Group of Gator Head Coaches Receive Lesson on "The Sports Gene"
Wednesday, February 18, 2015 | Scott Carter
David Epstein, author of "The Sports Gene," during a TED talk about athletic performance.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – In a conference room at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in late January, a former 800-meter runner at Columbia University met with several University of Florida head coaches to discuss athletic performance and how nature-versus-nurture plays out more than a decade into the 21st century.
If there is an expert on the subject, David Epstein qualifies as much as anyone. During his time as a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, Epstein often delved into sports science and wrote a cover story about genetic influence on athletic performance in 2010.
Epstein didn't stop with the magazine story, instead expanding his curiosity on the subject into a book titled “The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.”
When released in 2013, it landed on the New York Times' bestsellers list. (Note: Reviews from the Washington Post and New York Times).
“The book is basically my own 15 questions I wanted to know the answers to about sort of the nature-nurture of athleticism,'' Epstein said. “It came out of things that I was just logging in my head.”
The topic of athletic performance, and how factors such as environment, innate ability, training methods and intangible traits such as effort and desire impact it, had interested Epstein since high school in Evanston, Ill.
Epstein ran track and his team featured an inordinate number of Jamaican sprinters who had settled in the suburb north of Chicago. Their success resonated with Epstein, who wanted to know what made them such accomplished sprinters.
“We were really, really good,'' he said. “So I kind of got interested in Jamaica. I flipped open an atlas and 2.5 million people [live there]. What the hell is going on over there?”
An avid runner, Epstein continued his career in college and later earned master's degrees in journalism and environmental science from Columbia before embarking on a writing career, his first full-time job as the overnight crime reporter on the city desk of the New York Daily News.
Prior to writing “The Sports Gene,” Epstein was probably best known for co-authoring a story in 2003 for Sports Illustrated that revealed Yankees All-Star third baseman Alex Rodriguez had tested positive for steroids.
To report the book, Epstein trekked the globe meeting with athletes, coaches and scientists to discuss the nature-nurture equation. He visited Jamaica, Sweden and even traveled to Alaska to study why certain Alaskan huskies are more gifted than others to race in the Iditarod.
Another part of the journey took him to the Rift Valley in Kenya, an area that began to intrigue Epstein during his college running career when he competed against a large presence of Kenyans.
“You ask them where they are from and they are all from like this one tiny town in the middle of nowhere in the West Rift Valley,'' Epstein said. “At the same time I'm training with a group of five guys and we're doing the same thing every day. Eating together, living together, and yet we are getting more different in our races instead of more of the same. How is that possible?”
By now, a question you might have is why was Epstein at UF in a conference room talking to a group of Florida head coaches?
Epstein's week-long stay was part of UF's Science Journalist in Residence program. During his visit he spoke to journalism professors, students and other groups about the role of science in sports, an area that has only begun to be explored in great detail in recent years.
Ted Spiker, interim chair of the department of journalism, played a key role in setting up Epstein's visit.
“We really wanted to bring David in because of his incredible talent when it comes to telling science stories that resonate with the public through data, anecdotes and the synthesis of the two,'' Spiker said. “But besides talking to journalists-in-training, he really had amazing stories to tell and science to reveal about the way we train athletes—specifically how the sports science shows that we don't always do it the right way in terms of meshing the hardware (our genetics) and the software (the training, preparation and environment).
“What was incredible to see is that so many kinds of people—coaches, parents, media, students, faculty—really got something useful out of David's visits and talks.”
When an opportunity was arranged for the coaches to meet with Epstein, several took up the offer.
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Always in search of an edge, UF swim coach Gregg Troy wanted to hear Epstein's presentation for a potential nugget of wisdom from his research.
“Anytime you have a chance to tap into someone with his experience and the number of people he has talked to and stuff, it's nothing but a great education experience,'' Troy said. “He had some great ideas. The amount of studies he has been associated with, he just had a lot of information related to performance and the type of things that make performance better. It was a great couple of hours spent.”
In Troy's case, the veteran UF coach and head coach of the 2012 U.S. Olympic Team was specifically interested in pain tolerance in endurance sports.
As a long-distance runner, Epstein's athletic career on ground relates well to that of a swimmer in the water for distance events. Troy has seen plenty of talented athletes over the years fall to lesser-talented ones because of an inability to push through mental roadblocks as well as the underdog.
“When you get to the highest levels, sport is at least half mental, if not way more than that,'' Troy said.
UF men's tennis coach Bryan Shelton played professionally prior to his coaching career. He understands the game from an elite player's level and that of a coach trying to tap into a young player's psyche.
During the meeting, Shelton was struck by a study that Epstein cited in regard to positive reinforcement of an athlete compared to consistent negative analysis.
UF men's tennis coach Bryan Shelton talking to players at a recent match. (Photo: Christine Casey)
While many coaches take the harsher approach when they arrive at that fork in the road, Epstein warned that the tactic can ultimately have a negative impact on performance.
“As a coach, we're always trying to fix the problem,'' Shelton said. “By reinforcing the things they are doing well, there is more likelihood they will repeat those things. The studies show that telling them what they do wrong over and over again, they don't tend to develop as quickly.
“It's not that you have to sugarcoat everything, but you kind of wait to see if a positive [emerges] and then you make sure you hone in on those so you can get them to repeat them. I thought that was pretty interesting.”
For Epstein, speaking to the coaches was a voyage off the beaten path. While he has done numerous interviews about the book and spoken at conferences and other events, he had never discussed his research in a setting with only a group of coaches.
He came away impressed at their interest to dive deeper into information that can help them at their jobs.
“That was a pretty savvy group of coaches,'' he said. “They are obviously keeping up with a pretty fair amount of stuff."
In touching on Troy's interest in mind control of pain, Epstein shared a study about a construction worker who was rushed to the hospital after a construction bolt pierced his boot. The man was writhing in pain when he arrived at the hospital.
However, when doctors cut off the boot, they discovered the bolt had slid between his toes without injury.
“As soon as he sees that he's totally fine,'' Epstein said.
The primary message Epstein tried to instill to the coaches focused on the purpose of his book.
“To try and give them a sense of where the cutting edge of sport science is to the extent that I know it,'' he said. “It's there and it's also in the fact in that different people, because of their different genetics, respond to any single type of training differently. So coaches have to start being attuned to the fact that there is no single training plan.
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In Epstein's book, he illustrates through various anecdotes how the nature-versus-nurture debate cannot exclude genetic disposition as a major factor in athletic performance. The practice-makes-perfect theory clearly has a strong challenger.
As the future unfolds and more studies are done, the answers to both sides of the argument should gain clarity.
Shelton will be watching closely.
“As we move along, we are always trying to find an edge of how we can get better in what we do,'' Shelton said. “If you ignore technology, if you ignore science, you are just going to fall behind.”
Why did major-league hitter Albert Pujols strike out against softball pitcher Jennie Finch, who was throwing underhanded? Why does Jamaica produce so many Olympic sprinters? Why did Donald Thomas, only months after he started high jumping, beat Olympic champion Stefan Holm at the 2007 World Championships?
Epstein admits there are “still a lot more questions than answers.”
He explored each of the above questions in the book.
And as he wrote for National Geographic in 2013 shortly after the book was released, “as exercise genetics continues to progress, more people will have the chance to peer into their sports gene. How we choose to view the information, that's another matter entirely.”
Regardless, a fascinating subject no matter your final conclusion.
