Coachspeak Part IV - Survive and Advance
We all love a good survival story. 127 Hours, Bear Grylls, Survivorman, Naked and Afraid…these are all some of the highest rated or most well-known stories of survival. It keeps us on the edge of our seats. It keeps us engaged - we can’t help but look at that and flinch with every noise, react to every gross or stomach-churning moment.
Tournament play is a lot like that - in fact, the words survive and advance are said nearly every day. Just scroll your timeline and you’ll see those words at least 10 times a day. But, what if there were an alternative to just survival? Survival, by its very nature, indicates the bare minimum to stay alive.
What do I have to do to stay alive and fight another day? Another hour, another minute - whatever it is.
Why, then, do we apply this same thought to tournament play? We simply want to “survive” tonight to get to fight another day? Understandably, the phrase creates some drama and shows a toughness, a grit, a willingness to never say die and continue to fight to the last drop. That creates heroes in March - Cinderella stories that never should have been there. Top seeds that fall. They couldn’t survive.
What if we changed that, flipped it on its head. What if we decided that instead of merely surviving, we were going to choose to thrive. Thrive in Chaos. Thrive in the unknown because we train in the unknown. We are built for this moment because we are here to thrive, not merely to survive. No other time in the season do we talk about survival - in fact, we build our entire season on the hope that we will just be able to get to the end and qualify for the playoffs or a chance to play in a tournament. We take every step to thrive and pour into our teams, and then as soon as the playoffs come, it’s “survive and advance,” time.
No more thriving, it’s survival mode now.
We rely on our lowest held habits. We can’t experiment anymore with what might work - play it safe so we can survive today and play tomorrow. Yet…there’s always one team that goes home at the end of the game and doesn’t lace it up again until the next season. It is certainly not in all cases, but I have to wonder if the mentality of that coach speak of just merely surviving has something to do with it. Of course, someone has to lose the game and go home. But…does it have to be you? Does it have to be your players? Have we laid the necessary groundwork to know what thriving feels like?
We will not win every game. But what we have seen at EC is a spike in our coaches and their teams thriving. Not just because they might be winning, but they are more fulfilled because they are seeing the bigger picture. That the way we train, the environment we build, how we relate - we are able to navigate through the fog of chaos in our season and continue to thrive.
Does your team thrive in chaos? Do you?
