Wednesday, May 1, 2024

Basketball: On Writing and Other Skills

Coaches teach life, including verbal, nonverbal, and written communication. Not everyone receives or embraces coaching. If you can learn basketball then you can learn history, psychology, and writing.  

Craft your storytelling. The younger you are, the longer your runway to master the craft. Academics or athletics, "how you do anything is how you do everything." Make elevating elite student-athletes our legacy. 

"Share something great." Matt Haig wrote that "every story is about someone searching for something." Find ways to inspire with tips from well-regarded authors. 

1. Stories inform plot, characters, and dialogue. You construct your 'basketball story' with hundreds of days of brick and mortar work. 

2. Don't abuse adverbs. "She ran quickly" pales versus she raced, she sped, she hastened. Stephen King limits adverbs. He executes a MasterClass in his book On Writing. What basketball adverbs need editing in your story - inconsistently, indecisively, unconfidently? 

3. The Heath Brothers (Made to Stick) champion the acronym SUCCESS.

S - simple

U - unexpected

C - concrete (specific)

C - credible (believable)

E - emotional

S - stories 

4. "$#**@ first drafts." - Anne Lamott   Your first draft isn't a finished product. Get your thoughts down and edit later. 

5. "Don't be boring." - David Mamet  Inform and entertain. 

6. "The difference between good writers and bad writers is that good writers know when they're bad." - Dan Brown (author of The DaVinci Code) Don't settle for mediocrity. 

7. "Tell the best available version of the truth." - Bob Woodward, Investigative journalist, The Washington Post   Woodward wrote The Brethren, about the Supreme Court. A justice's clerk denied that a quote from him in the book. Woodward invited the clerk to his home, and showed him the quote in the clerk's own handwriting. 

8. "Read. Read. Read. Read. Read." - Werner Herzog   Develop your own style by reading and studying other writers. Herzog includes The Peregrine as required reading for his students. 

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there. Books about birds show pictures of the peregrine, and the text is full of information. Large and isolated in the gleaming whiteness of the page, the hawk stares back at you, bold, statuesque, brightly coloured. But when you have shut the book, you will never see that bird again. Compared with the close and static image, the reality will seem dull and disappointing. The living bird will never be so large, so shiny-bright. It will be deep in landscape, and always sinking farther back, always at the point of being lost. Pictures are waxworks beside the passionate mobility of the living bird.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

9. "Kill your darlings." - David Mamet   Make the word, sentence, paragraph, or scene advance the story. What are you doing today to advance your athletic story - technique, tactics, physicality, psychology? 


10. "Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed." - Hemingway  Anything well done requires study, research, and patience. 

11. "The director is the keeper of the story." - Ron Howard   Continual success flows from character, coaching, and consistency. Coaches take pride in players' achievements because we help 'clear the path'. Ryan Holiday writes, "That brings us back to the strategy: Find and make canvases for other people to paint on.

The Roman’s had a loose word for the concept: anteambulo and it meant a person who cleared the path in front of their patron. If you can do that successfully, you secure a quick and educational power position."

12. Ask better questions. In the introduction to The Leadership Moment, Michael Useem asks:
  • What went well?
  • What went poorly? 
  • What can I do better next time? 
  • What is the enduring lesson? 

Holistic coaching grows student-athletes in a learning culture. 

Lagniappe. Teach and grow this skill.  

Lagniappe 2. Commonalities among accomplished shooters... 

 Lagniappe 3. Another great Ryan Pannone share. 

Post by @ryanpannone
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