Surviving A Challenging Year

Two days ago as I was talking with my assistant coach and discussing the basketball season and what had transpired up to this point, we both agreed our team had two serious issues in front of them: 1) feeling as if they were failures, and 2) not having any confidence in their abilities. We know as coaches it is tough for a young team without a senior to feel confident. The truth is one individual who is a go-to player, who has complete and utter confidence in her skills makes those around her better, because she takes the pressure off everybody else. But when you don't have that player and all the players on the team feel enormous pressure to perform when they don't yet feel they can assume that role, their confidence wanes with each miss of the basket, each turnover and every defensive misstep.

In the world of athletics, having a losing season is never seen in a positive light. People don't talk about effort or growth when talking about a game; they talk about the score. I can't imagine what Thomas Edison would have been like as an athlete. When working on his inventions, he always believed he had not failed but through his efforts he had figured out 10,000 ways something did not work. He always believed he was one step closer to success. Would he have under the microscope of fans and the media kept his positive attitude? Or would he have succumbed to the feeling of not being good enough?

So here we are in the battle of wills, of fighting the internal dialogue of our players trying to get them to see something good in the midst of a challenging season. On Monday, we had each of them write a definition of failure and then read the definition out loud. Most of their definitions included something like failure means unwillingness to grow or giving up or not giving your best effort. Then I asked them to write down as many physical skills and intangible lessons they had learned through the past six months. When they had completed their lists, I asked if anybody had less than ten things. Not one of them raised their hand. I then told them they were not failures if they grown and learned so much--that they must feel good about how much they had evolved in a six month time frame.

On Tuesday, we tried to tackle the lack of confidence issue we had been having. I bought sandwich baggies and placed each players name on a baggie and told the team these were To-Go-Confidence Baggies. We had each player and coach write down on a piece of paper something amazing they saw in each teammate. When we were done with this task, each player had 17 confidence builders in their baggie. These were baggies to take with them and to pull out a slip of paper whenever they needed a confidence boost.

I am not angry or upset about this season; I understand this season is an opportunity for me as an individual to grow and to become someone better. My hope is I can provide that lesson to my players as well.

PLAY HARD. PLAY TOGETHER.