Rapid City Post 22's Jake Bohne observes from the top of the dugout this spring. Early this season Bohne is seeing the results of an off-season filled with hours of what is being called deep practice. (Photo Seth A. McConnell/IDS)

Editors’ Note: The following is the first of a three-part series exploring the growth of athletic talent. Part two will be published on Tuesday and part three on Wednesday.

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Everyone knows who they are. It’s obvious.

Sit in the bleachers at a Little League game when Zach Solano belts four home runs in four innings, or Brett Beyer throws a fastball in the mid-70s. Watch Jack Oberg speed across the ice at the Thunderdome. Watch the high school student sitting first chair in the violin section of the Black Hills Symphony. Watch the little 4th grader tucked in the back of the library, reading a whole book in one rainy afternoon. Watch a pee wee football game with parents who nod in agreement, “When he gets to high school, the coach can play him anywhere.” Watch Tyler Aquallo or Chelsey Biegler weave the lane and shoot a basketball. Watch Maddie Merriam field a hard ground ball in the hole and fire a bullet to first. Watch Tony Smoragiewicz run, and realize that he belongs on the savannas of the Masi Mara outrunning impalas.

Some young people are “naturals”. They are born with a gift. They are more coordinated, more creative, more developed than everyone around them. Their talent is “natural”. God’s will. They carry mom and dad’s genetics. We use the word “gifted” to describe them partly out of the sheer joy of their talent, and partly out of envy. They are just different.

Right?

These were exactly the observations I offered a month ago to Dr. Brett Lawlor, one of the partners at The Rehab Doctors, and one of the most respected sports physicians in the region. I wanted to know why a handful of young baseball players are so much better than all the others, and I knew in my heart what everyone knows–they’re just naturally gifted. But Dr. Lawlor’s response startled me. “A year ago, that’s what I thought, too.” He told me. “But that’s not what the newest neurological science is telling us. Go read The Talent Code.”

Daniel Coyle is a contributing editor to Outside magazine, and author of several books on sports. For The Talent Code, Coyle traveled to dozens of countries in search of the answer to a simple question—What is the secret of talent, and how do we unlock it? Is it nature, or nurture, or some unknown alchemy of both?

Coyle explored the poor urban slums of Brazil looking for the key to great Brazilian soccer players. He traveled to a classical music academy in New York. He visited tennis academies in Russia, and weedy, rocky, Little League baseball diamonds on the Caribbean island of Curacao. Most importantly, he traveled to the frontier of neurological science, to tell the story of a strange, barely understood, spider-like, “neural insulator” known to scientists as myelin.

Myelin is not handed out exclusively to the “gifted”. We all have the ability to grow it. And there is no indication that any one of us has more ability to grow myelin than anyone else. The simple fact is, according to Coyle and the scientists he interviewed, we are not born with talent. We grow it, and we begin growing it so early in life that when a young athlete walks on the field as a 10-year old, years of unconscious, accumulated work make us think a young player has “natural” talent.

Are superstar athletes born with talent? Science now suggests it is developed through thousands of hours of play, practice, mentoring, and motivation.

Consider the superstars: NFL Hall of Fame wide receiver Jerry Rice grew up in Mississippi and was not recruited by a single D-1 college. He ran a slow 4.71 forty-yard dash, and ended up at small Mississippi Valley State University in Itta Bena, Mississippi. Throughout his NFL career his workout ethic was the envy of teammates and opponents. Even after two decades in the NFL, rookie players could not keep up with the intensity or minute details of his self-imposed “deep practices”. Or, consider superstar quarterback Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. When Brady enrolled at the University of Michigan, he was no.7 on the depth chart. He was tall, and gangly, but slow. His arm was average, but his work ethic was relentless. Even so, he was drafted #199, at the end of the 6th round in the 2000 NFL Draft. He barely made the roster, and played most of his first year with the Patriots as no.4 on the depth chart. Hall of Fame hitter Tony Gwynn was short and chronically over-weight. But he spent thousands of hours in the batting cage even after he became an All-Star. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Four Hall of Fame athletes, none of whom started out as “gifted”, but all of whom were created by relentless practice.

When we do not develop talent, it has less to do with “nature”, or genetics, or God’s will, and more to do with the limits we put on ourselves, or the limits that communities put on their children.

