Coach Flip Naumburg's Journal

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

PHILOSOPHY AND ME, WE'RE PRETTY GOOD COMPANY

The following is spewing.  I do not claim it to be well thought out.

I have been thinking a lot about the philosophy of sports lately.  I guess that would not classify as a startling revelation based on the events of the recent past, but the streams of thought also have come from watching the NBA playoffs, an event that annually fascinates me. 

I think basketball is a game that shares much with lacrosse, including its North American heritage.  I have often described lacrosse to the mildly curious as "Basketball with collisions".  The similarities are obvious, like fast breaks, dodging and one on one match-ups, slides, zones, rotations on defense, and the all important aspect of player substitutions. The 6 on 6 (lacrosse in settled situations) is very similar to the 5 on 5 (basketball in set offense), with pick and roll plays, give and go's, and weaves often used in both sports to create opportunities to get looks at and shots on the goal.

Ultimately the violence and stick whacking make lacrosse a whole different animal from most of the other games in many ways, though, and that just gives me more as a coach to work with to my way of thinking. 

FRIENDS DON'T LET FRIENDS BLAH BLAH

Philosophically the movement and flow of basketball and how it is coached teaches me more than watching sports like baseball or football ever could.  Baseball has no continuous action element. I love it, but it has little urgency, and there are no time limits whatsoever.  To the fan it is almost more cultural than physical. People follow their teams and one game doesn't mean that much when you have 162 to play.   Excitement in baseball is a triple hit to the gap that, while being the most exciting thing to actually see at a baseball game is over in a couple of heartbeats, and then everyone stands around and spits for a while or goes to get a beer.  Actually, the most flow I have ever seen at a baseball game was when they used to do the Wave at Dodger Stadium in the eighties and nineties.  Remember the Wave?  Well, actually I don't remember it all that well.

Football has its moments of ultimate action and pure aestheticism, but mostly it is controlled, over-orchestrated, and you can't play it without phone lines and a fax machine.  Besides, I never thought it was fun to practice football even though there is nothing quite like the so-called "Friday night lights" and playing in a high school football game on a Friday night.  There was far too much standing around in practice for me, however.

I love all sports, and played 4 of them every year in high school, but I always loved to play and watch lacrosse more than the others once I discovered it and that it was all my favorite sports (ball games of any sort) rolled into one amusement park of a single game. Plus it had all that Native American spiritual part.  The stick and how it worked fascinated me from the first time I saw one.  The game spoke to me somehow, and I became an eager and willing disciple the moment it called.

HAVING A BALL

I always loved the ball itself in any game I played. The object, and what the different kinds of balls could do intrigued me.  I loved, and I thought I was good at chasing or getting them.  I knew that was my "role" on any given team. I wanted to learn about balls and ball games much more than I wanted to learn about reading, writing, and arithmetic at any level.

BACK, BACK, BACK

Even the "baseballs" I made at 12 years old out of an old sheet wrapped with Johnson and Johnson's white tape were cool as far as I was concerned.  My friends and I would hit those rag balls and make leaping, game-saving (pretend) catches up against the 8' cinder block wall that separated my house from a gravel public parking lot.  We would do that in the mid-summer until the lightning bugs and the streetlights could no longer help us to see the "ball" in the humid haze that was the air in New Hope, Pennsylvania in the summer of my youth.

OVERSPIN AND UNDERSPIN ARE MY LIFE

So needless to say I felt pretty juiced when introduced to the dense rubber orb they play lacrosse with.  It is the BMW of balls.  It's sleek, fast, and corners well, not to mention that it has status.

Yet while so much technology has changed in the game over the years, the ball remains, unlike the Beemer, the same simple thing made of the same simple stuff ever since whenever they stopped using a rock I guess, and that would be a long time.  And what a ball it is when I think about it.  

BALLS OUT

Tennis balls are warm and fuzzy, but far from lively. It's the racket that makes them live. A baseball is cool, but it feels dead in a lacrosse stick or even a baseball glove, while a lacrosse ball rocking in a pocket almost seems to take on a special energy of its own, and it gives the player a special feeling, too.  Hitting a lacrosse ball with a baseball bat is a little different from hitting a baseball with a bat.  I used to get a thrill when my baseball-playing buddy in college would hit me "fly balls" with a lacrosse ball, and I would run around and catch them with my lacrosse stick.  Life in college didn't get much more exciting than that for me. It would drop from unbelievably high in the sky like a pea with a rocket attached to it.

Footballs are cool, too, but they are finicky and difficult to keep under control at times, no matter what the skill level.  They are also made from dead animal skin, which doesn't lend itself to lively quite as well as your flubber and other organic plant materials.  Hockey pucks are rubber (I think) and stylish, but they too are somewhat complicated and not as versatile as the bouncing, spinning, light yet heavy lacrosse ball. The lacrosse ball is sort of the "Iron Butterfly" of balls.  The wind affects it, but then again it doesn't, kind of like a magic thing….

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HARMONY

All that I have just written started out with me thinking a lot about (pondering) the concept of harmony in sports and specifically the importance of harmony on a team.  How I got to the "balls" part I know not.

