Fact or Fiction

It is amazing how a few months can fly by in what seems like minutes and then a few weeks can last forever. Since the beginning of preseason, time has been elusive floating by us like dead wood in a flooded river. It has been so hard to grasp or hold. Recently, though, after we've suffered a couple of injuries, time has slowed down and it feels as if time is now an enemy rather than a friend. We need time to stop, to slow down, to let us recover and catch our breaths.

In the game against Seton Hill, time seemed to stop when one of our starters suffered an injury early in the game. When she went out, our timing got disrupted. We felt off kilter, a little bit rough as balls were passed to the wrong team, lay-ups were missed, and plays were forgotten.

This is our second major injury in the past two weeks which is why we could believe we need more time--time to heal, time to get other players ready, but time is not going to stop. We have to keep going. We have to find answers and we have to continue believing we can still have our dreams.

As a team, we could call it quits. We could convince ourselves we now have a solid reason for losses. We could tell the story we lost to Seton Hill, because a starter was out of the game. However, the coaching staff doesn't believe in telling this story. We had plenty of opportunities to win the game. We made a three pointer to go ahead and all we needed was a stop. When we failed to get the stop, we had a chance to score to tie it up and we didn't make it. We lost the game because we failed to execute, not because a starter was on the bench.

The difficulty now is to make certain our players can distinguish between fact and fiction. We can still tell the story we want. We can still create the outcomes we want. We don't have to buy into a pity party. Self-pity is always an enemy and never a friend.

In order to get the point across, we played a game called fact or fiction. Each player was given a card which had printed on one side the word "Fact" and on the other side the word "Fiction". We came up with 41 statements which the players had to decide were fact or fiction.

Some of the statements were meant to be funny:
Coach Winn's eyes increase in size by three inches when she is mad.
(FACT)
Coach Testa dresses fly for the games. (FACT)

Others were meant to make teammates think.
Lauren is too slow to get on the ball stops. (FICTION)
Tianni's biggest opponent is her own mind. (FACT)
Tianni cannot overcome her self-imposed limitations. (FICTION)
Frenchy isn't competitive enough to become a great basketball player. (FICTION)
Mo is a big defensive stopper. (FACT)
Mo is limited to being only a defensive player. (FICTION)
Encouraging each other and sticking together is overrated. (FICTION)
We are not a comeback team. (FICTION)
When we lose, we never learn from the experience. (FICTION)

We wanted them to realize we get to tell our story and whatever story we tell is the one we create. If we want to chose to believe we can no longer win with injuries, it will become our story. If, however, we are strong enough to tell a different story like winning with the challenges we face, then we will make that story come true.

I have faith in our story-telling abilities.

ONE HEART. ONE DREAM.