In an article entitled, Guarantee Success by Practicing Failure, Coach Greg White challenges coaches to, among other things, “be an awful official”. His idea is to challenge boys with the adversity of unfairness, obvious unfairness, in order to create situations that are even worse than games. He suggests that a coach should purposely have an official favor one team in a scrimmage, let them get away with “murder” while calling the most ticky-tack fouls on the other team. This is pure brilliance.
The great 1st century Roman Statesman Cicero said, “Virtue (or character) is what happens when wise and courageous decisions have become second nature.” Making good decisions quickly, choosing the courageous path over the easy one and restraining the emotional outbursts urged on by our humanity are not natural for us, they are learned through experience and practice.
Coach White urges the practicing of such virtue for basketball players. Put them in situations where they will want to complain, to give up, to blame the officials. While his intent is to build upon their eventual failure so that they develop a “second nature”. A nature which responds to this adversity with clarity of thought, with focused emotions and with the courage to push harder even when their body is telling them that an acceptance of failure will at least allow for the pain to stop. Build on this, practice after practice and then when a situation like this arises in a game, the whole team's “second nature” kicks in… again, brilliant, and philosophically classical!
I would add that in the pursuit of “growing up men” in sports, coaches ought to more deliberately help their players make the connection between the virtue that they are learning on the court, with the virtue that they will one day need as a husband, father, employee and contributor to society. We should not just train athletes, we should expose our players to the idea that as they learn to deal with adversity in practice and games, they are also learning a very valuable skill (virtue) that must be applied to achieve successful living.
Remember, how your boy plays on the “fields of friendly strife” will be how he fights the greatest battles of his life.
You can follow Coach Greg White Twitter@GregWhite32
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