Athletic Intelligence

Here's another non-WAC-related article but one we found intriguing. We'll probably post one of these a week but it all depends on what catches our attention.

Athletic Intelligence
An interview with MIT Associate Head Coach Dr. Oliver Eslinger
David Friedman
SLAM
August 14, 2008

Dr. Oliver Eslinger is MIT’s associate head basketball coach, a position that keeps him involved in every aspect of the program from coaching to working with alumni to managing the other assistant coaches.

Dr. Eslinger’s playing experience at Clark University and his PhD in counseling-sports psychology provide him a unique perspective on the mental and physical preparation involved in playing and coaching college basketball. I recently spoke with Dr. Eslinger about the challenges—and advantages—of trying to recruit players to come to MIT, the style of play that MIT employs and the importance of “flow” in athletic success...

...SLAM: Which traits are most important for a player to excel on defense?

OE: I’ve always felt that defense starts with the mentality of how badly do you want it and telling yourself that you can get stops and believing in your teammates that if the ball gets by you then you are going to get help. It really takes a lot of drive and a lot of heart and a lot of focus but if you are a student of the game then of course you can pick up tendencies of your opponent and of the offensive players, such as if a kid can’t go to his left then we are really going to make an effort to force him to his left.

...It hurts to stay in your stance, so you have to be conditioned mentally and physically to be able to do that. It really is a mind game to believe that you want to do it and you can do it...

...SLAM: I believe in general that it takes a lot of intelligence to play sports well and to play sports at a high level but sometimes you will hear coaches in various sports say that a player is ‘overthinking’ when he should just be reacting and I think that Bill Russell once said that if a player is thinking about a particular situation it is too late because by the time he thinks the thought the situation will have already passed. When you are coaching players who are very intelligent academically and who also have the memory and ability to internalize whatever scouting information you give them, do you see a fine line between intelligence being an asset and situations in which players are overthinking instead of reacting instinctively?

OE: Oh yeah. I’ve noticed at MIT that our players like information and they want to be able to process it and understand the purpose for doing certain things. We often do get into discussions of why we are doing things certain ways and that helps but at the same time, like you said, you don’t want to have that sense of ‘paralysis by analysis’ when you begin to overthink and that really hurts your reaction time and your ability to sense what is going to happen.

I certainly believe in flow, in letting your athletic intelligence take over. There is actually a theory in psychology called ‘flow’ which relates to being in the ‘zone,’ when an athlete is not thinking about anything and just putting everything he or she has into the skills of the sport. The mind and body are so closely connected that it just happens....

Go here for the complete interview.