This is where Coyle begins: “Every human skill, whether it’s playing baseball or playing Bach, is created by chains of nerve fibers carrying a tiny electrical impulse—basically, a signal traveling through a circuit. Myelin’s vital role is to wrap those nerve fibers the same way that rubber insulation wraps copper wire, making the signal stronger and faster by preventing the electrical impulses from leaking out. When we fire our circuits in the right way—when we practice swinging that bat or playing that note—our myelin responds by wrapping layers of insulation around that neural circuit, each new layer adding a bit more skill and speed. The thicker the myelin gets, the better it insulates, and the faster and more accurate our movements and thoughts become.”

Coyle quotes Dr. George Bartzokis, a UCLA neurologist: “All skills, all language, all music, all movements, are made of living circuits, and all circuits grow according to certain rules.”

So the question naturally becomes—“How do we grow myelin?” The research also suggests a deeper set of questions. Whether we are talking about reading or playing chess, or learning the piano, or playing shortstop, or shooting a basketball, could we, (should we), re-organize public education to incorporate what researchers are learning about myelin and the development of talent?

Scientists point to three core principles of learning; deep practice, mentoring, and motivation or inspiration–the impulse that drives us to work hard. As fate would have it, each principle is linked to cultural values and behaviors that too often work against our best efforts to improve our skills.

Deep Practice

Children at play, without boundaries, is one of the most important keys to developing myelin. (Photo Jake Nordbye/IDS)

It will come as no surprise that “practice makes perfect.” As Sizzle shortstop Maddie Merriam tells visitors to her Facebook page: “The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital.” Researchers who study the growth of talent now report that the kind of practice we undertake is more important than simple, mindless repetition, or, as one often sees at Little League practices, endless standing around while ten players listen to a coach tell them how to do something. It turns out that the Nike slogan “Just do it…” has its roots in the science of neurology.

The sheer volume of disciplined, “self-aware” practice that it takes to create talent is enormous. Scientists now talk about the “Rule of 10,000 Hours” as a threshold for mastering a skill.

Consider 10,000 hours. If a 12-year old Little League all-star clings to the idea of becoming a Major League baseball player, and goes to the batting cage for an intense hour long practice session every day of the year, he will be 40 before he masters the art of hitting—at which time he will be the oldest rookie in the Majors.

So how do great athletes jump-start the process? If a motivated Little Leaguer spends three hours a day in deep practice, he will get to 10,000 hours by the time he is 22, and that gives him a shot at the Big Leagues. But how does a child accomplish three hours of hitting and throwing and catching every day?

A good beginning is to celebrate rather than punish the physical excesses of childhood. Children need to play, without boundaries. It is the fast track to the first thousand hours. Show me the 12-year old standing all alone in right field praying that the ball doesn’t come his way, and I will show you a child who has not practiced how to catch a fly ball or throw it back to the second baseman.

Walker Paz, who plays for the Timberline Sportsters, is, by universal judgment, one of the best Little League All-Stars in the city. His mother, Leilani Hamilton, remembers him as a toddler. “He started throwing the ball when he was 16 months old, and he’s been doing it ever since. By two he was catching balls and kicking balls. He’s always had great coordination.”

Walker Paz delivers during a Little League game this spring. Balance, coordination, and muscle memory is often developed with thousands of hours of practice and play before athletes reach their teenage years. (Photo Sam Hurst/IDS)

Across town, Karla McGriff remembers her son Hayden (a Harney All-Star) as a youngster: “He would spend all day throwing the ball against a wall, over and over, all day long. Diving and catching and throwing. He never stopped.”

“I’ve always played catch with my dad.” Hayden added. “I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t play catch with him.”

Hayden McGriff’s father, Kasey, coaches the Harney Bankers, and over four years at the helm, he has pieced together the most dynamic practice sessions in Little League. “It’s hard to keep twelve boys active all the time. It always seems like the 10th, 11th, and 12th boys on the team don’t get enough balls compared to the 1,2,3, and that’s wrong.” McGriff observed. But McGriff organizes Bankers practices to increase the participation of all his players. After warming up, the practices hit a fevered pitch when two batters line up ten feet apart at home plate and take live pitching from two coaches tucked safely behind screens near the pitcher’s mound, throwing balls in rapid fire alternating succession. “It was actually coach Hanson’s idea,” McGriff told me recently. “It’s a two way deal. The players get more reps at bat, and the kids in the field have to stay focused all the time.” At a typical Little League practice, a young player might get ten or twelve swings, but at Bankers practices players get forty or fifty swings, which also means that players in the field are getting forty or fifty ground balls and line drives during each two-player hitting session. Then the team hits in the batting cage.

