Should you teach your team of eleven- and twelve-year-olds to press all the time, every game? Will they win if you do? Malcolm Gladwell, in this week's New Yorker, appears to say yes.

I'd like to know what people more familiar with youth sports at that level think about Gladwell's exemplary team: Mark Hyman might worry about the conditioning involved, though it does sound like the girls enjoyed it. As Gladwell tells it, their season-ending loss came not when opponents figured out how to break a press, but when referees-- on an opponent's home court-- decided, in effect, to disallow their style of play.

Gladwell looks at those twelve-year-olds, and at Lawrence of Arabia, and at Rick Pitino, and at computerized wargames, but not at the women's college teams who more or less do what he says almost nobody does: at least two pretty good ones come to mind.