"Victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan."
Successful teams embrace adversity. Failure is our teacher, our companion, a necessary mentor.
As a high school player, I remember losing (by two) against the three-time consecutive State Champions. We lost because of turnovers and a lack of mental toughness against their suffocating press. Painful...maybe that's redundant. But our coach lambasted us for about forty-five minutes after the game. He didn't accept mediocrity, which is how we played that night. "We will never lose to that team again." I believe that transformative tongue-lashing turned our season around...plus practice.
We practiced against man-to-man pressure, 5 against 7, initially without dribbling allowed until pressure became only opportunity. It led to a thirteen game winning streak including an eighteen point victory later, on their court.
Court-storming isn't exactly new (1973).
I remember film study, of one particularly bad closeout by our center, the grainy 8 mm film being run forward and backward, over and over. "That's $#!7bird defense." Later, that center would outplay a high school All-American and Celtics' draft choice in the tournament. Failure repackaged, served as a springboard for success.
Failure becomes Jim Collins' "Brutal Reality" in the epic Good to Great. Failure isn't final unless we allow it to be.
We cannot wish our way to success. We cannot feel sorry for ourselves or look for sympathy. We have to look in the mirror and see who we are and whom we want to become.
Before the game I discussed that height accounts for about fifty percent of rebounding. But that also means that another fifty percent belongs to anticipation, aggressiveness, desire, and toughness. We can leverage the other fifty percent.
I told the players yesterday that we have to ignore what's "outside our boat." We need a great attitude, better decisions, and total effort if we want to be our best. We need better coaching and better play, not better players.
Ultimately we choose how to use failure. Hope is not a plan.
