Basketball: Resilience

"Pressure is playing a five dollar Nassau with two dollars in your pocket." - Lee Trevino

The four legs of the growth stool are skill, strategy, physicality, and psychology (resilience). Weakness in any element creates imbalance. 

Resilience goes by many names - grit, mental toughness, fight, heart. And it's not endemic to sport. 

The exemplar is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Written after WW2, 'Search' chronicles life in Nazi death camps and the capacity of people to endure suffering. 

At the end of Jay Bilas's Toughness, he describes the toughest person he knows, a young woman who is a mother and brain tumor survivor. 

Former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens's book Resilience embodies cognitive dissonance. He discusses the 'moral sensibility' and resilience of a fellow SEAL struggling with alcoholism and PTSD. Greitens has a deep understanding of empathy, yet lived awash in career-defining scandals. 

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Resilience informs the struggle against adversity. Hyperfocus on sport disservices those who overcome life adversity of poverty, health, bias, violence, war, and more. Sport affords us distraction. 

Adversity manifests in many forms in basketball - competition, illness, injury, fatigue, personal and family problems, and more. Quick to criticize, we make assumptions about performance without facts. We've all inhabited both sides. 

A parent complained about the teaching her daughter was receiving. Another parent who attended almost every practice said, "I'm there and I'm learning a lot." Where you stand depends on where you sit. 

Give athletes resilience tools. 

• Experience. "Experience is the best teacher, but sometimes the tuition is high." 
• Conditioning. "Fatigue makes cowards of us all." 
• Mindfulness. Mindfulness lower blood pressure and stress hormones. 
• Sports psychology. There's no consensus on one technique but visualization and self-talk help many athletes. 

Stories might help. I taught middle school girls audacious stories of achievement such as: 

• Arlene Blum leading a summit of Annapurna, one of fourteen peaks over 8,000 meters.
• Frances Taylor the first woman US Cabinet member (Secretary of Labor under FDR).
• Wilma Rudolph overcoming polio to win multiple Olympic sprint gold medals. 

Day-to-day, choose positivity, speak greatness, and support players self-belief. UNC Soccer Coach Anson Dorrance believes in only showing positive video. Up your psychology game. 

Lagniappe. Seek balance (occasional language).