Coaching Esports: A Model For Player Improvement

If you are thinking about being an esports coach and working with kids, I believe coaching experience from sports can translate very effectively into esports. First however you have to wrap your head around the idea that competitive gaming can teach players valuable skills. Chances are if you are thinking about esports coaching you already believe that, and if you’ve read this far you are at least willing to consider it.

So let’s see how you can do this. In my experience, the function of a coach at the individual level is to help a player to develop to their maximum potential. At the team level, their function is to balance the strengths and weaknesses of the players so that the strengths are magnified, and the weaknesses are irrelevant. In this article I’m going to focus on individual coaching.

For me, the ultimate success a coach can achieve is to help a player perform their best under pressure. I called this Competitive Excellence. Legendary UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden called it Competitive Greatness and he defined it as:

Being your best when your best is most needed.

So how can we, as coaches, help players achieve this with video games? In my experience it takes technique, time, and training. It will not happen overnight, however seeing a player achieve their potential is one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had on the field, or in the arena. Before we go any further however I want to make a clear definition. The word competitive is a loaded word. I might say, “competitive excellence” and you might hear, “someone who is really good at being a jerk.” That is not at all what I mean.

When I say competitive I:

• Do mean: someone who brings their best to a challenge and is process focused. They define themselves by the effort their bring, and the things they control.
• Do not mean: Someone who must win at all costs and is so deathly afraid of losing they avoid all serious challenges and ruin the enjoyment of the competition for everyone participating and watching.

With that clarification in mind, let’s take a look at how we can help esport athletes develop competitive excellence.

When I coached, I used the four-letter acronym L.A.M.B. which stood for:

• Look
• Aim
• Move
• Believe

It is based off something my father used to call the, “Dumb Luck Theory” of travel. For him travel was about a journey. If you did it right, you went to new places, discovered new things, and became someone new. Travel was transformational for him. It also captures the idea that is the journey, not the destination that is so important in life. I like that metaphor, but in practical terms this is how it applies to coaching.

• Looking: You stay alert and awake. Pay attention and be open to discovery.
• Aim: You set intention. Be deliberate.
• Move: Nothing happens standing still. Put the car in gear. Take action.
• Believe: Finally, you trust that what you want is possible. (and it might be better than you imagine)

Here’s how you can use that framework as a coach.

Look -

You know where it ends, yo, it usually depends on where you start

— Lyrics from What It’s Like by Everlast

Truth — or, more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality — is the essential foundation for any good outcome.

— Ray Dalio, Principles

As a practical matter, every form of competition is usually built on top of skills. When we set out to help someone improve, both we as the coach, and them as the player need to know where they are starting.

I once asked Rodney Davis, a professional baseball player and coach, “Why doesn’t baseball get more complex?” He looked at me sideways. “I mean, with football the playbooks get thicker at every level. College more complex than high school, and the NFL playbooks are like phone books.” It can take a player years to learn a new offence.

Rodney answered me with one word. “Speed.”

The same fundamental skills in baseball became increasingly more difficult as the game accelerated.

When you want to coach a player to get better, you need to Look at:

1. The required skills to play the game
2. How the skills and complexity progress at each level
3. Where your player falls on that spectrum.

Every significant esport game has a rich and complex set of skills. One of the most important things you can teach yourself, and your players is how to see the game. Really see it. See it the way an expert sees it.

In order to appreciate any competition, one of the prerequisites is that you have to understand enough of the skills to be able to see them as they are played out, and project how they will affect the game. Every great competition boils down to the ancient story, “the irresistible force meets the immovable object.” Who will win?

When we can see the skills, and project the possible outcomes, we have the capacity to enter a game as a meaningful competitor. Therefore, one of the most important jobs you can do as a coach, is teach yourself and your players how to look at competitions and break them down. Once you have a handle on what skills are required, and how they should look, and where you think your player is on the competitive ladder, you are read to take aim at helping them improve.

AIM -

In his fantastic book, the first 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman lays out one of his key principles for rapid skill acquisition.

Rule: Set an appropriate skill target

Aim is about being intentional in your improvement. Perhaps this is the single biggest thing I see missing from esports. We put too much stock in tutorials and YouTube videos. However, working with someone to craft a plan for improvement, can make all the difference. The reality is that all great tournaments happen between people, not people vs machines. While a piece of software or a video may be able to convey techniques, very few applications as of the time of this writing can really assess your skill the way an experience coach can. A player might become obsessed with finishing moves when what would really benefit them the most is to polish their recovery. The point is that a good coach should be able to help a player know what is most important for them to learn. Or perhaps a player needs to get out of their comfort zone and try some more advanced moves.

