The Conductor

Texas Tech\'s Manny Matsakis is turning up his special teams with music
by: Jane Musgrave
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While other coaches spent the off-season boning up on the latest offensive drills or figuring out how to defend against the pass, Texas Tech's Manny Matsakis was curled up with the latest issue of Psychology Today and wondering whether the heavy metal band Metallica could help his kickoff coverage team stop the run-back.

So far, Matsakis is convinced his time was well spent.

"Every time we play it, something good happens," Matsakis says of his growing love for Metallica whose members surely didn't have football on their minds when they penned the lyrics for "Seek and Destroy."

And, Matsakis didn't have Metallica on his mind when he came up with an idea of how to help his special teams squash the competition. But when he decided to give each of his special teams a name, a slogan and a theme song, the 1993 Metallica song turned out to be a perfect fit.

"I knew I wanted to call the kickoff coverage team 'The Headhunters,' and I knew I wanted their slogan to be 'Seek and destroy,'" he says. "Metallica happened to have a song named 'Seek and Destroy,' so that was an easy one to pick."

Never mind that Matsakis' own musical tastes are slightly more mainstream. He wasn't trying to come up with a play list to satisfy his own much less his players' musical sensibilities.

He wanted to play with their minds.

A undergraduate biology major with a longtime interest in psychology, Matsakis says he wanted to see if he could improve the performance of his special teams by manipulating his players' thought process. And after reading various journals and articles on the Internet, he became convinced he could do it with music.

He prevailed upon head coach Mike Leach to go along with the experiment, and a high-tech public address system was installed on the practice fields over the summer. Matsakis picked the names, the slogans and the songs for the six special teams and the experiment was underway.

"It's loud," he says of the songs that blast from the P.A. system during practices and drown out nearly everything except the sound of his voice that is amplified over a wireless microphone he straps on his head.

The volume is critical, he says. Every time the punt team, AKA The Bomb Squad, hears the theme song from Mission Impossible, he wants them to remember exactly what he told them to do while the music was blaring.

Likewise, when The Sharks, the punt return team, hears the theme song from Jaws, he wants them to remember what he told them to do to get the ball downfield and run and block accordingly.

"It's sort of like Pavlov's dogs," he says of the conditioned response he is aiming for. Just as the famous Russian psychologist trained his dogs to salivate when they heard a bell ring, he wants his players to kick into overdrive when they hear their song blaring from the loud speakers or, on game day, being played by the school's 450-member Goin' Band From Raiderland.

Matsakis initially didn't intend to involve the school band in his psychological experiment. But when band director Keith Bearden heard about it, he went out and bought the sheet music for five of the six songs. Playing Metallica's "Seek and Destroy," was out of the question.

While loath to let his band be upstaged by canned music screaming from the P.A. system, Bearden says he doesn't mind putting down his baton for Metallica. "It's usually after a touchdown and we've already blown out our brains on the fight song," Bearden says.

He says the band generally likes the songs that were added to its play list. But, he adds, it can get confusing. For instance, the band often has to second-guess the coach in a third-and-one situation. If the team is going to go for it, obviously, the band shouldn't play the theme from Mission Impossible. But, he says, if they're going to punt, the punt team is supposed to hear its song. So, occasionally, he says, the band doesn't know exactly what to do.

Further, he says, if the opposing team is forced to punt a lot, playing the theme from Jaws can get tiresome.

But, he says, those are small headaches. "We just try to help out when we can," Bearden says.

But the big question is whether the repetitious playing of the songs is helping the players as Matsakis intended.

Matsakis insists that he is sold on the concept. While it will take a while to analyze whether the songs helped the teams' performance, he says there is no question that it helped them coalesce as units.

"The esprit de corps among the special teams is the best I've seen," Matsakis says. "This links them to some kind of battle cry. It's like, 'Hey, we belong with this.'"

Unlike the defense and offense, members of special teams often feel like outsiders. The songs, he says, gives each of the teams an identity, makes them feel important and helps them feel more a part of the team.

And, while opinions vary, sports psychologists say that Matsakis may be onto something.

