The following is beautifully written by University of Washington Assistant Coach Mike Neighborsand should be a must see/read for all coaches -- especially assistant coaches:
Have you ever wondered if you were supposed to be a coach?
Sacramento, California… ARCO Arena… March 29th, 2010… NCAA Elite 8… Stanford (34-1) vs. Xavier (30-3). Winner advances to the Final Four… Stanford had won their first three tourney games by a combined 98 points… Xavier attempting to be first non-BCS school to advance to Final Four in 11 years…20.6 seconds to play… 51-51 tie game… Xavier ball on the side coming out of a timeout… Shot clock is off…Ball inbounded safely… All-American Amber Harris cuts off a high cross screen and draws a double team from Stanford All–Americans, Nneka Ogwumike and Kayla Pedersen… Harris finds a wide open Dee Dee Jernigan behind the defense… Amber fires a bullet pass to block… Dee Dee can’t convert the wide open two footer… Harris alertly scrambles for the rebound which she secures… As she dribbles to get space, she finds Dee Dee again even more open and closer to bucket than the first time with 9.5 to play...she misses again… and this time Stanford’s Kayla Pedersen rebounds…
This was the moment I knew I was supposed to be a coach.
If you don’t remember the play or have never seen it, check out this link to hear Stuart Scott’s ESPN call of the action and also what followed in the final 4.4 seconds before you read on.
So much of our daily routine as a coach is spent doing things in an office. We are on the computer researching opponents or recruits. We are manning a remote control watching film in preparation for an upcoming game or one of our own games/practices. We are on our phone chatting with other coaches about the latest gossip or news of the day. We are filing out paper work for an upcoming road trip. On top of that high school coaches are grading papers, filling out absentee forms, doing lunch duty, or meeting with a parent about a student’s generally poor attitude in your math class.
While vital to execution of our jobs, it is NOT what our players really need from us. If you as a coach can’t perform the necessary duties of your job without tiring out or burning out, you will never be there when your players truly need you.
I learned this one the hard way over the years. I found myself so wrapped up in “doing my job” that most times I wasn’t there to do my real job. Sure, I had some highlights. I was there at times, but wow did I miss out on so many more.
Over the last two years since that Stanford game, I have been trying to collect all the times I was there when a player needed me as well as the times I wasn’t. With help from other Newsletter group members and coaching colleagues input, I hope we can share a piece that will help young coaches from having to learn these lessons the hard way.
I can assure that your boss will never be upset if “your TPS reports are late” if you are tending to the welfare of one of your players. (Office Space reference for you non-movie buff basketball heads)
A sold-out crowd of more than 17,000 watched from the risers of the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on March 19, 2011 at Arizona State University senior Anthony Robles emerged from the locker room on crutches. After handing them to ASU assistant coach Brian Stith, he hopped to the corner of the mat, crouched down on one knee, and waited for the whistle that would signal the start of his final wrestling match.
"I told myself I was unstoppable," says Robles of that moment. "I had put way too much into it to go in there and not come out with a national title."
That day, Robles, who was born without a right leg and permanently traded in a prosthetic one for crutches at the age of 3, defeated defending national champ Matt McConough 7-1 to become the first disabled wrestler in history to win a national college title.
Finding some time to go through my folder of "Things to Read" and came across a fascinating article from CNN.com by Todd Leopold on "The Success of Failure." I've wrote about if often but one thing that Coach Dale Brown always preached to our teams was "how strong is your FQ." He thought it was more important than IQ. FQ was "failure quotient." In other words, how much failure can you handle, maintain a positive attitude, remain focused to your goals and keep pushing through. He'd like the following excerpts:
Failure. It's such an ugly word, isn't it? It reeks of cancer, of loss: the sense that what once went wrong cannot be set right, that the world has come to an end, that failures are failures forever -- that it's not just the project that failed, but you. Successful people, we imagine, are somehow blessed with more optimism, bigger brains and higher ideals than the rest of us.
But it's not true. Successful people -- creative people -- fail every day, just like everybody else. Except they don't view failure as a verdict. They view it as an opportunity. Indeed, it's failure that paves the way for creativity.
