The Awkward Kid that Could by John Cioffredi https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83 Journey of lifetime, with enough plot twists and setbacks to make HBO jealous. en-us 2017-12-14 19:19:44 UTC 2025-11-06 13:27:02 UTC hello@padlet.com https://padlet-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/icons/Tent.png 4.) Raising the Bar While the first few practices may have been a little rough, I finally started moving through the Fitts-Posner Stages of Learning as the weeks began to slide by. A majority of my time was spent in the first two stages of learning, the Cognitive phase, during which I experimented with a number of different strategies to see what number of steps on the straight versus the curve of my approach yielded the best results, and using verbal cues to remind myself what I wanted to try and emphasize on each jump. After a few weeks I had progressed into the Associative Stage of Learning, I was no longer trying to figure how many steps to take on the curve and the straight, I had worked out that 5 on the straight and 5 on the curve worked best, and I was no longer talking myself through each jump. My jumps were more consistent, and I was starting to be able to detect what I was doing wrong before I talked with my coach. I was able to use environmental and proprioceptive cues to determine whether or not my approach was correct before I’d even left the ground. I was establishing my albeit awkward, but effective motor pattern, and it was paying off.It was a long time before I matured into the Autonomous Stage of Learning, I hesitate to say that I’m even there now after high jumping for a decade. Over the years there have been a number of different aspects of my jump that have changed, from the number of total steps I take in my approach, to the muscles I’m activating on the curve in order to ensure I’m bringing as much speed as I can handle into my jump. But for the sake of this project we’ll say I finally made it to the Autonomous phase, because in part it’s true, I no longer have to contemplate how to jump, my attentional demand while jumping is markedly lower than when I started and had to use every little ounce of attentional focus in my little adolescent brain to even walk without tripping over my shoelaces. I can detect and correct errors in my jump during the movement itself, a sign that I’ve finally arrived at the 3rd stage of learning. This maturation (at least physical) could not have come at a better time. johncioffredi https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216306518 2017-12-14 19:36:13 UTC https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216306518 1.) 5’10” is a little short for the NBA When I was 5 years old if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would’ve insisted that I was going to be the Red Power Ranger…or a professional basketball player, one of the two.But when I found out that power rangers really didn’t have the best health insurance I figured I’d have to fall back on my professional basketball career. Unfortunately, by the 7th grade I realized the potential roadblocks to my masterplan, namely that I was 5’10” with a limb coordination that made me a borderline insurance liability to be on the team.But I could jump.And as spring rolled around I found that my aversion to tight pants and athletic supporters was just too much, I couldn’t bring myself to play baseball anymore, so I went out for the track team. The first day my coach handed me a pair of shorts that looked like they’d been shrunk in the wash, “Where’s the rest of them?” I asked? After an appropriate amount of teenage angst, I finally slipped on my short shorts and immediately knew I made the right decision. After years of being constrained by tight baseball pants the freedom I felt in these short shorts was an immediate game changer. While still riding the high of the fashion statement of the century I went over to the high jump station to see if I had what it took to be the next great….well to be honest I couldn’t think of a single famous high jumper.It didn’t look promising at first.While 12 year old John was sure there was going to be a transfer of skill from layup lines in basketball where a similar single foot take off was required, the Identical Elements Theory did not apply to this situation. The components of the skills and the context of the skills just weren’t similar enough to allow my layup line skills to transfer into a world class high jumper. The curved run up and the 30 degree take off angle between the bar and the jumper’s foot required to successfully complete the jump were too foreign of skills for my body to apply the same strategy as I used for layup lines a few months prior. The components of the skill were too different, and without the ball in my hands the context felt all wrong too, so it was back to square one. johncioffredi https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216306567 2017-12-14 19:36:22 UTC https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216306567 2.) “It’s Simple Physics” The first few practices learning how to high jump were rough. To make things worse I just couldn’t figure out the form. I consider myself to be a more or less athletic human being, but high jumping had reduced me to a puddle of disbelief and mild self-doubt. How could getting over a bar really be so difficult? In retrospect, the verbal knowledge of performance I was receiving from my coach may have had something to do with it.After the coach watched us bumble around trying to figure out how to approach the bar he stopped us. “Guys it’s simple physics” he told us. According to him all we had to do was accelerate for five strides ensuring that we strike with the entirety of our midfoot, emphasizing activation of our posterior chain, beginning with our hip/hamstring combination, allow our center of mass to drift outside our base of support as we transition to the curve, ensuring lateral acceleration, while maintaining adequate knee recovery, finally translating the centripetal force into vertical height by minimizing the ground contact time in the penultimate and takeoff steps. This was extremely precise prescriptive verbal knowledge of performance, but for a kid who was still trying to wrap his head around the fact that babies aren’t actually delivered by storks this advice was a little much. Had I been presented with only one or two verbal cues that emphasized the most important components of the task I may been able learn the general movement pattern of the task with greater ease. But once I got the gist of the movement the personal records soon followed. johncioffredi https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216306732 2017-12-14 19:36:39 UTC https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216306732 3.) Getting into the Rhythm By the summer of my junior year of high school I had been high jumping for about 5 years, and I’d had some success on the state level. But being the baby of the family and having 4 older sisters who were all State Champions in a least one event (the eldest of whom was also the Gatorade Track and Field Athlete of the Year) I was still a small