Coach Flip Naumburg's Journal

Monday, September 26, 2005

HOW TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

This is a conceptual approach to life that unfortunately remains quite foreign to me. I wish I were better at making friends and influencing people. My working book title would have to be more along the lines of "How to alienate people and Piss some of them off while you’re at it". Even when trying to be tongue-in-cheek in here (journal), it can turn out that people that I never thought would bother to read do, and they are sometimes not amused and or offended by my words or what they take as my meaning. I do what I can. Oh well, onward through the fog.

B.Y. YOOHOO!

I hope the weather cooperates this Saturday. The BYU Cougars are coming to town to play us (CSU Lax) this Saturday in a full lacrosse game, something rarely seen in the autumn. We will play 4 full quarters instead of the normal shortened games that are played this time of year (off-season). It should be fun and exciting to have this as our first action of the entire year against a team wearing colors other than green. We have been scrimmaging amongst ourselves since August. Hopefully we have learned some good lax things early that we can take into the game on Saturday.

These Cougars look like a very good edition of that ongoing very good lacrosse book. Author, and Coach Jason Lamb appears to have a quick and potent array of offensive talent to plug in. I often try to NOT pay attention to his personnel, what with all the 2-year Mormon missions and comings and goings. I don’t like to worry about individuals too much anyway. Besides we are in general not as concerned with specific match-ups on the field as we are with playing our own style of team defense.

All I know is that they (BYU) tend to be older than we are, and theoretically more mature (they have wives and kids) than we tend to be (a good fake ID is all I need).

It might be hard to ignore a few of the Cougars on this team, however. I will be interested to see how well we can handle the pressure they will try to put on us.

Whatever time of the year we play BYU it is a war, and we (CSU lax) are pretty much convinced that they (BYU) ALWAYS play better against us than they tend to against others. I am grateful to Jason and the Cougars for coming here to play us in light of our not being able to travel to Las Vegas this October for the big Best of the West Tournament there. It is a favor to us that I won’t forget.

WHERE ARE WE?

Our practices have been very strange in some ways, but mostly they have been moving our team in a positive direction on the overall plus minus compass. The weird or strange part for me is that we can have a different feel, look, or vibe depending on whom or who is not at practice on that particular day. This makes me a little uncomfortable, but I’m on it.

I feel like we have put in or touched on many, many aspects of game play already. We have lots of "toys" to play with inside my plan of an overall, super aggressive playing style. It is not my intention to "kill time" in the name of ball possession and things like that. It is not my plan to watch other teams play catch for extended periods of time either. I will continue my ongoing search for disruption of whatever it is that makes the other team comfortable.

This is a fun team to coach this 2005-2006 one. It is, however, another "fragile" team, but one that is capable of rocking, too. We are not the most talented CSU team of all time. I wonder if we can ever match the creamy talent at the top of our 2001 team, for example. Nowadays I might end up losing half that talent before I got to use it all up to teams and schools that have money and scholarships and stuff. At the same time I like to think that we have come far as a program since 2001, and that we always have the potential to be a very talented team because of that. We will soon find out.

THERE IS A FINE LINE BETWEEN AGONY AND ECSTACY

We had a scrimmage the other day that was so well played, so competitive that it made me do an about face in my practice plan. We had a game situation scrimmage that became almost "sudden death", and there were three goals scored back and forth in the last minute or so of scrimmage "regulation" time. It was so competitive, so smartly played and well executed that when it was over I completely changed my mind about what was to come next. My plan had been to run the team hard at the end of practice that day, but after the way they played in the scrimmage, the only memory I wanted them to take home with them was the movie that had just played at the old CSU Actionplex. I told them exactly that and for me, my coaching heart had "soared like a hawk" on this day.

Then on Saturday we had an intra-team scrimmage. It was good, but I admit that there were moments of terror for me. There were some ugly ground ball scrums and unforced errors galore. If fear truly is the greatest motivator, then the day before yesterday (Saturday) should power my coaching motor boat for a while. This movie is far from being made.

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