Rob Gray: The Father of the Modern Coaching Movement

Rob Gray was a goalie in hockey, and there end the similarities between he and every other hockey goalie on the planet that afternoon, for Gray was a goalie who couldn’t use his glove. Couldn’t move his stick. Couldn’t stop the opposing shooter’s shot in any way.

The only tool he had in order to tend his goal was to skate at the shooter.

Sound dumb? Ineffective? Borderline pointless?

Gray thought so too.

“But quickly something amazing came to light. Hardly any of the shooters scored goals,” Gray recently wrote. “Most missed the net completely while others shot the puck right at me…. Instead of telling me I had to cut down the angle of the shooter, [Coach Phillips] took away some of my movement solutions so that I could explore different ones. If I started to wander too far from my net, he would pass the puck to the shooter a little more quickly. He was what I would call an ecological coach.”

He was the man who would change Gray’s life, and the field of coaching as we know it.

That practice, as Gray details in his latest book, Learning to be an ecological coach, is the genesis story of what would become his life calling: The father of the modern coaching movement.

He is not so self-indulgent as to label himself as such. He is, as his teachings via books and podcasts and papers suggest all human beings are, a lifelong learner. When he’s asked on SANDCAST what, exactly, his job could be described as, he sums it up as a skill acquisition specialist. It is an admittedly ambiguous term, although one that is much easier to grasp than the one in bold print in his bio at Arizona State (Humans Systems Engineering) where he is an associate professor, or his role with the Chicago Cubs, which describes him as a “Sports Science Consultant.”

Confused? Don’t blame you.

Put simply: Rob Gray teaches humans — athletes in particular — how to learn.

And he is very, very good at it.

“Instead of giving them solutions, we give them a problem.”

There is a movement growing in popularity among coaches that is flipping the traditional model of practices on its head. The top-down, coach-instructed, rep-rep-rep based style traditionally used by coaches and then passed down to their athletes who then perpetuate the system has slowly come into question.

Many of those questions have begun, and since been answered by, Gray.

“In traditional coaching, we take a skill like setting in volleyball and we pull it out of the game, break it down, we try to give you the optimal correct technique for how to do it. We get you to practice it over and over again, until you can do it automatically,” Gray explained on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “Later on, we hope you can put that into a game. That’s been the dominant model for a long time: motor memory, repetition, working on the fundamentals first.

“In an ecological approach, the idea is to, instead of giving an athlete a solution, we’ll let them find their own. Instead of giving them solutions, we give them a problem. We give them practice conditions where they can learn. We vary constraints – the number of players, the size of the court, the height of the net, the size of the ball – to try to get them to learn solutions and make more of an adaptable athlete.”

This is why, in a practice where a coach leans towards an ecological approach, which can be untidily summed up as providing problems for athletes to solve as opposed to solutions to repeat, you will see many activities and games that might be viewed anywhere from unorthodox to outright bizarre. Why, for example, is there a volleyball player hitting the ball intentionally under the net? Why is that golfer hitting his driver as far left as he can, and then as far right? Why is that center fielder using a glove barely bigger than his hand?

Wouldn’t they all be better served simply repping out keeping the ball in front of them when attacking? Or hitting their drive straight down the fairway? Or catching a ball using a glove they’d actually use in a game?

Here Gray acknowledges that those players and teams wouldn’t necessarily get worse under those practice conditions. They’d probably get better.

But is it that the most effective manner of using the 120 or so minutes of practice?

“Good players have gotten better despite those practices, not because of it. We’re talking about the differences between efficiency and effectiveness, not whether it does or doesn’t work. Nothing works! The placebo effect, right?” Gray said, laughing. “We’re learning machines. We’re meant to learn. I think it’s a more effective use of practice time.

“For every one great player who got great doing [the traditional method of practicing], I’m sure we could name 5,000 who didn’t get great doing that.”

