In Good to Great, Jim Collins includes confronting the brutal facts as essential to organizational success.
The Daily Coach amplifies:
“Everybody, take out a blank sheet of paper. I want you to write down the top five brutal facts that face the company today. Go.”
Collins wants them to allocate a total of 100 total points to these five brutal facts. This way, they won’t overemphasize No. 1 on their list and may even discover that No. 4 should be the real priority.
Are we valuing the little time that we have as much as we should be?
What are the 5 brutal facts of our own teams?
Which of these must be addressed immediately?"
Here is a composite of BRUTAL FACTS of coaching girls teams during twenty years:
1. Trends. We're witnessing a steady drift away from basketball toward competing sports - volleyball, soccer, and lacrosse. That's not a criticism of players, just reality. James Naismith's claim that "basketball is an easy game to learn but a difficult one to master" rings true. Excellence demands an enormous commitment to unrequired work - skill development, strength and conditioning, and study.
Another trend is the inability to keep top players "home." If we develop even two solid players annually per class, there's a steady influx of talent. Now, it's exodus. What, if anything, can change this?
2. Skill. Every position is a skill position and the overall level of skill in the teams I see is lower than that of a decade ago. That doesn't mean there aren't highly skilled players, hard workers, and athletes. But a corollary of fewer "basketball players" is more players playing basketball as secondary sport.
3. Physicality. "Basketball isn't a contact sport; it is a collision sport." The will to set and fight through screens, to rebound, and take charges is uneven. I think it's no accident in the secondary sport population where contact is not a core of the primary sport.
4. Basketball IQ. The jury is out. "Instinctive" play often reflects experience. I've seen a lot more instinctive play in volleyball which relates to players starting younger and playing more.
5. Attitude. I've coached a lot of great kids, nice kids. Note the quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
CAESAR
(aside to ANTONY) Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
195He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.
More past players had a 'nastiness', the 'lean and hungry' look. They weren't dirty but more were fierce.
Tennyson reminds us, "that which we are, we are, and if we are to be any better now is the time to begin."
Lagniappe (something extra). Defending back screens is tough.