Bottle-Feeding Kittens, Training Design and Play
Weezy F. Baby and the F is for currently feeding the kittens
Cats on Broadway…
No, just newborn kittens in the bathtub.
My wife is fostering some newborn cats because the shelter she works at decided these kittens didn’t need a mom. The shelter that you know… Is supposed to save animals is just out here playing God, deciding she didn’t deserve to live.
And if it wasn’t for Tiffany, these 3 wouldn’t be experiencing their first joys of ‘play’ because they were on the list to be euthanized too...
Don’t worry, they’re going to live a full life because of her decision to you know… Actually do what is right by the animals.
But I’m digressing heavily…
Play.
They don’t have a mom; they’ve never been modeled it. They haven’t gone to kitten wrestling practice with a coach yelling explicit instructions at them.
But these fuckers understand play. 3 weeks out of the womb…
How?
Play is innate.
Yet, as coaches, we don’t think our kittens are capable of this level of self-organization.
Why?
Great design also makes a coach redundant
We’re also uncomfortable with that…
Brice is not uncomfortable with that, and that’s why Brice is a great ‘coach’. But he wouldn’t give himself such an antiquated label as ‘coach’:
“Any time you see signs or labels added to a device, it is an indication of bad design: a simple lock should not require instructions.”
― Donald A. Norman
We, coaches and collective society have ripped away the good design of ‘play’ for the ‘poor design’ of cone obstacle courses, explicit instruction at 10, private 1v1 trainers that pattern your kids into robots… And because we’ve done that, they now need instructions on how to play the game… That’s poor design according to Norman.
If kids are allowed to play as young as these kittens are. If they are left alone in the street for hours like we used to… If they are thrown into games at practice not lines and cute patterns on the ice to skate… They’ll never need a coach to explain ‘conceptual hockey’ to them… They’ll just know… Don’t believe me? Watch this:
And now watch this… Same content, different context.
Good design in the youth space looks a lot like setting up a game and watching kids play… Be like Lil’ Wayne in the song “6 Foot, 7 Foot”
Real G’s move in silence like lasagna.
P.S. the real players, play… And they’re remembering to tell you now…
