Pickup Basketball and the Joy of Immediate Feedback
I am not good at basketball. Sometimes, this inconvenient truth makes people angry, because I look like maybe I should be good at basketball. My height and build (described by one pediatrician as “sturdy” in what was 100% not a compliment) do the opposite of good expectation management: they overpromise, and I underdeliver.
But I like to compete, to strive together, as part of a team. I played all the team sports as a kid, and I unwittingly let them form a lot of my worldview. Basketball is the easiest team sport to play informally (in my corner of the world).
I played last weekend and got absolutely worked, but, luckily for me, that’s not the point of these musings. The point is rather…
Pickup basketball gives good feedback
The feedback from pickup basketball has all the hallmarks of the best kinds of feedback: it’s immediate, it’s in context, it’s non-ambiguous, and if you want, it’s actionable.
Competition tends to give competitors high-fidelity, high-quality feedback, (I almost starting writing here about how “iron sharpens iron” and how competition is a core philosophical tenet of theoretical capitalism, but for your sake, I stopped myself), but pickup basketball feedback is particularly good. I think it’s because pickup basketball is a voluntary (no one is forced to play), and hypersocial game based on simple rules with a clearly defined, shared goal.
A competitive game
The game is where the rubber meets the road, or rather where the synthetic leather meets the asphalt.
The presence of other people wanting to win is what makes the feedback sting and what makes it stick. Peer-level competitors reveal you to yourself. Your hesi-crossover can look and feel great when you’re playing against air, but when you’re playing against another human who also chose to wake up on a Saturday morning to start their day with a win, you’ll get clear signals about where you have room for improvement.
that we’ve opted in to
In pickup basketball, we’ve all opted-in to the game. Unfortunately, people play a lot of games they didn’t explicitly opt-in to: life, politics, relationships — to name a few examples. Without opt-in agreement, feedback is irrelevant: if I didn’t agree to participate, I’m much less likely to care about improving the quality of my participation.
with simple rules
In pickup basketball, we (mostly) agree on the constraints, the rules and customs that must be respected in pursuit of the goal, and we collectively enforce them. We enter a simplified world and submit to simplified rules. This is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon, a prerequisite for enthusiastic participation in complex human endeavors.
and a clear shared goal
In pickup basketball, we share the same goal, a goal that some of us will necessarily fail to reach: win. For feedback to be important, the stakes have to be real. There have to be consequences for ignoring what the game is telling you.
where success depends on unfamiliar others
Pickup sports (to differentiate from organized sports with persistent teams and rules enforced by outside officials) have a particular unpredictability. You don’t know who will be on your team, who will be on the other team, who is talented and who just looks like they should be. It’s a hypersocial exercise: the best pickup teams are the ones that quickly establish an unspoken pecking order. If the 4th-best player believes that he is the best player, the team will struggle until he is disabused of that belief.
I want to be in more feedback-rich situations, where it’s hard to lie to myself about how good I am or the quality of my contribution to a team.
To the Panhandle Court crew: I’ll see you next Saturday.