Scott Pengelly, a psychologist who has served as an adviser to Olympic athletes and NFL teams, says there is no question that music - or as Pavlov found out, a bell - is a powerful motivator.

In his world, such a noise is called a discriminate stimulus. "Do you have a cat?" he asks. "What does it do when the phone rings?"

Most cats, he says, will run toward a ringing phone. They instinctively know a lap, and the affections of its owner will be available when they hear the bell, buzz or beep of a phone. Humans, in this case football players, can be taught to make the same association with music.

For years, he says, individual players have used music to prepare for competition. Earvin "Magic" Johnson, for instance, crafted an entire three-hour routine where he used music to get pumped before a game.

At the other extreme, he says, was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who sat in a dark silent room for hours before a game to ward off the debilitating effects of migraine headaches.

But he says Abdul-Jabbar is the exception. In most cases, players use music to heighten their emotions so they are at their physical peak. Baseball players will ask that their favorite songs be played before they bat. Discus and javelin throwers will listen to music to give themselves the edge they need to throw harder.

However, while individuals have used music to get psyched and marketing departments routinely use it to arouse fans, Pengelly says it's not as common to use music to motivate an entire team. But, he says, its not unheard of. The women's World Cup soccer team, for instance, had a song it played to get pumped before games.

Donald Gould, a professor in the Department of Exercise and Sports Science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, agrees that the effect music has on the human psyche can't be denied.

"That's why they don't play hard rock at the dentist's office," says Gould, who describes himself as a mental training specialist. "And why there's such a thing as elevator music."

He says he's not convinced that Matsakis can use music to produce a conditioned response. It would be difficult to prove that Johnny ran down the field and successfully stopped the ball carrier on the 10-yard line merely because he heard "Seek and Destroy," and remembered how Matsakis told him to run the play.

But, he says, as a motivational tool and as a way to build team unity, it's a good one as long as a coach doesn't take it too far.

"Coaches are often looking for a gimmick. So, they think I'm going to play music and my team is going to be good," Gould says. A couple of years back, some coach insisted that his team did better after he painted the locker room fire red. Soon, half the locker rooms in the country were getting new paint jobs.

Unfortunately, he says, neither new paint nor pounding music can win games.

"It's not a bad idea," he says of Matsakis' experiment. "It's a good tool for a coach to put in his toolbox, but that's what it is - a tool. Trick plays don't win championships."

And like any other tool, coaches need to analyze their players to determine what will and won't work, says Robert Weinberg, editor of the Journal of Applied Sports Psychology and a professor of sports psychology at Miami University in Ohio.

For some athletes, music could hurt their concentration, he says. Some may perform better if they are calmed down, rather than pumped up, he warns. Music won't necessarily work with every player or every team, he says.

"Like last week, the Eagles ran a double-reverse that worked," he says. "But just because it worked for the Eagles doesn't mean that every coach in the nation should say, 'Oh great. Let's put it in our playbook.' They have to analyze their team and determine if they have the speed and the skill and all the other things it takes to do a double-reverse."

Still, he says, using music isn't a bad idea. "It's a reasonable thing to do," he says. "You're using a cue, or a trigger, to cue the appropriate response."

And if that means turning otherwise middle-of-the road coaches, players and fans into Metallica groupies, so be it.


Team-Punt
Name-Bomb Squad
Slogan-"Attention to detail"
Song-Theme from Mission Impossible
Team-Kickoff Return
Name-Showtime
Slogan-"Crank it up"
Song-"Start Me Up," by the Rolling Stones
Team-Kickoff Coverage
Name-Headhunters
Slogan-"Seek and destroy"
Song-"Seek and Destroy," by Metallica
Team-Punt Return
Name-Sharks
Slogan-"Attack"
Song-Theme from Jaws
Team-Field Goal
Name-Score
Slogan-"Count on me"
Song-"Rock and Roll Part II," by Gary Glitter
Team-Field Goal Block
Name-Regulators
Slogan-"Mount up"
Song-"Regulators," by Warren G.

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