was a guest on my show, Diamond Hill, had been.. we were on the phone, my son was struggling with the decision of, he had some offers different colleges to play baseball, and so I said, "Hey, why don't you talk to him? Because kids never listen to your parents, so he gets on the phone with them, and he's on speaker, and he goes, "Hey, hey, what's.. what's your goal? And he goes, "Do you want to be a professional baseball player? And my son goes, "Well, I mean, sure. And he goes, "What, you don't think you can be a professional baseball player? And he goes, and in his mind, like, and I get where his mindset was. He was like, well, I mean, that would be great, but that's, you know, I want to be a d1 baseball player.

 

Speaker 2  1:03:28

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1  1:03:28

that's my end goal. And he goes, okay, so he says, start thinking I want to be a professional baseball player, and all your decisions will fall in line with that on how you get to, you know, like, you'll get what you want eventually. You may not become a professional baseball player, but you'll probably go further if you take the furthest point and say that's my focus, and my actions, and my everything has to kind of line up to that. And I thought that was really interesting advice, because, you know, like, it's like, you know, that aim for the stars, you'll land in the clouds kind of mentality, right. But again, I think the goal, you know, at least you know me translating it for him is like to, he's going from high school now, he's getting to play at the next level. Is there a next level after that? And if there isn't, that's cool too, right? Because it's been like you did something that other people couldn't do,

 

Speaker 2  1:04:18

yeah.

 

Speaker 1  1:04:19

And then did you get to, if you put all your effort in, and that's as far as you got, that's great, right? And not everybody's going to make it to that, whatever that penultimate goal is, right.

 

Speaker 2  1:04:33

How do you help, like, give that person the psychological resources, so that they, when they don't get to that goal that they have that they're able to say, okay, I'm satisfied, right? Like, it's the, that's the challenge is, I had my heart set on being a professional baseball player, but I only made it to a D to college level. Well, okay, how do you take away a success from that, which I think is the challenge. I would even say, not. Even people that have played team sport, that people that come from sport, and I see this in my own lab, like the all of my grad students are ex-athletes at a pretty high level, and I think you know the world that we live in right now, sport is one of the only domains that you can put people in where they have to measure themselves on a regular basis and figure out what they're made of, and you know how they face adversity and what kind of character they have, like we don't, we don't get that as much in education anymore, and there's not as much engagement in other types of activities that actually push you to your limit, those people that are pushed to their limits become people that understand themselves better, and those people are just different kinds of people.

 

Speaker 1  1:05:45

I joke about the team sports, because it's more about collaboration. So, if you're a swimmer, you don't really care about it, but you care about yourself, not that you're narcissistic. I'm not saying that about swimmers, but you know what I mean. It's more about the collab. Yeah, no, it's true. And I think that's that's kind of the goal of this show, is to try to help provide tools and tips to people to kind of find resilience, you know, get something out of this, and, like, you know, go, okay, let's not just focus on my slap shot today, let's focus on how am I going to manage failure, because failure is going to happen, right? Like, how am I going to deal with that, right? And, in, you know, how do I bounce back from that. What is my reset mechanism in a game to kind of, to kind of deal with that kind of stuff? And I think that, that to me is the most important thing for athletes, is I don't think they get the tools at a young enough age, and you know, you know, that's, you know, something that I think has to be built into a lot of these programs, and I think we're getting there a little bit, I still think people think it's woo woo, and weird that, oh, I should journal, or I should meditate, or I should, you know, have these mindset tips, but it's, I think it's important, for sure.

 

Speaker 2  1:06:54

Yeah, I agree. I think it's like the mental skill is like a physical skill, you've got to practice, you got to. It's something that's learned over time. It doesn't emerge organically, except in very rare circumstances, and oftentimes not in ways we can predict.

 

Speaker 1  1:07:10

For those listening, you know what I take from this is the real advantage isn't being ahead early. Stay curious, stay resilient, and get engaged long enough to see what you can become.

 

Speaker 2  1:07:21

Yeah,

 

Speaker 1  1:07:23

Joe, thanks for your time. It was awesome.

 

Speaker 2  1:07:25

Yeah, this was a lot of fun. Thanks, Todd.

 

Matt Cundill  1:07:29

Thanks for listening. For more including resources and more about the show, go to The Mental approach.com

 

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  1:07:36

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