“The coaches always tell us they will meet us in the cage a half hour early if we want to do extra hitting,” Hayden McGriff adds.

“So do you take them up on it?” I ask.

“Yes. I do. Everyone on the team does.” The Bankers are 6-0 this season and at the top of the Harney standings. By intensifying the repetition, Bankers players are growing myelin.

When I first watched a Post 22 practice sixteen years ago, I noticed that the players themselves were hitting fly balls to the outfielders and ground balls to the infielders. It seemed inefficient and old-fashioned. At every other practice I’ve seen from T-ball on up the adult coaches hit to the players. When I asked Post 22 head coach Dave Ploof why he let the players do the hitting, he described his first years as a coach, when the program couldn’t afford assistant coaches. The players had to do it as a matter of necessity. But the more I watched over the years the more I understood his deeper purpose. The drills were a way to keep every player active all practice long, and a way to use even the most insignificant opportunity to practice hand-eye coordination.

Every swing, every drive off the back leg, every attempt to use hand-eye coordination, builds myelin. But this is where myelin throws us a curve.

Speaking in evolutionary terms, the faster we became (the more talent we developed), the faster the lion became. So myelin responds most when we push ourselves beyond our limits. To grow myelin athletes have to take risks, have to push themselves beyond what they know how to do. The process of “problem solving”, trying and failing and working out the details of improvement in agonizingly slow steps, is the essence of deep practice. It is also the fastest way to grow myelin.

But this process also exposes an athlete to failure, and failure in our society is fraught with peril. If an athlete or a musician tries to do something new and fails, he faces ridicule, and when that criticism comes from a teacher, or coach, or parents in the stands yelling, “Come on…catch the ball, Johnny,” the first instinct of survival is to retreat from experimentation to what is safe. So next time, instead of running to the ball, Johnny lets the ball drop safely in front, fields it on a hop, and let’s a run score.

Many years ago I was standing in the outfield at a Post 22 practice watching Coach Rich Downs work with a talented 18 year old centerfielder who was already very accomplished as an outfielder. The boy was effortlessly catching fly balls and making his throws. Downs approached him and said, “You’re not working hard enough. I know you can catch a fly ball. You don’t need to show me you can catch a fly ball. Move over. Force yourself to make a longer run to get to the ball, push yourself. You have to work harder.” The centerfielder had retreated into his safety zone. He did not want to drop a ball in front of other players and especially the coaches. Downs was trying to get him to think upside down from the way he had grown up.

Post 22 assistant coach Rich Downs discusses base running with Jake Sullivan. (Photo Seth A. McConnell/IDS)

It may be instinctive on the part of loving parents or supportive coaches to try and create shortcuts, ways for an athlete to go around or avoid the struggle that comes with failure. But it is precisely the individual problem solving itself that is most valuable.

Everything we know so far about the role of “deep practice” in the development of talent has implications for our approach to public education. It is quite likely, in this age of fiscal austerity and standardized tests, that we are going in exactly the wrong direction. Rather than cutting the school week to four days, as many South Dakota school districts have been forced to do, we should be expanding the hours in class and expanding the number of days that children are in school. Rather than eliminating or shrinking art and music, recess, and physical education, we should be doubling and tripling the time we spend with children on these essential sources of myelin growth. We need to expand recess and physical education as a way to fight obesity, but now comes research that suggests it is also the key to developing talent. It is impossible to reduce play and grow talent.

The emphasis of modern schools on standardized tests in math and reading would suggest that children are simply transferring the growth of myelin from physical activities to mental activities like reading. That’s not all bad. But we’re not taking the right approach to reading any more than we are to hitting a ball.

By increasing class sizes, and by forcing teachers to teach subjects they, themselves, are not masters in, we eliminate the ability of teachers to work one-on-one with every student, and it turns out that intensive, individual mentoring is the second key to myelin growth and “deep practice”.

Read part two tomorrow of the Science of Talent: “Deep Practice Requires a Mentor”