South Carolina Game

Quote from: TONYD3 on December 23, 2015, 04:24:32 PM

Coaching is hard not easy .

 
Coaching is not hard. If it was there would be fewer stupid coaches. The truth is that many people involved in sports at a high level are mouth breathers: between being coddled academically and repeatedly concussed it's a wonder some of these guys can even tie their shoes. Neurosurgery is hard. Piloting the space shuttle is hard. Being a Navy seal is hard. Coaching is only hard if you're a nice person and if you're a nice person everything is hard.

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As a coach I absolutely believe that I affected  a game with my words and excitement. I believe that I got stops with my passion. I don't see that with this staff.

I have some questions about your post and it's not about how you managed to cram the word "I" into a 500 word essay 36 times - which is an impressive 7 percent. It's about what's cited above

"I absolutely believe that I affected  a game with my words and excitement. I believe that I got stops with my passion."

I certainly agree that there are coaches who inspire their players with their passion, eg Billy Martin. And otoh there are also very successful coaches who are stoics, eg John Wooden or Gregg Popovich. And then there are coaches who are passionate and jump up and down and don't do very well at all. Steve Lavin for example was quite the dervish on the sidelines and he sucked balls at coaching and his teams stunk. So there does not seem to be any direct correlation between success and passion that I can see, and especially because I assume that all - or at least most - coaches are passionate about winning. I say most because Steve Lavin famously said that he "didn't feel any great pressure to win at Saint John's" but he's probably an anomaly: I think we can agree that most coaches probably care more about winning than they do about what kind of pasta they're going to shove into their mouths after the game. So anyway digression aside and getting back to your beliefs:

* Are there other areas in your life where your words and excitement can affect outward reality. Like if you're in traffic and you yell at the other cars do they part like the Red Sea before Moses. Or if you yell at water does it boil faster. This may sound frivolous, but Uri Geller thinks he can bend spoons by talking to them and Madame Blavatsky thought her words capable of raising the dead. I just want to know what I'm dealing with.

* You say that your team makes good plays because of your words. When your team makes a bad play, is that because you're not excited and passionate enough? Or is that he kids fault. If your team makes a bad play because you're not excited an passionate enough, do you yell at yourself to bring yourself to the right level of excitement and passion so that when you yell at the kids their play improves, or do you just continue to yell at them.

* Are there specific words or inflections that you use to inspire your team or is it all improvised? Which is more important, the words or the passion? Like if you yelled really excited gibberish would that work or would a flat effect work with Gettysburg Address level inspiring rhetoric like "Come on guys get a stop" or "Hey Little Johnnie make your free throws" or is it a specific combination of inflection and syllables that works the magic?

* If your sideline passion is responsible for good outcomes, do you practice screaming and jumping up and down? If not, aren't you doing a disservice to your players? Wouldn't yelling practice be more effective than lay up drills and so on.

* When you yell things that make your players play better how come the sound only affects your players and not the other team? Like if you farted, everyone would smell it, not just the shirts or the skins. How come everyone who hears your inspiring words isn't inspired?

* Why is it that some coaches who yell all the time - Mike Rice for example - don't win all the their games. Is it because they're not yelling the right things loud enough or is it that the other guy is yelling more better things louder? Why was Bobby Knight's passionate yelling so effective at Indiana and so much less effective at Texas Tech.

* If Mullin's stoicism is responsible for the losses to IW and NJIT, how did SJU manage to beat Syracuse in the face of that same stoicism?







Great post Fun.  Patience is the requirement for everyone.  To criticize the staff at his point, especially over trivial matters, shows a total lack of knowledge of history and the game.

Foad, thank you so much for that last post.  You are a treasure, man.

Your right that there are bigger issues and many of them but to be fair he sat on the table quite a few times during the game.   

(Didn't take very long for the crazies to surface, did it?)