For the Love of Basketball (and Perseverance)

My first love was basketball. I loved watching it, playing it, and up until I was a senior in high school, I even loved practicing it. As a much-more-fragile person in my 40s, my relationship with the sport has changed quite a bit, but I still love it. Over the past 3 years I’ve had the incredible opportunity to get back into coaching. It’s frequently said how team sports teach life lessons, and that’s become even more apparent over this past season.

Spoiler alert, my team didn’t have the Disney-esque ending; we didn’t come from behind to win the league championship. But we did have a season full of adversity that also saw all 8 girls on the roster improve on — and also hopefully off — the court.

We had games where none of our shots went into the basket. We had tough close games where we mentally lost our composure, and then the game. We had games with fantastic defense. We had games with almost perfect free throw shooting percentages. We had games we didn’t have any subs and played a full game with only 5 girls. We had two games without a true point guard.

After 4 months of practice and 12 total games, we finished the season 3-9.

Now you may see that record and see a disappointing season – but I can guarantee that’s short-sighted. Here’s what that record doesn’t reflect.

It doesn’t reflect the work our starting point guard did to keep her mental composure. It doesn’t reflect the confidence gained by several players when they were asked to guard the best players on the opposing team. It doesn’t reflect how much better we got with knowing how to move around on offense without the ball. It doesn’t reflect the grit two of my post players gained as they both got thrust into playing point guard for several games while our guard was out. And it doesn’t reflect the tenacity of the team as a whole when we played a team we’d lost to twice by 3 points, and then won by 8 to make it to the second round of the playoffs as a 5-seed (and there were only 6 teams in the league).

Sometimes all the effort you put in is invisible at first. But invisible doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t count. It may be next season, next board meeting, next fiscal year before that effort pays off. But the payoff will come eventually.

So maybe that presentation you worked on didn’t go as well as you’d hoped. Maybe you had an error in your Excel macro and didn’t find it until later. Maybe the effectiveness of your Agile ceremonies isn’t where you want to be right now. All those short-term frustrations can easily be turned into long-term successes – it’s just what you do with them. Do you start a season 0-4 and give up? Or do you take a hard step back and look at where the inefficiencies are with your current Agile ceremonies in order to make them better?

If a group of eight 7th-graders can keep persisting, I feel confident that we can also.