It is in the human interaction and feedback where coach can really help a player grow. The goal of the coach isn’t to be better than the player, it is to see what direction would be best to help that player achieve their potential.

Move -

Once the direction is set, the coach is there to help the player move. This can be done with a combination of deliberate practices, and carefully architected competitions. Many players become obsessed with winning, and so they are afraid to take on a challenge outside there skill envelope. A good coach can help a player make that jump. What’s more, sometimes, to get better, players need to engage people they can’t beat.

When I coached a team of 9-year-old kids in an Arizona’s winter baseball league, I told the players and the parents we were not going to win a single game. And we did not. Yet this was one of the best seasons we ever had. Why? Because the real goal of that “meaningless” season was to teach everyone to pitch. And it is that irony of sports that they won’t let you pitch until you know how. How do you learn how to pitch? By pitching. So, we made our own team, and every single kid pitched in a game.

By the spring, all 14 players on that team were drafted onto a kid pitch team. A good coach finds a way to help his players grow. And they grow through action and movement toward their goal. We measure progress and process.

To make this more concrete, let me break it down into how to handle beginners, intermediate, and advanced players.

BEGINNER CHALLENGES

Winning against human opponents is likely too much of a stretch for the beginner. Therefore, the focus for beginners is to learn the fundamentals. This can be competing against bots, or against coaches who are scaling their skill to the player’s. Beginners should mostly focus on competing with other players at their rank. However, players can learn a lot from highly structured directed competitions that are themselves games (for example how many times can a player recover from getting hit off stage in Smash Bros by a coach?)

INTERMEDIATE CHALLENGES

At this level players need to compete and play regularly to discover where the holes are in their game. For players in this range, a coach should consider the Goldilocks rule: Make the player play someone a little better, a little worse, and just right. This means they play someone you know they can’t beat, then someone you know they can beat (helps recover from the loss and shows progress) then someone they might beat but could also lose to.

When players compete up, it stretches the player’s skill, and they learn from more advanced play. It also reveals what the player needs to work on. When they play someone, they “should” defeat, they can get a sense of the progress they are making. The most valuable, and the hardest thing to do is to find and face the player that is perfectly matched for them. A “Goldilocks” opponent should be one that your player could beat, but they do not know if they will win. Intermediate players can benefit from all of these challenges.

ADVANCED

Advanced players typically put in enormous amounts of practice but more than that they often study the game itself and the strategies. They can also gain a lot by teaching and coaching younger players. There is a saying from medical school:

• Watch One
• Do One
• Teach One

Mastery often comes with guiding others and explaining concepts to them. In a community, top players can be a rich resource for intermediate players. They can also be source of inspiration for new and beginning players.

Don’t forget, motivation is often connected to identity. If a player feels like they are moving forward they are likely to be more motivated.

Believe -

Finally, it is hard to overstate how important it is to believe that people can grow and improve. Mark Gordon, the president of Tempe South Little League once told a room full of coaches, “it is not coaching your best players that will win you a championship, but how much you improve your worst players that will decide who wins.” He was right. For players to believe in themselves, usually the coach has to believe in them first.

There is a very practical way to address player belief in themselves. The key is focus on self-talk. For a variety of reasons most people have a very negative self-talk. The best practice is to help players develop what is called a “performance goal.” What is a performance goal? A form of positive self-talk. The theory goes like this. The body will try to implement what you can imagine and there is no visualization for the word “don’t.” This means, coaches can help players by crafting statements that they can act on. Performance goals focus on what the player can control.

Here’s a good example from basketball. Many coaches tell their players, “Keep the other guy from getting the ball.” But you can’t control the other player. Positive coaches teach, “get between the other player and the ball.” The focus is on you, and what you can control.

In her book Mindset, Professor Carol Dweck makes the case for how important it is to have the right mindset for facing competition. People primed with a fixed mindset, are often convinced their success depends upon things they cannot control. People with a growth mindset however, remain grounded in their own abilities and effort. And as Angela Duckworth pointed out in her book Grit, effort counts twice. Professor Duckworth through research and study found that effort is twice as impactful as talent in determining player performance.

Keeping you players focused on what they can control, is a simple but effective way to start building their belief in themselves.

As my own players told me one day after practice, “You win, or you learn.” They played like they had nothing to lose. That attitude helped them win. A lot.

CONCLUSION

When working with players, whether it is in video games, or sports, I find it is the focus on player improvement that makes a difference. The L.A.M.B. Model is a quick reminder I use to remember to pay attention, make sure I’m aiming for the right things, oriented toward action, and helping them believe in themselves and their capacity to improve. Once a player experiences some improvement, that goes a long way toward building their confidence not only in themselves, but the process itself.