A Painfully Long Season

Anyone that has coached for a significant amount of time has experienced a painfully long season. In the nine seasons I spent as the head coach of a varsity high school basketball team I was fortunate to have coached some very talented teams and players and was a part of some championship seasons. That success led me to where I have been for the past 12 seasons, head coach of the men’s basketball team at Mohawk College.

In my 21 seasons as a head coach I have experienced plenty of defeat and failure.

My first season as a high school head coach was more than forgettable; our record was 1-25. To make matters worse, I wasn’t even there the day we won our only game!

Few will remember the transition year between my first great team in season four and the next great team in season six (at least I hope not).

It’s difficult to be consistently strong at the high school level when you can’t recruit players. Success becomes a moving target. Championships, no matter how great the coach, are not always a realistic or accurate indicator of success. Most of the time success should be measured by your team and players’ improvement throughout the season, by the experiences they shared, by the relationships they formed, and yes, by the fun they had. If you cannot bring yourself to include those factors into the success equation you will not improve as a coach, your experiences will be tainted, your relationships will sour and coaching won’t be fun.

As I transitioned to the College level I expected to take three or four years to get my feet wet and understand the challenges of building my own program. I expected to struggle early and I could live with that as long as I believed my teams were getting better throughout season and I was also progressing and learning in my role.

From seasons two to season six we could beat the best teams in the country on any given night, and occasionally did, but we were not good enough to do it consistently. In season seven we broke through and won our National Championship. For four straight years after that we never left the National Top 10 rankings.

I bring all this up maybe as a means to protect myself from the memory of last year… From a record stand point it was a disaster. For the first time in eight seasons we missed the playoffs. We realized going into the season that it was going to be a challenge. We had a great back court but we lost our experienced front court players and depth all at once.

“After some serious self-reflection I came to a harsh but obvious conclusion… I was the biggest reason for our painfully long season. I failed as the captain of the ship.”

When your team fails and you’re the leader, perhaps the hardest thing to do is critically look back at your own performance.

Was I the reason we didn’t succeed?

Could I have done something differently to lessen the disappointment?

After some serious self-reflection I came to a harsh but obvious conclusion… I was the biggest reason for our painfully long season. I failed as the captain of the ship.

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We had really good kids; they were all fun to be around. As I alluded to earlier, our biggest challenge was overcoming our youth and inexperience. Nine of the thirteen players had not experienced any of our program’s success. Only the back court had played significant minutes in our biggest games.

When I look at that last paragraph, it seems obvious what I could have done differently.

I have always thought one of my strengths was my ability to adapt and design a plan to take advantage of our strengths in order to give us the absolute best chance for success. This team could really shoot the ball and we were never going to be a strong rebounding team. We felt we could pressure and get after teams in the full court. I had a plan in my mind. It might not be a championship caliber team but my glass is always half full. I believed we would get better and our game plan would put us in a position to beat anyone on any given night by the end of the year.

“I needed to take control early on. I needed to push them harder; show them how to compete every day. Show them the importance of hard work and the good that comes from it.”

What I didn’t adapt to was the personality of the group. I had become accustomed to the older, self-starting, player driven teams we had for the past five seasons. They were teams that needed me to design, develop and teach the strategy necessary to show us our best path but I didn’t have to push them to get there. They enjoyed the work, they embraced the process; a process that they learned from the previous group of players.

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This group was different. They needed me to be the leader every day. I needed to take control early on. I needed to push them harder; show them how to compete every day. Show them the importance of hard work and the good that comes from it.

I sat back and let things happen even though I could feel we needed more. I let the team down. They didn’t get the experience they should have. We should have been a playoff team despite our perceived short comings.

Our strong recruiting class also struggled in the classroom which makes me feel as if I had let them down on and off the court. In short… I DID A TERRIBLE JOB!

It has taken 21 years as a head coach to realize that my job is to constantly evaluate what I am doing… during good seasons, mediocre ones and especially bad ones. ALWAYS look at yourself first. You have one thing the rest of the team does not… the ability to have the final say in the direction you want to head. Maybe you need to scrap what you’re doing mid-season. Maybe you have to remove a player with great talent who is stifling the group. You CAN’T stop trying different things when you are not satisfied with the direction you are headed. But the bottom line is YOU need to accept responsibility for what is happening.

I have accepted responsibility for painfully long season. I wish I had done so sooner. If I had we might have made the playoffs, we would have shared more positive experiences, had more time to form stronger relationships and definitely had more fun. I vow to learn from last season and work harder to make necessary adjustments sooner. I vow to provide better leadership to the next team!