Week 135: The pause of recognition
and a perfect example of an article.
The eyes get big, the mouth opens, the lungs breathe in quickly, and the answer is on the tip of the tongue. Or maybe it isn’t. But there is motion to indicate something is happening with the player.
As you watch your team during practice, this is going to be a common reaction. Once that answer gets close, there is often a hesitation where the body tenses up, and the player must push themselves to compose their answer in their mind and buzz. The pause of recognition is that gap between the player realizing they should be buzzing and the buzz itself.
As the player gets more confident with their abilities, one of their goals should be to diminish the pause of recognition and get them to react to the clue with a buzz as the rest of the reaction occurs.
When you see the pause of recognition in practice, give your players the knowledge to combat it. Players have to realize there’s a few things going on when they react to the question like this. First there is partial recognition, that they have some inkling of the question’s answer. There may also be uncertain recognition, where they don’t necessarily trust their own answer, but because they have that answer in front of mind, they can’t switch out. It’s often the case that their doubt is unwarranted in this case, but they are defeating themselves in the pause of recognition.
Practice is the right time to work on this, if you notice a player having this experience repeatedly they may be double clutching with some part of the answer. When the player is paused, the other team has the advantage. You may want to encourage them to buzz anyway when you see this in practice because you want them to use the time allowed after the buzz to compose the other parts of the answer. There’s also the possibility that the act of starting to answer will push the rest of the answer out. There’s also the possibility they are focusing on an inessential part of the answer, like a first me, and they already have what they need. Getting prompted when the answer is stuck can also coax out their best guess without them trying to give their perfect guess.
Prairie dogging
At some point in your practice, you will see this reaction in your players. The player will hear something in the question and their head will pop up, as if they are suddenly brought to attention in their seat. They’ve recognized the clue as something they have heard before, and now they are trying to recall the context. During Pitt practices, this phenomenon used to be called this prairie dog position, as it looked like the player was popping their head out of the ground to listen to find the direction of some threat. Another version of this was when in the middle of the question the player’s body language changed and they unconsciously leaned in more fully and their shoulders tightened.
Realize that the prairie dog or the sudden lean in can be the result of being surprised by a clue. That’s good in that they are learning to recognize more clues, but that’s bad in that it means they could have been more attentive to the clues that came before.
Note that I said “unconsciously” about the lean-in. In some formats of competition, the player is allowed to communicate information about whether they know an answer or not, and conscious body position is one method of conveying that information. (As coach, you may teach your team this technique later on if it’s useful to your future competition.)
Both of these reactions are explosive uses of energy, and resolving this with a buzz is also a sudden consumption of energy. The player in the pause of recognition and the player suddenly upright are in maximum tension with themselves. The more times you react in this way the more energy you are expending, the more tired you will get as the day progresses. The players goal should be to avoid getting stuck in these positions and to move from recognition to buzzing in a single action. The coach needs to encourage them to push their players to buzz, and not allow tensions to build.
I read this article this morning, and figured since I wasn't going to write about it in question form I'd write about it here. This is the Platonic ideal of an article to be converted into a question. You can read it here, I’ll wait:
https://www.theringer.com/nba/2022/10/12/23399637/nba-draft-swap-picks
Even if you don't follow basketball, you can understand the mechanics of a pick swap, why it's valued in NBA circles, the historical context of it, and the famous teams and players who have been involved in the process. This article hits all of those pieces of information, including answering the classic early clue "who was the first person affected?" If those materials are laid in front of a question writer, they could easily write a competent and interesting question, without having any more knowledge of the subject.
It's a process and mechanics subject that might appeal to a writer who doesn't even follow the sport, and doesn't want to write a simple biography question for the slot. I can think of other sports questions, where the answer was "saves" which I powered from knowing that Jerome Holtzman was the baseball writer who introduced the statistic, which I learned from a similar article to this. Now, if you ask “why is someone who doesn't follow the sport writing a question on basketball?”, consider the analogous question, “why is your science player writing a literature question?” the answer to both is: “Because they need to write that question to fill the packet.” It also expands the canon of answers ever so slightly, without going further into obscurity.
The article achieves a goal for writers, it provides more clues than can be used in a single question. If the writer has enough material from this source to form a question, they won't go further in their research. Another source with additional information will not be consulted, so the clues here are the clues that will appear in all questions about it, until this source is surpassed and it falls off the top of the search results.
I don't intend this to be cynical or critical of this process, this is simply what happens for sports questions when someone is compelled to write to fill a category, rather than chooses to write. This happens in every subject, in every format with a category distribution, because most writers have a category they have to fill. What I do intend is for you to be aware of how this sort of writing will be used, and for you to take advantage of the situation.