Thoughts From Three: All It Takes is All You've Got

That Word Again....

"All it takes is all you've got."

                                                 Skaneateles T-shirt slogan

A cloudy but mild break-even sort of late afternoon had settled over the track as the athletes slowly emptied away.  Practice had ended early.  We were in the hurricane eye of two tough dual meets in three days, so the job had been to recover, tweak some technique, go light and brace for what was coming next. Three of our coaching staff watched the reverse parade slowly file out while leaning on the track's boundary fence and jawing like farmers with feet up on a truck running board at the local feed mill. The conversation, however, did not turn on the next day's contest, our final dual meet of the season. We were all, instead, imagining what the shrunken team sizes would look like come Thursday when only championship-qualified athletes continued. And we were admitting to the same thing. This had been a hard season, harder than anticipated.

          "I should be excited about working with the championship qualifiers," Coach Eells ruminated, "but I'm just exhausted."  Heads nodded. We were all weary because up to 75% of our mental energy so far had been directed toward team members who would not be on that championship roster. A number of those were simply un-athletic individuals, but that wasn't---and never had been--the issue. The issue was that too many of the departing were, in fact, only too happy to begin enjoying those open afternoons, team members who had higher absentee percentages than the rest, who found reasons to miss meets, who left the team for spring break, who typically mistook 70% efforts for 100%, who constantly heard sound coaching advice and then just as consistently ignored it.  We'd managed to hang on to many of the kids that other sports teams would have cut on day 3 of try-outs-but it wasn't easy. We'd attempted to show them what real work is. We'd tried to engender the notion of accomplishment not only for oneself, but in service to others, to teammates and team. Success had come to some of those who had not earned a seat on the championship buses, but there were also some discouraging failures, some who stubbornly refused to buy what we were selling.

          Scholastic coaches have developed detailed and often colorful methods of describing and categorizing such team members. Most of the monikers are best left out of print-and most actually miss the mark because they assume to know why someone with, say,  a 63% attendance average keeps showing up, even if irregularly.  Lazy doesn't properly describe someone who dutifully answers the call to attendance each day and then shuffles through workouts. Unmotivated fails to adequately explain the senior whose personal records all lie two or three years in the past. Sneaky won't help us really understand the team member who discovers new ailments every other hard day practice in order to inveigle mid-workout trips to the trainer.  We wind up naming symptoms, not a cause.

The word that finally came to us fence-leaners who had just spent a disproportionate amount of our spring time coaxing, cajoling and encouraging such frustrating team members was, under the circumstances, the most descriptive: commitment. "Everything begins with your commitment," believes sport psychologist Terry Orlick. Everything can end there too.  

Monday:

 Coach V.:

[Alice] is not going to school today, too sick.

--Mrs. P.

Thanks very much for the notification. Hope she feels better soon.

 --Coach Vermeulen

Thursday(9:09am):

Hi, so [Alice] was still too sick to run with the team yesterday and Tuesday, although she won the talent show contest!!!  .......

-Mrs. P.

Thanks for the notification.

--Coach Vermeulen

Thursday(10:20pm)

Hi Coach. I obviously vetoed [Alice's] plan to go to track today. She insists on going tomorrow. Still coughing but less. 

 -Mrs. P.

Thanks for the notification.

--Coach Vermeulen

It came as no surprise when Alice, citing numerous "conflicts" and unburdened by any obligation to finish what she had started, quit the team mid-season. A particular rubric is known to some coaches, one that roughly divides athletes into one of four types. The Type IV athlete has little talent and is unmotivated. A Type II athlete also lacks significant talent but is motivated to improve and succeed. The Type III athletes possess above-average talent but are unmotivated or often un-coachable. And the Type I athlete possesses both native talent and the motivation to develop that talent.

Type IV athletes typically form the exit parade of team members who do not last the season. Type I athletes, for many programs, are few and far between, and coaches count their good fortune when those folks infrequently arrive. The Type II athletes earn our respect and time for working so hard with their limited talent; we don't mind working with them one bit. But college coaches have always been ahead of us when it comes to Type III athletes. Don't waste your time, they advise, but then we turn around and, with a nod to irony, usually give Type III's the good old college try.

 ------

Everyone lauds commitment in our scholastic track and field athletes. We write articles about such young adults, praise and hold them up as role models for school and community. And rightly so. But then, through the current structure of our sport, we remind everyone that commitment is optional. If we try holding an athlete from a meet due to a non-quantifiable but obvious lack of effort in practices, it's a matter of little time before the parent phone calls or e-mails hit the AD's office. The expectation some prospective team members bring in the door is that their alternate definition of required effort and commitment is equal and acceptable. The assumption is that there should be no assumptions. A disturbing percentage of athletes(and parents) do not take to heart what Del Hessel stated in Coaching Instincts: "Do not request or expect things that you have not earned." Such 'things' can include competitive opportunities and, yes, the respect of your coach.

Our no-cut policy for track & field remains a blessing and a curse. I coached an athlete who quit the team halfway through indoor track. Then, with no school or athletic rule to cover such circumstances, that same athlete unabashedly reappeared for outdoor track, only to quit again six weeks later. During those durations, coaches were expected to devote time and energy in attempts to inspire commitment in the uncommitted. In reality, we babysat.

Two definitions offered by Merriam-Webster for commitment are these: 1) a promise to do or give something; 2) a promise to be loyal to someone or something. The key word in both definitions is the word promise. I honestly believe that a small but persistent percentage of team members each year do not believe that they have, by signing up for track, promised anything. They are, in their way of thinking, merely taking the sport out for a test drive, with no more commitment than an intention to check the thing out. And while most of those signees return the keys after a few days with a thanks-but-no-thanks goodbye, the curious few hang on well into-or through-a season, exasperating coaches with a perplexing notion of commitment, as though commitment is always negotiable and track is a series of optional one-day contracts to show or not show, to work hard or to hardly work, depending on the mood. It goes without saying that none of those drop-in team members ever board the championship buses at season's end.

          On my wish list is the device that measures commitment as accurately as the tape  or watch measure distance and time. It doesn't exist, of course, but if it did, many of the team rules, regulations and policy guidelines that we laboriously codify and seek to enforce would become superfluous. Once we had determined each athlete's commitment level in the opening days of the season, coaches and AD's could decide if 75% was enough. Or 80%. Or 95. We could decide who was more deserving of the coaches' limited time and attention. We could make educated guesses as to whom-talent aside-was going to grow in their ability to commit to the sport and their teammates because those athletes could also become the "contributors" Coach Aris of F-M talks about, as opposed to the sport's mere participants. We could then decide if it is ever track and field's job to just babysit.

          "Come on, take a chance. Live a little," I sometimes jokingly cajole my athletes afraid to try something new or something hard. What I'm suggesting is that they promise themselves to something different, something harder or something requiring greater persistence and sacrifice. What I'm really suggesting-what our sport requires for any genuine success-is commitment.