8 | train the dog

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden had strong opinions about emotion. Consider just two of his comments on the matter:

“Practice self-discipline and keep emotions under control. Good judgment and common sense are essential.”

“Self-control, regardless of what we are doing, whether it involves a physical act or a mental decision, must be maintained to produce desirable results. If emotion takes over, reason usually flies out the window and the acts or decisions are not likely to be as productive as they should be.”

Wooden’s conclusion - that emotions tr*mp reason and need to be controlled - makes logical sense. And his approach certainly produced winning teams. Even so, I think there is another conclusion to be drawn from Wooden’s observations, a belief which recently crystalized while reading Joan Koenig’s The Musical Child: Using Music to Raise Children Who Are Happy.

Midway through the book, Koenig wrote:

Emotion creates attention, and attention fosters empathy. Learning to make music together is also learning to listen to others, which leads to the ability to ‘read’ the other person and to anticipate their actions and intentions. (p.95)

In Wooden’s reasoning, you harness the power of self-control to direct attention in the effort to control dangerous emotions. Koenig flips that logic on its head by pointing out that emotion is the natural leader in the relationship. To put it visually, emotion is the dog, and attention is the human.

Yes, we could design a training protocol to strengthen the human to resist such disaster, but wouldn’t it be easier to train the dog? In other words, if emotion is a natural leader, perhaps it is more useful to focus on creating desired emotions rather than controlling those that emerge from the chaos of competition. Instead of saying “we are going to learn to control our emotions when we don’t execute to our satisfaction,” what if we said “we are going to summon the emotions that make execution more likely?”

The goal for practice could then become one of co-creation among teammates (and coaches) to generate the emotional conditions that fuel success. Interestingly, an atmosphere of co-creativity may be more in line with what the originator of basketball believed than what Wooden espoused. In a piece written after Wooden’s death, author Tommy Craggs - who seems to have been raised on “if you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, wait for them to die before you say it” - questions many of the accepted views on Wooden’s approach. Craggs does Wooden like Kendrick did Drake in the short article, but the part that jumped out to me was what he wrote about James Naismith, the (alleged) inventor of basketball:

Naismith, as art critic Dave Hickey has noted, was wonderfully Jeffersonian. He set down only five guiding principles—discipline not among them—to govern his game, which he was delighted to point out did not need a coach. The beauty of Naismith’s invention is that it foresaw, even insisted upon, its own evolution—why else put the hoop in the air? And why else include, in those earthbound days, a goaltending rule? He once wrote: “Each generation that has played basketball has passed on some new developments to the next. The technique and expertness with which the game is now played are indeed wonderful to me.”

Much like Koenig, Naismith seemed to be emphasizing collective creativity. This is in sharp contrast to Wooden’s prioritization of self-discipline and rational thought. Some might argue that Wooden believed he was molding humans more than basketball players, but Koenig offers guidance here, too. When she outlines the seven benefits that come from musical engagement, I can’t help but think they would likely produce both good basketball and good citizens:

The 7 C’s of Musical Engagement (Stefan Koelsch)

• Social Contact

• Social Cognition

• Co-pathy (Koelsch’s own term for the social version of empathy)

• Communication

• Coordination of Actions

• Cooperation

• Social Cohesion

In short, Koenig’s book is filled with ideas that could be adapted to athletic preparation, and I plan to explore them in greater detail in future issues. For now, I will finish with the question that hit me the hardest upon my first reading of Koenig’s effort:

What would happen if, when designing practice, we treated emotional experiences as a feature instead of a bug?

Note: This issue’s thumbnail art was created by Dave Filkins of Grand Rapids, Michigan

Kevin J.P. Woods, Goncalo Sampaio, Tedra James, Emily Przysinda, Adam Hewett, Andrea E. Spencer, Benjamin Morillon & Psyche Loui. 2024. Rapid modulation in music supports attention in listeners with attentional difficulties. Communications Biology, 7, 1376.

I learned about the above study through Kristen McClure’s ADHD Advocate newsletter. She did a great job outlining the findings - and regularly produces great stuff aside from that - so I will simply link her summary below.

potential translations to sport: My first thoughts when reading this research turned towards post-competition recovery and sleep. I have worked with several athletes who struggle with post-competition relaxation and recovery, and can think of several examples across the sports in which I have worked where recovery is a challenge:

• Professional basketball players competing in back-to-backs

• Runners competing in trials/competitions that require multiple races over a few day period

• Baseball athletes whose games end late in the evenings, and who may only get one day off for every 10 days on

• Golfers competing in multiple round, multiple day tournaments

I was already familiar with research on binaural beats and sleep, but this study claims to use techniques that go beyond that singular approach. The study also employed an existing source of music with rapid modulation (i.e., brain.fm), which could make the intervention more accessible to athletes. Quality-control in available binaural beats may be lacking, and, while you can produce your own, having to do so may create an additional barrier. Additionally, not everyone is a fan of the sonic experience with binaural beats, so a musical option may be more appealing.

Beyond recovery and sleep, athletes could also use the music during pre-competition to manage nerves/energy or as a tool outside of competition to support meditation practices.

In an interview, Boston Celtic’s star and 2024 NBA Finals MVP Jaylen Brown equated defending to reading an opponent’s rhythm and learning “when their beat is about to drop.” This is the second time I have heard an NBA player describe basketball in terms of musical rhythm. The first was while participating in the pre-draft interview process with several organizations through my work with Courtex Performance. During the 2020 pre-draft, a prospect revealed that he also played the drums. When we followed up about his musical training, he explained that he felt like playing the drums helped him understand how he could control the game’s rhythm as a guard. In light of what Jaylen Brown describes about tracking the BPM of an offensive player, it seems that this ability to intentionally shift rhythm would make a player much harder to defend.

Today’s spotlight is courtesy of Jacqui Devaney’s Dinner Music substack, which entered my orbit courtesy of Anne Helen Petersen's Culture Study substack. So far, Devaney is batting a thousand in my book, so check it out if you hate the robots but love the music. One of her picks this week was Nick Garrie’s The Nightmare of J.B. Stanislas. On track 11, Garrie drops the following:

Wheel of fortune
Wheel round
The fair seemed different from the ground
Can't breathe
Can't see
Ah me I'm free

Nick Garrie “Wheel of Fortune”

“The fair seemed different from the ground” is going to live rent-free in my head from now on! 

And, in the spirit of raging against the robots and their algorithms, a bonus lyric courtesy of The Flaming Lips from a song written for these times!

'Cause she knows that ('Cause she knows that)
It'd be tragic (It'd be tragic)
If those evil robots win (Evil robots)

The Flaming Lips “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1”

I headed to the internet for this issue to find songs with “dog” in the title. I quickly had a 90-song playlist (clocking in at over 5 hours) and felt like I had only scratched the surface. More importantly, my two co-workers were becomingly increasingly frustrated with all the barking on many of the tracks.

In the interest of time and human/canine sanity, I called the search and pivoted to listening to the collection (via headphones). I made cuts based on personal preference alone and leave you with what remains: 27 Dog Songs. If you have tracks that you feel deserve to be added, dump them in the comments!