If you’ve ever had the feeling that sports have been changing the last few years, you should watch Enhanced, a six-episode documentary that became available Monday on ESPN+.
ESPN+ is the sports giant’s subscription streaming service, so this series won’t be available, at least not yet, on any of the ever-expanding family of ESPN cable channels.
Enhanced is, in a sense, an offshoot of ESPN’s successful and often superb 30 for 30 series. Alex Gibney, who was central to 30 for 30, executive produces and narrates.
In the broad scope, Enhanced explores the ways that athletes and trainers today are employing science and technology to improve performance.
The second episode, for instance, looks at the way baseball began using algorithms to assess player performance and how that concept has spread to almost every other major sport.
While not every baseball fan appreciates breaking the game down into seemingly arcane statistics, the Enhanced episode makes it clear that these measuring devices are only apt to spread in the eternal pursuit of quantifying talent and skill.
The first episode of Enhanced, titled Skill, poses the “nature vs. nurture” question. Does great skill result more from being born with the right body or from obsessively working your tail off?
Not surprisingly, the episode doesn’t pick a right and wrong answer. It seems to suggest you need a certain level of genetic endowment to get into the game, and then once you do, the proper kind of obsessive training can make the difference between being a really good weekend gym player and making millions of dollars in the pros.
The featured NBA player here, C.J. McCollum of the Portland Trail Blazers, was too small in high school, went to a college that produces engineers rather than pro athletes (Lehigh), and still made it to the top.
His secret, he says: He and his brother pushed for years, playing for hours every day, creating drills, never stopping until he became good enough.
It’s an impressive story that Enhanced cautions few others will replicate. One of a hundred high school athletes even gets a college scholarship, never mind a pro offer.
Still, hope springs eternal and Enhanced also showcases – almost to the level of an infomercial – Ohio’s Spire Institute, where parents can send their promising athletic offspring for intensive high-tech training. Cost: $37,500 a year, plus extra for any academic component.
Okay, question. Maybe two questions.
One, are high-level sports going to become largely the playground of the wealthy, the kids whose parents could afford the extra edge they get from a Spire, which talks about the alumni it has sent to the pros and the Olympics?
Second, is the kind of obsessive training Spire offers increasingly necessary for young athletes to compete? With more and more kids playing sports before they’re in first grade, do you have to start that young to even get into the game?
On that second question, Enhanced offers a caution. Its experts suggest that the best athletes usually are the ones who play a variety of sports in their youth and only start to specialize around high school because they develop a wider range of skills.
On the science and technology side of all this, Enhanced finds most of the advances come from honing the type of training that best enhances performance.
Which, frankly, doesn’t sound like an especially new lesson.
But some athletes, including Olympic runner Natasha Hastings, have found that mild electrical stimulation seems to have a positive effect on the brain.
And that underscores the longest running motif of Enhanced: The brain is the new star.
It seems that the right type of repetitive activity – that is, practice – can rewire the brain to respond more quickly to situations like those encountered in competitive sports. Top athletes don’t have physically faster responses; they have brains wired to spur that response faster.
Enhanced at times can get a little arcane for civilians. It does help explain why even when sports sort of look the same as they used to look, they probably aren’t.