#100 Use The Funnel, Not the Average Value: Chris Button on the PhD That Almost Wasn’t (Part One)

In this landmark 100th episode, Ian Renshaw and Keith Davids are joined by Professor Chris Button from the University of Otago, whose research has ranged from ball-catching biomechanics to basketball free throws to, more recently, why so many people drown. Chris's route into research wasn't inevitable — he turned down a PhD scholarship for a job as a wine specialist before one line from Keith ("your PhD is your passport anywhere") talked him back onto the academic path.

The conversation traces the finding buried in that PhD that coaches still routinely average away: when Chris's group-level statistics on ball-catching showed no differences between participants, despite him watching them move differently in real time, the fix wasn't better instrumentation — it was refusing to average, and analysing individuals as individuals. Years later at Edinburgh, the same logic showed up in basketball free throws: novices varied early in the shot, experts showed a funnel, real variability at the start narrowing as the ball approached release. The skill wasn't the absence of variability, but the timing of when it was allowed to matter. They also dig into the interdisciplinary Manchester Metropolitan University cohort that shaped Chris's approach of arguing between frameworks rather than staying inside one — a method that carried him to Otago and, eventually, toward water safety research.

Part One of Two — Part Two continues in August's Week One Guest Podcast.

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