11 | salute the sample

As I age, I have found it increasingly enjoyable to revisit music from my past to “discover” new (old) music. The hip-hop or pop tracks that dominated the playlists of my youth were often sample-based, and I love exploring the tracks from which those songs emerged. It is an interesting cycle. Young producers pulled from older tracks to create the musical foundation for songs that appealed to me at younger ages. Now, those songs may no longer reflect my thinking or mood, but I find that the source material often does. For example, blasting SO FRESH, SO CLEAN feels like a man trying to hold on to what he likely never could grasp, but relaxing to Joe Simon’s BEFORE THE NIGHT IS OVER feels just about right!

The idea of sampling makes me think back to working youth baseball camps when I was in college. It was interesting to watch kids who had grown up in the era of ESPN web-gems diving for catches and attempting to throw from the hole like Jeter. Fast-forward to today and you don’t even need to watch Baseball Tonight to see great plays. Social media has brought the “samples” into the palm of your hand. It makes me wonder what it would look like to approach sport preparation like a producer searching for samples? 

What would it look like to do something similar in sport? Could you isolate aspects of your favorite athlete’s game and find a way to make them your own? Is there a movement parallel to the relationship between Dexter Wansel’s THE SWEETEST PAIN and Mac Miller’s NIKES ON MY FEET? As a coach, could you build a library of “samples” from your sport and build time into training to play with those samples? Could you engage your own athletes in a discussion of what “samples” they could steal from teammates?

This is likely the most half-baked of any issue of the chordinnation, so I am most curious to hear your thoughts on how this could look. I see value in helping athletes explore possibilities for movement and value in trying different samples, even if only as a form of differential learning or added variability. It reminds me of my favorite tattoo-artist Vince Villalvazo and his Fishbowl Sketching. The artists in his studio would write random things on slips of paper and toss them in a fishbowl. They would each pull out some agreed upon number of slips and then set about to drawing a tattoo design that incorporated every idea on their selected slips. Would they create something that would ever be tattooed on a human? Unlikely. Did it help them grow as artists? Absolutely.

I see this sport sampling idea similarly. At best, athletes develop skills that will one day show up in competition directly as easily recognizable from their source (see Ghostface’s HOLLA HOLLA version of sampling). At worst, they will engage in experimentation and expand the possibilities for future movement solutions. I am curious to hear from others, however, because, similar to sampling, the jump from the original idea to the new creation is where the magic lies!

Note: title is a nod to the segment from LL Cool J’s ROCK THE BELLS radio, also available through YouTube

Ali Boolani, Jeremy Lackman, Timothy Baghurst, John L. Larue, and Matthew Lee Smith. 2019. Impact of positive and negative motivation and music on jump shot efficiency among NAIA Division I college basketball players. International Journal of Exercise Science, 12(5), 100-110.

purpose: “to examine the role of positive and negative reinforcement and music on the jump shot performance of male and female NAIA Division I college basketball athletes”

participants: 10 male college basketball players and 10 female college basketball players

design: Participants completed trials under four conditions, the order of which was randomized:

• Control Condition: silence

• Music Condition: edited version of Tyga’s RACK CITY

• Positive Feedback Condition: “great shot,” “you’ve got this,” “good shot,” “there you go”

• Negative Feedback Condition: “you suck,” “off shot,” “you can’t shoot”, “your shot is terrible”

Participants completed a warm-up using the same routine they would use in a game. Once ready, they were allowed to shoot 10 15-foot practice shots and 10 three-point practice shots to get comfortable with the shooting protocol for the study (i.e., shooting from a rack). They shot from 5 different midrange (i.e., 15-foot) locations and 5 different three-point locations. They were told not to dribble prior to shooting. They shot a total of 100 shots, with the four conditions distributed randomly.

results: Researches found differences within the results for the midrange shots, with silence outperforming both positive and negative feedback and music outperforming both positive and negative feedback. They found no differences within the results for the three-point shots, and no gender differences. When the totals were analyzed, music outperformed both positive and negative feedback.

potential translations to sport: In the discussion section, the researchers suggest that “verbal cues and verbal motivation may lead to distractions for basketball players when they are in the process of shooting” (p.106). They noted that the study design was not game-like and even the feedback delivery was artificial, but the point is worth considering. My first thought when seeing these results was similar: we may do more damage with too much feedback as opposed to too little. Ultimately, learning movement is about understanding the feedback that is available to you implicitly as a performer and adjusting to achieve the desired outcome. If we jump in too soon or too often, we may interrupt or prevent athletes from processing their own internal feedback and making these connections. To my thinking, this study says less about music than feedback in general. I would be very curious to see this protocol replicated with the addition of a condition that simply asked participants to answer “How did that one feel?” after an attempt. That may already exist, but my lit search time quota is spent for the week so any effort to find it will have to wait!

I take a trip back to 2015 and NBA player Al Jefferson describing how he “sampled” throughout his career.

Interviewer: You appropriate other players’ moves?

Jefferson: When I got to Boston I stole Paul Pierce’s ball fake. Tom Gugliotta used to kick my (butt) every day in practice my rookie year. It was always the same move – a turnaround jumper – so I stole that, (particularly) his footwork. Everyone I go against, if I like something they do, I steal it and put it in my own form.

Interview published in the Charlotte Observer on September 19, 2015

Jefferson lasted 14 years in the league, averaged just south of 16 per game, and took home north of 130 million over the course of his career. Seems like an endorsement for theft to me!

And his story is hardly unique. Back in 2018, the Wall Street Journal published a (now paywalled) article on how YouTube had influenced the development of the current generation of NBA stars, with a particular focus on Jayson Tatum.

Nothing too deep with this one; just a look at the crossover between music and sport from Mac Miller.

I make 'em so mad, they got no swag
Pippens on my feet, they the throw backs

mac miller NIKES ON MY FEET

For a look at Scottie Pippen’s shoe-volution, check out this article or take a walk down memory lane with the video below!

For issue 11, I grabbed some source material from songs from my listening past. I went with those that I could identify myself, so I would love to hear more suggestions to add to the playlist.