The Jon Jaques Blog at the New York Times

Jon Jaques is a senior on the Cornell basketball team. As he did last season, Jon will be blogging for The Quad throughout this season.

Getting Into the Zone at Cornell

By Jon Jaques
New York Times
November 13, 2009

Athletes, whether collegiate or professional, are always looking for unique ways to get an edge. At Cornell, we’re no different. Before my sophomore year, we experimented with team yoga sessions (we were lead by a free-spirited instructor simply called Hawk) and before last season we received a lecture from James Maas, a world-renowned sleep expert and Cornell professor. He told us about the importance of getting sufficient sleep for peak athletic performance. While we stopped doing yoga after that preseason and I personally have not changed my erratic sleep habits since that seminar, we have won two Ivy League championships, so those unique experiences could not have hurt. The experimentation continued last weekend, as Coach Donahue brought in Joe Dowling, a peak-performance psychologist from Philadelphia who told us that the key to reaching your maximum athletic potential was finding “the zone.”

According to Dowling, getting into the zone allows an athlete to completely focus on the task at hand and not worry about anything else but the next shot, play, etc. In most sports, but in basketball especially, it is really easy to get frustrated by a missed shot or a turnover and let that snowball into three or four more bad plays or a bad week. Dowling said practicing relaxation techniques like deep breathing (“in through the nose, out through the mouth”) or visualizing playing well in the future can help you focus on the next play or simply drown out negativity in your life and help you sleep better at night.

Anyone who has ever played ball with me knows I am ridiculously hard on myself (more than you would believe). Though I’ve improved in this area, three and a half years into my college career I honestly still sometimes dwell on bad plays. One message that Dowling left that has really helped me is the idea that the “next shot is the first shot”. I’m not at all qualified to be giving psychological advice, but just saying that little quote to myself on or off the court whenever I feel myself getting flustered kind of clears my mind and helps me focus. Try it.

After his lecture, Dowling “hypnotized” everyone on the team, which basically meant he put us in a deep, relaxed state. After what felt like five minutes, we woke up feeling very relaxed but extremely confused. We found out that each of us had actually been asleep for more than 20 minutes. The last thing I remembered was Dowling telling all of us to try to watch the colors of our inner eye float around while our eyes were closed. Do it … really trippy stuff.

Anyway, our first game of the season is finally here: at Alabama on Saturday. As much as my teammates and I love two and half hours of practice a day for a month straight, it’s about time we played a real game. The Crimson Tide football team, ranked No. 2 in the country, is at Mississippi State this weekend and it is Alabama Coach Anthony Grant’s debut in Tuscaloosa, so we’re expecting a big crowd at Coleman Coliseum (150-plus of the fans will be making the 45-minute drive from Birmingham to watch the native Alabaman and Cornell senior Louis Dale’s return to the South). Should be an interesting trip to say the least.