Another Way to Learn
October 30, 2012
In 2000, I had the pleasure of listening to a speech by Ken Dryden, who had been goalkeeper for Cornell University when it was the NCAA Ice Hockey Champion in the 1960s. Ken Dryden then was a goalkeeper in the National Hockey League for eight years. Then president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and he’s a lawyer.
Ken Dryden said that the greatest lesson of sport is that most things go wrong; in fact, that they almost always go wrong. He said he’s seen dozens of coaches on hundreds of occasions diagram plays in the locker room where every defender is blocked just so and every pattern is executed perfectly.
But what you learn in competition, said Dryden, is that the plans almost always go awry, that the patterns almost always break down. What you learn in competition is to not get upset, but to improvise and find another way to get the puck in the goal or the ball in the net.
What happens to the high school student, asked Dryden, who doesn’t play sports in high school and who gets all A’s, a 4.3 grade point average on a 4 point scale, 100 percent on test scores all the time, who never has anything go wrong? What happens to that student in college when he or she gets 90 percent, or 80 percent, or worse. What happens to that student when something goes wrong in life?
Dryden concluded that sport is not frivolous, it’s another way to learn.
Reserve Lessons
January 26, 2018
Nothing prepared me for coaching more than the time I spent sitting on the bench. I hated it. And when I started coaching, I couldn’t forget how much I disliked sitting on the bench, and I did everything I could do to get every player in a game every week on some level – 9th grade, JV or varsity.
So I get it. Not starting hurts. Not playing stinks. And while many coaches are brilliant in their tactics to share playing time, some coaches do a miserable job of getting reserves into games.
But having said all that, I must add that too many people undervalue the importance of reserves, of the practice players who work hard to make the regulars better. Many champion wrestlers and tennis players earned their titles because of practice partners who pushed them to be better day-in and day-out. Many championship teams achieved their success through arduous daily competition in practice all season long. Many times it has been a so-called “backup” player, who worked hard in practices and who was often worked into games by caring coaches, who steps in after a starter is injured and saves the season.
There is much to be learned as a reserve, including what it means to be a loyal teammate ... a team player ... and what teamwork and sacrifice and loyalty and dedication really mean.
I have said often in speeches that it’s my wish that every student would have the opportunity to be a starter in one sport and a substitute in another because the lessons to be learned from each are different and so vital to developing the whole person.
It is a shame that students have somehow gotten the message that it’s a waste of their time to be a part of a team where they aren’t a starter or even the star. They get this message from adults ... sometimes it’s coaches, but more often it’s parents who criticize coaches and/or transfer their children to schools where they have a greater chance for athletic success.
As the benches get shorter on our school sports teams, the lessons learned get fewer.