in fish in what was already a pretty small pond. But none the less I had gained some status, people knew who I was, which you could argue isn’t all that impressive considering I lived in a “city” of less than 10,000 people whose newspaper headlines occasionally read “Rabid Squirrel Terrorizes Hanover Street School”. But the kids that came to track camp every summer still knew that I was the guy with hops. And every summer my coach would throw a bar up to 6ft, my warm-up height in serious competitions, and let me bask in the ooos and ahhhs of the young minds that came to learn the secrets to the skill. But interestingly enough, even though I could list a number of correct pieces of a proper jump after thinking about it for a while, every year when I got off the mat and my coached asked me to explain what I did right and what I did wrong in this warm up jump it was harder and harder to communicate how I completed the movement. This is because while novices still use a large verbal component while learning how to perform a movement, a sign indicative of both the Cognitive Stage of Learning as well as Declarative Memory, experts store these motor patterns in their Procedural Memory, which makes it difficult to describe or analyze using words. It’s the same problem you run into when trying to explain tying your shoes. It’s challenging to describe the steps necessary to tie your shoes, and even more difficult to analyze how your technique was while tying your shoes. It’s easier to just show someone how to do it because it’s no longer stored as Declarative Memory, it’s stored as Procedural Memory. This was the same problem I was having trying to describe and especially analyze my jump in front of these flabbergasted five year olds because the verbal component had dropped out and I was left with just the feeling of the jump. Luckily, the feeling was all I needed to soar my senior year. johncioffredi https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216307560 2017-12-14 19:38:38 UTC https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216307560 5.) Citius, Altius, FortiusMy junior year of high school I had jumped 6’7”, a stellar performance that earned me the school record. But to be considered a competitor on the national stage I had to jump at least 6’8”. That spring, as the season was getting underway, I was offered a substantial athletic scholarship to the University of Vermont to compete on the track and field team as a Catamount. To sweeten the deal, the coach offered me another sum on top of what was already being offered to sign immediately. I told him that I would sign, but that until I had jumped 6’8” I didn’t feel like I had earned the money he was offering. When he told that he’d never had an athlete decline to take more money I responded “Oh I fully intend to take you up on your offer, but not until I’ve proven that I’ve earned it.” Needless to say my parents were furious. “We don’t have that kind of money just lying around!” In retrospect I should have seen that reaction coming, but I reminded them that they were the ones that had instilled the extremely stubborn morals by which I based my decision, that you don’t accept something you haven’t earned. And besides, I was going to jump 6’8” within the week anyways. It’s easy to confuse my demeanor at this time for arrogance, but there is a distinct difference between arrogance and confidence. Arrogance is when you think you’re going to achieve a goal, confidence is when you know you’re going to achieve a goal. At that point in my life I was certain of one thing, that I was going to jump 6’8” and earn every penny of that athletic scholarship. How could I be so certain? Because I’d seen myself do it hundreds of times already. I’d been unintentionally visualizing myself jumping 6’8” for an entire year, and with the taste of disappointment still lingering in my mouth from the last season, I was using both Motivational imagery, watching myself ascend over the bar, as well as Cognitive imagery, feeling every step in my approach, the sensation of the perfect take off, and the exhilaration of the descending back to the mat knowing I had successfully smited gravity once again, to propel me to higher heights. My visual and kinesthetic imagery was unparalleled meaning that my ability to unknowingly use this imagery to my benefit was ideal, and it was only a matter of time until reality caught with my dreams. With only two meets left in the entire season it looked like my inflated ego may have actually bitten off a little more than it could chew. There was an entire state of people rooting against me. The stage was set for a dramatic finish to the season with the state having assembled the most competitive high jump field in its history, with two athletes, myself being one of them, having already cleared 6’7” and two more having jumped 6’6” within the past week. The competition was underway and everyone came to battle. I had an uncharacteristic miss in the early heights at 6’2” which meant I had some work ahead of me to even be maintain my title of State Champion. But as the bar was raised to 6’6” pure confidence coursed through my veins, and I knew in that moment I was about to win my 3rd straight title. I powered into my run-up, drove through my curve, and muscled my body through the air, touching nothin’ but hearts. Lying on the mat, I felt victorious, but not satisfied. I had won the competition, but I still had not achieved what I had set out to do, jump 6’8”, definitively proving myself as one of the best high jumpers in state history. The first attempt at 6’8” was a ugly. I barely even got off the ground before giving up on the jump and grabbing the bar with my hand. The second was hardly any better, and still nothing compared to what I needed to launch myself into state history. With only one attempt remaining and the eyes of the entire stadium on me I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and watched myself clear the barrier in my mind one last time. My eyes ripped open as I sprinted through the straight, held on for dear life in the curve, and launched myself into the air, shattering the limitations others had tried to impose on me, and refusing to come down until they had witnessed my finest moment.I had finally jumped 6’8”, and the feeling of satisfaction I felt at that moment was indescribable. It was validation of all the hard work I’d put in. It was my finest hour, and only those closest to me can truly understand the impact that stupid jump had on my life. In the 3 years of collegiate track and field I’ve never come close to that personal record. And I’ve never felt the confidence and the immortality that I experienced that day. But for some reason, even though I decided to transfer half way across the country only to be cut from the team not even a year after arriving, I’m still passionately training on my own. Why? Because I’ve got this image that just keeps playing over and over again in my mind. It’s me. And in it I’m jumping 6’9”. johncioffredi https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216321365 2017-12-14 20:13:34 UTC https://padlet.com/johncioffredi/7f7sezcipw83/wish/216321365