Associate Professor's new book spotlights new ways to learn and play
High school sports is, for some people, emphatically not the glory days.
Endless drills and repetition. Riding the pine when you don’t get what coach has screamed at you. Watching the kids with some semblance of talent get all the attention.
Rob Gray’s new book, “How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills,” wants to correct the way sports are taught and learned.
An associate professor at Arizona State University’s Human Systems Engineering program, Gray’s idea for the book came from his consulting work with sports teams. His research focuses on perceptual-motor control, with a particular emphasis on the demanding actions involved in driving, aviation and sports.
“We're changing how we think about how to train people and how we practice now,” Gray said. “The way I start the book is I kind of lament what I'm seeing with kids in sports. The way that we're doing it, a lot of things we're doing, I think it’s pushing a lot of people away ... I think not only does it kind of discourage people, but I think it can lead to them not developing a love of movement, of being active and causing health problems later on.”
In Gray's hands, how we learn and how we become skillful at a sport becomes something entirely different from the way we learned in high school.
That military idea that there’s one way to serve a tennis ball for example. That one way is to repeat that technique over and over until (theoretically) it’s automatic. You don’t play the game until you learn how to serve. Or dribble the soccer ball. Or sink a penalty shot.
“I think kids that can't learn the fundamentals — which can be boring — don't get a chance to enjoy the game,” he said. “And I find that kind of frustrating.”
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