Week 211: Learning from Pete Carill

Notes from The Smart Take from The Strong (part 1)

Mar 28, 2024

When you read this I’ll be hip deep in final additions to the stack for their episode taping. Because of a national conference of Catholic educators taking place in Pittsburgh next week, and a school from home day due to the eclipse, there is no school from Wednesday afternoon until April 9. So they have just one more practice before taping, and I have to do my last prep work so they can learn the last bits from Quizlet and Kahoot!. So with that in mind, I put these in place ahead of schedule for this week and next.

Share Holed up with a buzzer

I revisited this book this week because it is March Madness, and because I was stuck for a subject. In February, I finished reading The Smart Take from The Strong, Princeton coach Pete Carril's philosophy of basketball. The reason I gravitated towards this philosophy of sport over others was that I saw a greater similarity between his situation and mine. Basketball is always talked about as one of the principal ideas behind the development of quiz bowl, but I've never been much of a basketball fan. But I knew Pete Carril through being in the same conference as Princeton basketball. Princeton basketball in the 1960s through the 1990s was a situation where there were occasionally great players coming through, but at no point was basketball considered the only reason those students were at the school. I want the team to learn how to play quiz bowl, but I recognize that quiz bowl will never be their central activity. As such the real valuable pieces they’re going to get out of this are going to be the lessons learned in practice.

As we've been working through the last month of practices, planning our advance toward taping, I've had time to reflect on pieces of what was expressed in the text, and sought to adapt it to quiz bowl. These are some of the key quotes I pulled out of the book and my thoughts on them.

Page 51: "Try not to talk too much about shooting. Spend the time instead taking a lot of shots."

The first year of this, I spent a lot of time, maybe half of practice, going over what I gave them in study guides. Part of that was my delivery of study guides to them. I used to print them out for them. About the middle of the year, I started putting them in a google drive, and printing them. The past year I've given them maybe 10 minutes on that, using a slideshow and links to the material, and then gotten into reading practice questions. Mrs. Parker has helped me a lot on this point. I spent so much time prepping for what they would see in battle, when I should have just shown them the battle.

Page 28-29: "When you explain a point to player X, the other players should listen so that they know about the point as well."

Not to turn this into another screed against specialization, but in the limited practice time you have starting out, you'd better explain points that everyone can benefit from. Players lapse into habits, and sometimes the bad habits they lapse into are not even their own. But if the whole team sees the mistake, they all can help the teammate break the habit.

(I can't find the page) "Make a criticism specific"

You want to make the criticism specific because everything in quiz bowl is situational. There is very little that is a universal criticism in quiz bowl that is useful or constructive. The criticism has to be tied into the situation of the question or the game score for it to be constructive and applicable later. The trick in doing that is making it only specific enough that the situation will be encountered later.

(I can't find the page, but it's the same as above)"Teach the specific skill"

You can't really teach things for quiz bowl without being specific about the thing being taught. Answer lines are designed to be as clear as possible, and specificity is the way the writers accomplish that. The problem with this advice for quiz bowl is there's like 10,000 specific skills to learn at the start, and unlike basketball it's not obvious which of the 10,000 are the most pressing need to know.

Page 26: "It's in the best interest of the coach to not spend three hours a day practicing things that don't happen very much. "

If there's one thing we've excelled at it's understanding that our time is limited so we have to constrain ourselves to the things that will cover lots of questions or things that will appear lots of times. One of the things I hope I'm doing again in this new book is pushing those things to the front of the practice schedule.

Page 56: "You Never Tire of Making Shots"

I was going to morph this into You Never Tire of Answering Questions Correctly, but I would have caught myself in a lie. I once tired of answering questions correctly, because I was the only one answering anything. And as I was sitting there between questions I realized that for that particular question, due to geographical specificity and my personal interests, I was not only the only person in that room likely to answer that question correctly, I was likely the only person at that tournament who could have answered that question correctly. In that moment I realized that question was a bad question to ask in every other room, because it was a blank, and bad in my room because its outcome was predetermined. You can tire of answering questions correctly if there's no risk someone will get out in front of you.

The coaching lesson you want to take from this story is to always use questions in practice that challenge multiple members of your team. If it becomes one player in practice being challenged by the questions and the rest overwhelmed by the questions, both sides will stop pushing themselves.

Page 67: "Remember to let you players know that everyone learns at different rates. "

I had known this since college, but it's always a good reminder. You can always be fooled by a question that your teammate isn't fooled by, or vice versa. You may have had that one course with that one lesson that you apply here, and they probably never had that teacher. Everybody brings a different history to the team, and everybody picks up what you teach in different ways.

Everybody picks up different information during the course of a question, and retains the information at different levels. The key is just to keep everyone engaged with the questions. If they stay engaged with the question even if they're not answering, they're listening; as long as they're listening, they're learning.

Page 68: "Whom Does the Player Get Mad at?" "When a player is told what he has to do to become a better player, does he get mad at the coach, or himself? If he gets mad at the coach, he'll never get better as a player. If he gets mad at himself, he will get better."

This is the basic sports psychology in a nutshell. It's applicable to quiz bowl, though few people get to the level of actual anger, more like frustration. While those two outcomes remains true for quiz bowl, there's a couple extra outcomes that have to be discussed:

If the player gets mad at the opponent, that's probably not healthy, and it's up to you the coach to direct that anger positively. All the opponent did was do the assignment. They did what the situation demanded, and now you know what that situation demands the next time.

If the player gets mad at the packet, they're closer to being over the target, but its not healthy either. The question once asked is inert, like a bee that's already left its stinger in you. That question can't do anything more to them. All you can do is prepare yourself for the next time that particular type of bee shows up.

Page 105: "Everything we do in practice must show itself somewhere in the game, or else we don't do it."

I'm taking this statement and fine tuning it for quiz bowl, because basketball has a certain degree of bedrock stability that quiz bowl does not. There's always one ball, five players on the court, and the basket is always the same amount of points depending on where the shot is taken. I try to focus on the next event in practice. If we're going to be taping an episode before we go on to a college campus, I will write simulated lightning rounds, and I will write them with an emphasis on geography and art, with less literature and science. I will recognize that there are things you can't ask without an ambigous answer line, and so won't appear. The other way round, I will emphasize verbal descriptions over pictures. What I won't do is send them through something that won't ever show up in either type of event. Even "Name A" drills or playing Scrambled States work with the information they'll need in a game situation.

Page 28: "It is a mistake we all make as coaches to think that there is only one way of doing something. There is not. Whatever works works."

I knew this one already. It's the logical extension of "No Shame, Only Points." If you learned military units, landmarks, and world leaders from the Civilization games, so be it. If you are familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda because it was something Bart Simpson said, so be it.

There is a certain affliction of a certain strain of smart kids the world around where they feel a slight trepidation about letting the world know what they know. Quizbowl, when the practice room is free and positive, is an excellent purgative for that particular poison. You as coach must recognize that, and when you make allow that to be excised from your players’ daily life, they will find the way to push themselves to be free in that space.

I have more from this, but I'll leave it for next week.