Harmony is a great thing to have, but it almost doesn't seem to fit that well with modern society.  You can't buy harmony, at least not the kind I'm talking about, and it doesn't simply come along with talent you are given or that you might recruit.  You can't send away for instructions on how to produce it, and you can't custom order it.  It almost must find you, because it cannot be forced or uncovered from a pile of team parts, but then it can in fact be the proverbial needle in a haystack to find at times. It can't be built exactly the same way twice.  You cannot save or stockpile it for later, and you can't recycle any part of harmony.  I don't care. Harmony is my most important ingredient for any recipe I might have for team success.  That's that whole "family" thing I try to perpetuate.

BRONX ZOO

It is true that the Yankees and Oakland A's of the 1970's won championships while most guys on those teams hated each other, or at least they all hated Reggie Jackson (I digress).  Michael Jordan was so good at making players around him better that in my opinion that was the true measure of his greatness.  Great players make the players around them better.  That is my definition of a great player.  Jordan also had the ability to will his team like no other athlete ever has (my lifetime as sports lover), also in my opinion. MJ worked the control angle much more than the harmony one, I suspect.  I'm pretty sure the Dennis Rodman years in Chicago were somewhat less than harmonious. They never skipped a beat though, and they (he) have the 6 World titles to show for it.  If I wasn't impressed, why I would I have one son named Michael and another named Jordan?

Knowing this sort of thing doesn't deter me from saying that for me the most important ingredient for coaching will always still be harmony, because it allows for so much freedom for growth, change, forgiveness, momentum, or really whatever a team might need at any given moment to help it have a better chance to be successful. 

RANDOM, AND BY THAT I MEAN HOUSE

I was thinking about it so much lately that I looked it (harmony) up in the dictionary.  The definition I liked best was #2: "A consistent, orderly, or pleasing arrangement of parts; congruity". "Accord" was another meaning I liked.  Then it got into the musical meanings, and in a way that fits into how I coach as well.  In practice I constantly use words like rhythm, tempo, and flow.  The ball movement should have something close to a beat, and in fact I don't mind at all if there is a ghetto blaster at practice, and for drills especially. 

I like even spacing of people and passes on the field, a symmetry you might say.  I say dumb things out loud like, "Make the ball sing", or "Make it hum" and by that I mean that there is a ball movement that makes the game look choreographed and musical, and that's what I'm going for.  This melody of movement is what opens up the creative passing lanes in both lacrosse and in life.  There is a single perfect time to pass and a perfect time to catch in this game and when a team becomes syncopated with all that, well then I begin to see in real life the game vision that runs around in my head, and then it does all become "music to my ears". 

DEFENSE PROTECTS DEHOUSE

I would say that my fundamental goal is usually to build teams on the foundation of defense.  At the same time my aspirations are always to finish the building with a heaping helping of harmony liberally spread on top of the roof for protection from the elements.  The house covered with harmony allows for magical things to happen inside, and then the sum can become way, way more than its parts.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN, THOUGH?

Harmony is a thing, but not an easy one to have and not one you can hold in the palm or any other part of your hand. If you have it, however, everything looks like it comes with a little or a lot less effort.  True harmony needs to be constantly fed by everyone on a team, top to bottom.  Part of it is for each one of the players to step back once in a while and figure out in some way and on their own that the team is more important than any one individual (corny but still true). 

Once everyone (coach, too) gives in at least partially to the notion that the family is indeed strongest when all the parts understand that the team machine is more important than any of its individual parts, that is when good things really start to happen.  It sounds simple or at least basic, but it is not always so cut and dried.  The human psyche can be quite frail when the ego is involved.  Giving up or sharing some of "me" can be very difficult for these proud players at times.  They want to help the team by scoring more or somehow doing more.  Sometimes players can actually do more for the TEAM by doing less, and this is a hard, even discouraging lesson for the individual to learn, at least at first, but it is crucial to the life of a team and its evolution.  So what is the bridge over these kind of individual troubled waters?  Team harmony, or at least it is for me.  It is certainly one thing that when it is part of us it empowers me as a coach.

I will give an example.  Let's say I have been trying to convince a certain player of a concept.  Lets' s say I talk to him and drill him on it daily, and after a time he begins to "get it".  Then he comes up to me one day after practice and tells me how Coach Kale got him to finally see this particular playing concept and how he is comfortable with it and okay we can move on as it were.  Now, do I get mad because he somehow got the message better from Kale?  Hell no.  If I am not simply glad that he got it then I am missing the Harmony Boat.  Do I think Kale is better at coaching in this case than me?  Maybe, but who cares as long as we all got there, and we all know what we are trying to do?  Does it hurt my feelings a little?  Sure, but not really.

BE HERE NOW - AGAIN AND ALWAYS

Harmony is what I'm going for first, and it might be a challenge.  I am not happy to begin this next team "age" with a foundation of chaos. In many ways we are a team jolted out of tune because of events over which we had pretty much no control, but if we can somehow turn that current chaos into a future chorus, then maybe there is a chance that we, CSU lacrosse, might not skip a beat when all is sung and done.

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