John Seely Brown is the former head of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), the Xerox lab responsible for digital printing, the computer mouse and Ethernet. He says "trafficking in unlimited failure" let PARC's employees invent once-unimaginable technologies.
"My mantra inside PARC, which was never particularly appreciated in corporate headquarters, was at least 75% of the things we did failed," he says.
Investment manager Diane Garnick, who taught a course on failure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, put it succinctly. "We learn more from our failures than we could ever learn from our successes."
Plugging away -- with no guarantee of success -- is not advice people like to hear. Iain Roberts, a principal with the design consultancy IDEO, says some clients have to be educated that "you have to be OK with failing." Clients naturally want to play it safe, but sometimes the most interesting ideas are out on the fringes.
"It's always a risk," he says. But a necessary one: "If you're not failing, you're not pushing hard enough."
Giving up is not the end
Giving up can also be part of the creative process, says Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, and a creativity expert.
"Sooner or later, creators have to learn when an idea is going nowhere," he says.
But, he cautions, that point is hard to identify.
"The error is more often in the opposite direction: Not giving a new idea a sufficient chance for development. It is not easy to tell in advance which is going to pan out and which not," he says. The uncertainty cuts both ways: "Edison spent more time and money developing a means for separating iron ore than he did on the electric light bulb. The former was a dismal failure, the latter a brilliant success."
When asked the best advice he ever got, Michael Oher responed this way:
"It was from two teachers, Ms. Verlen Logan and Miss Sue Mitchell. In the 4th grade, Ms Logan used to tell our class, 'Can't never could and ain't never would." Later in high school, Miss Sue expressed the same idea, but more simply. Whenever I felt like things were too difficult or I was thinking about giving up, she would say, 'You can do it.' I know that doesn't sound like much, but for a kid who no one thought would amount to anything, having an adult believe in me enough to say 'You can do it' was empowering."
In one of his recent Hard 2 Guard Player Development Newsletters, Brian McCormick takes on the concept of "athleticism" and makes some incredibly important points. The primary subject of Brian's blog was the perceived or lackthereof athleticism of Jimmer Fredette. Here are some of Brian's points:
I wish those who evaluate players had a better understanding of the attributes, characteristics, skills and talents that they were evaluating, as opposed to possessing a journalism degree.
I have written about the subject numerous times with regards to Steve Nash and Roger Federer: athleticism is more than explosiveness. Explosiveness is a key element of athleticism, especially in basketball, but it is not everything. Athleticism includes balance, agility, quickness, hand-eye coordination, endurance, strength, hand dexterity, foot dexterity, coordination and more.
I have seen Fredette play twice, so I am far from an expert. However, he illustrates good strength, footwork, agility, coordination and more.
More importantly, sport intelligence impacts sport athleticism. In tests of agility, players perform differently in closed-skill tests than in open-skill tests. There is an NBA player who tests as a mediocre athlete in closed-skill agility tests, but tests off the charts in open-skill tests (the trainer asked me not to disclose the exact test or the name of the player).
Therefore, pattern recognition and anticipation skills influence game athleticism. Fredette appears to have great pattern recognition and anticipatory skills which would augment his athleticism and make him a better game performer than any closed-skill test might suggest (in the event that he tests poorly; he may very well test like a good athlete even in closed-skill tests). If NBA writers and decision-makers rely too much on the out-dated tests at the combines, they may underestimate Fredette’s athleticism and his ability to translate his college success to the NBA. Explosiveness is not the same as athleticism. Athleticism is more than 40-inch vertical jumps or a 300 lbs. bench press.
Vern Gambetta defines athleticism as “the ability to execute athletic movements (run, jump, throw) at optimum speed with precision, style and grace while demonstrating technical competency in the context of your sport.” Clearly, by this definition, The Jimmer is plenty athletic.
“This is the true joy in life…being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one…being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy…I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It’s a sort of splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possibly before handing it on to future generation.”
“The best part of it for me is the idea that this group of young men, who came together and believed in themselves, bought the team concept completely, took the names off the back of the jerseys, checked the egos at the door. The reinforcement for team is the greatest source of satisfaction for me. You start to think about all our veteran guys who now are world champions and are experiencing that feeling for the first time, reinforcing the concept of team, that’s the great thing for me.”
