Coach Flip Naumburg's Journal

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

IF YOU COMMIT THE GLOVE MUST FIT

It is my educated guess that no one came here (CSU) specifically to play lacrosse ten years ago. Rather they got to campus and then heard there was a team and a party to go along with it. It cost next to nothing to play then, very much unlike now.

When I came to "interview" for the "job" here in that June of 1996, 4 guys from the CSU Lacrosse Club came to meet and buy me lunch in Denver at a sports bar. Between one of them getting-girlfriend-pregnant-and-I-gotta-get-married-so-bye-bye, and a few other things for two of the other ones, eventually just one of these four "team leaders" actually ever ended up playing for me. There were only a couple of months in between. That sounds like "club" ball to me, and it indicates how far along we weren’t when I arrived and I became "us".

That is where "we" were then. We were basically a crummy team with no resolve or commitment to any one thing larger than where the next "buzz" would come from. The USLIA (for us) was a year away then, and there was no team direction at all. During that first year there was also no real league that we were in. Things were in limbo. They could, however, already party just fine well before I arrived.

A LEGEND IN MY OWN MIND

I was going to come here and make something wonderful and instantly out of what was more or less previously nothing really great, or at least that was the thought in my mind. I probably thought that right up until my first "real" game that March 1, 1997, a humiliating pounding that we took from the C.U. Buffs where I think we surrendered some 25 goals at Folsom in Boulder on astroturf. I wasn’t feeling like the conqueror of all after that. I think I was instead shell-shocked by what had happened.

Serious practices and the defensive "game plan" I had in mind were things outside of what "they" wanted here in 1996. I was combing the landscape all year for a believer. I needed a coat rack on which to hang my hat of change. There was actually one (believer), but he had to stay in the closet lest he become outcast. Besides, he had no choice but to believe because he is the one who got me to come here in the first place. There were also a couple of young freshmen believers, too, and they know who they were.

I actually got in my 4-Runner and just flat left practice right in the middle a few times out of frustration and anger that first year. I can do "tantrum" really well. One would think I almost come by them (tantrums) naturally.

HOW DID I GET HERE?

I almost turned around and ran home to California not so very long after I had spent the entire summer moving us from the left coast all the way to Colorado. I shifted family and business like an earthquake solely so I could be the HEAD coach of a crummy team that ultimately didn’t particularly like me, do it for free, and do it in a place where I didn’t really want to be.

I was in essence a one-man goal setting workshop that had run amuck and suddenly I was practically in Wyoming for Christ’s sake. There is a reason that Wyoming has the smallest population of any state in the U.S.A.

However, lest I forget, Wyoming is still 40 miles to the north. Somehow, and parts of my tenure haven’t always been that pretty as we know, I have endeavored to persevere, and here I still be. Change didn’t really begin to surface for our budding "program" until one year later in 1998, and with the arrival of a couple of new and committed faces, kids who hated to lose enough for change to begin to take place. I think we were 10-3 for a won-loss record that first 1997 year. That’s not bad, but our challenges were the three we lost, not the other10 we won, and we didn’t meet those 3 challenges very well at all.

PSYCHOLOGY PART 1 -WHERE YOU FROM, SAILOR?

When I first arrived here at CSU in 1996-1997, I would say that 90% or more of our players were from the state of Colorado, and 50% or less of the 30 or so players on the "squad" actually came to practice regularly. They all came to games no matter where they came from, and they will still do that. Even if they don’t attend practices regularly in the fall, players will still unashamedly show up for the fall tournaments expecting to play major minutes. This simple dynamic never ceases to amaze me, nor does it cease to make the coaching more complicated. I could change it, but I don’t. It is okay for things to be this way when the games don’t count. It’s all like one big tryout for me to look at anyway.

STATE OF THE PROGRAM

I would say that now, and despite the fact that it must be hard for parents to pay that hefty out-of-state tuition for an in-state quality university education they could get back home, we are close to half out-of-staters on the team now. For many of the players playing college lacrosse while here was and is high up on their priority list. I consider that to be a really good thing.

I think we entice many out-of-state students to look at CSU, and I believe that helps the demographics for an "aggie" school like CSU, but nothing has ever happened that would lead me to believe that anyone around here agrees or cares.

THE SPRING PROGRAM.

I consider coming to practice daily like it is your job as a prerequisite for programdom. I am not convinced that this team here gets that concept. Right now we practice two times a week for one hour each time. If you cannot fit those two hours into the allotted 168 hours in a week then what kind of commitment do you expect me to give to you when it is game time?

I think I might have scared them off with all my emphasis on the STUDENT part of student-athlete. I think I will need to crack some come-to-practice whip at some point, but not quite yet.

PET PEEVE

Ultimately I guess the thing I hate most of all when it comes to practice habits is when a player comes to practice when he is not really ready to play at the intensity and quality "I" want or demand. So, if everyone except one is catching and throwing and doing, then that one who isn't screws it up for everyone else when he does not execute that simple act of catching the ball or whatever, and then I blow a frustration gasket. That makes it pretty much suck for everyone.

Here is my message: Do not come to practice if you are not ready to really PLAY ball!

REBEL YELL

This team group in general has been giving me signals all along that I need to get angry and ride them hard to get "what I want" from them. I have to remind myself to go off on them because I like them, and also because they are young and I don’t want to scare them too much while I'm only trying to get their attention.

APPLE CORE, BALTIMORE

A new century reality is that our CORE group of players, the ones that really love the team, the game, and to come to practice every day is a bigger number than almost ever and continues to grow. It is, in fact, almost but not quite big enough for my Adam-in-the-garden-with-Eve tastes.

Speaking of Baltimore, I have never had a "great" player from Baltimore to coach. I had a very average one once. He was a great help for that Pepperdine team with his lax genes alone, but before I die I would like to have one of those great players from Baltimore that they have so many extras of. Baltimore is east of lacrosse Eden. Lacrosse is a way of and a part of every day life there, and this is often reflected in the stick skills of most from there.

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