On Coaching

I really like the picture that accompanies this week’s blog.  It is a picture of two of my former players, one a coach at Humber College and the other an outstanding shooting guard on a very good high school team I coached a few years ago. They are celebrating a college national championship.

Coaching was a major part of my teaching life.  I figure I coached somewhere around 50 teams, over 1000 games and around 4000 practices.  I think I coached nearly 500 players.  I started coaching basketball because I loved the complexity of the game, as many of my former players know, I often called it "high speed, moving chess."  I enjoyed the intricacy of it and I enjoyed breaking it down and having each player master skills that made them part of a successful whole.  I felt like it was a moment in my work where I could see if my skills were as good as I thought they might be.

There's a fair bit of ego in that last statement.  When I first started, I saw it about me, my ability, my teaching, my coaching.  When I finished, I was a little better at letting the performance of the athlete be theirs and theirs alone.  While winning remained an important part of my coaching, at the end of my career, it became more than that.

 At the end now, I wonder about the sacrifices.  The countless hours in gyms and weight rooms, on road trips, driving vans full of tired or cranky or hungry  kids, was  it worth it?  This is an easy question to answer when my own children were on the teams.  I wouldn't change a thing of that but the other years? What about the countless seasons where I coached other people's children and was away from my own?  What about the sacrifice my wife made? She saw little of the reward and a lot of the pain.

Dutch thinker and historian, Rutger Bergman argues that in our modern economy many of the jobs we have are what he calls "bull shit jobs."  He goes on to define a "bullshit job" as one where even the person employed in such a manner sees it as "superfluous".  He lists PR advisers, Human Resource managers, telemarketers and most administrative jobs in both the private and public sectors.  I've been lucky, there's been very little bull shit in my job.  Some, but probably not enough to completely cover the bottom of your shoe.  My work has been meaningful in many ways that I hadn't predicted.

In a melding of the two sides of my work life, I now, more than ever, see basketball as a metaphor.  Faulkner in his essay "On Receiving the Nobel Prize" writes about writing as the only thing "worth the sweat and the agony."  He also worries that modern writers will write only of "victories without hope and worst of all without pity and compassion." He also is afraid of  "defeats in which no one loses anything of value."

High school basketball  gave me these things.  It gave me the chance at victories where I could teach compassion and the value of the agony and the sweat.  The insulting balm that non-participants use to sooth players and coaches after a loss is "it's just a game."  No it is not just a game.  It is a metaphor for our dedication to each other.  A symbol of what we are willing to sacrifice for each other.  It is covenant between a teacher and a player, each committing completely to the other and when we failed, we knew we had lost something of value.

Look at that picture again.  Coaching has given me this.