"When talent cheats you..."
Shared by Breanne Smedley
After nearly a decade of coaching, I’ve experienced a lot of different teams.
Teams that have had almost no volleyball experience coming in.
Teams that are "raw."
Teams that are a mixture of experience levels.
And, once in a while, teams that are really talented.
It’s these teams, I’ve found, can be the hardest to coach at times.
"Sure, I bet it’s really hard to just win all the time!" I can hear the voice in the back of my head mimicking me.
But, let me tell you. I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum.
I’ve coached a season where my team didn’t win one game.
And I’ve coached a season where my team had a near-perfect record and placed top four at state.
Both have their challenges.
The past few years, I’ve had really talented teams.
Teams made up of girls that have natural gifts of height, athleticism, and access to year-round training.
This talent, though, can easily become "the nemesis of their minds" as Alabama’s head football coach Nick Saban says.
The very thing that makes them great, is the thing that can bring them down.
If not checked.
Let me paint a picture.
This past season, my team was playing another team in our league who hadn’t won a match in a while.
We were up in the third set, close to winning.
When, my team decided to start goofing off a bit.
Making silly mistakes, and laughing.
Coming up with plans to put our shortest player who only plays defense in the front row...just to see how it would go.
It was unacceptable. Disrespectful, even.
And a true example of how we allowed talent to cheat us.
Sure, we won that game easily, because of our natural talent that just happened to be better than the other team’s that season.
But, we lost in many ways too.
Instead of playing disciplined, focused, and to the best of our abilities from start to finish..
We stopped. We got lazy. We got complacent.
We didn’t get better at competing, practicing sound technique, or finishing that night.
And it wasn’t our opponent’s fault. It was ours.
We thought our end game was to beat our opponents.
When, really, it’s to maximize our own potential.
But, as we discussed in depth at practice the next day, our win-loss record cannot be the measurement of our success.
The new win-loss that we keep track of: Did we maximize our own potential? Did we play the best that we could play, regardless of what’s happening on the other side of the net?
That match, by those standards, went in the "L" column.
The difference lives in our minds.
It’s the difference between coasting when you’re up by 10, and actually finishing with the same energy, attention, and technique as when you started.
It’s the difference between feeling good because of the scoreboard and feeling good because you know you got better.
It’s obvious in sports. But it’s present in business, relationships, and our physical health.
Are we just looking around, trying to outperform other people?
Or are we actually seeking to outperform yesterday’s self.
One will always limit us and our potential.
The other has no limit to what we can become.
#MindfullyEvolving
Comments
Post a Comment