My friend Kyle Manary was the director of the Chris Paul Elite BackCourt Camp for several years. He got to work intimately with Chris Paul on what they would teach some of the country’s top high school and college point guards each year in North Carolina. And, a few years ago Kyle shared with me some insight that Chris spoke to the points during camp.
“Good players can beat their defender. Great players can beat their defenders and make the right reads to score or pass on the helpside. If you’re a great point guard your defender is essentially irrelevant”
There is so much truth to this statement. As a point guard you have to have the focus of what is going on right in front of you, but also the awareness and feel of everything that is occurring throughout the court. And, when having a conversation with a friend of mine, a former point guard under Pete Carrill at Princeton, I had an insight of mine.
Meditation and Point Guard Play share this very same quality. You’re training your mind to be focused on what is right in front of you, as well as, the full awareness of what is going on around you. For example if you’re driving your car, you’re almost simultaneously focused on actually driving the car — turning the wheel — but also have a more “full” awareness of your blind spot or scanning in front of you for cars coming to a sudden stop or cutting you off.
When we meditate we are training our minds in this same way. In fact, Google has a specific exercise for this to be able to flow back and forth between intense focus and full awareness that we’ll teach our Point Guard Blueprint Academy. This is next level training that you don’t want to miss if you’re looking to maximize your potential.