The real enemy: constant practice

For decades, coaches and athletes have relied upon a theory proposed by Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson, who published, in a 1993 paper, studies in which he and his colleagues concluded that expert violinists derived their talent not from innate abilities but rather from large amounts of deliberate practice over a period of 10 years or more. This theory was made vogue by Malcom Gladwell’s popular book, Outliers, in which a notion dubbed the 10,000-hour rule was established. It created a simple and catchy line of thought that if one were to practice anything for 10,000 hours, they’d achieve a rough level of mastery.

“It’s way too simple,” said Gray, who also acknowledged that he enjoys Gladwell’s writing and pointed out hat Ericsson contributed a great deal to the world of human performance. “Nobody actually believes that. There’s no magic number. It’s a popular story to sell books. The key message is that elite athletes have more hours of deliberate practice, where deliberate practice is practice focused on improving your weaknesses with a clear intent on making you better.

“The enduring message from his work needs to be specific from your weaknesses and deliberate with a clear intent.”

Essentially, what Gray – and what Ericcson would later acknowledge himself – is saying is this: Not all hours are created equal.

The new approach – creating problems for athletes to solve as opposed to solutions to reproduce ad nauseam – is, the research continues to show, the most nutrient dense type of hour when it comes to skill acquisition and learning. There is enough science and research behind it to fill books and papers and months worth of podcasting, all of which Gray does through his four books (and counting) and popular podcast, Perception & Action, and a number of papers he has published.

“The real enemy is constant practice, where you’re working on the same skill in the same conditions – strict repetitions. You’re repeating the exact same thing,” Gray said. “That’s what we don’t want. There’s a bunch of research that says that isn’t effective in the longterm.

“The dominant idea used to be that this approach meant slower acquisition of the skill but it came with the advantage of in the long run they’d be better problem-solvers, creative, adaptable athletes. That idea is not really well supported. You can do it just as fast as long as you’re manipulating constraints in the right way, challenging them in ways that are appropriate. I think they’re both equivalent. It’s hard to resist telling them what to do vs. letting them explore the game a little bit and changing the constraints to let them find it.”

This is perhaps the most difficult aspect for coaches: finding the restraint to explain or provide the answer to the problem or technique themselves. Because providing the solution to the problem creates a one-size-fits-all approach, whether you’re a 6-foot-4 blocker or a 5-foot-7 defender, a shooting guard or a power forward, a center fielder or a catcher. While there are commonalities among movements – fundamentals is the popular term, “invariances” is the ecological one used in Gray’s circles – there is also a great deal of personalized movements, or “variances” amongst athletes at all level of sport. You can find this across the full spectrum of athletes and movement, from the NBA – compare Steph Curry’s shot to, say, Ray Allen – to the PGA Tour – compare Scottie Sheffler’s swing and finish to that of Tiger Woods – to the MLB – match Barry Bonds’ batting stance to that of Aaron Judge and everything in between.

You’ll find commonalities, yes, just as you will inevitably notice a world of subtle differences in all of them.

“I’ve been researching for 25 years now. Initially, I was studying the traditional model, the information processing model of skill. I was looking at what do the key performers have?” Gray said. “My main sport is baseball. What does every great baseball player do? There’s a whole bunch of different ways to swing. There’s not just one way to do it, there are multiple different ways to do it. Skilled athletes have variable movements.”

Coaches, like Gray’s Coach Philipps, have been using this approach for as long as there has been sport, of course. There just hadn’t been a name or glossary of terms to describe it.

“I find a lot of good coaches I work with have been using these ideas for a long time, they’ve been creating challenging practices for their athletes, not telling them what to do,” Gray said. “They just didn’t call it and use the terms I use. Some of the core ideas have been around for a while, just in different forms.”

Now, however, there is a form.

There are words to describe them. There are books to read, podcasts to listen to, scientific papers to dissect.

Those are thanks, in large part, to Rob Gray.

What Coach Philipps began those many years ago with a quirky drill for a hockey goalie became the life work of his pupil — and, now, the work of coaches the world over.