The "W" word

First of all, I'm sick of the whole dictionary thing, ok?  If you are new to this blog and don't what the heck I'm talking about, take a quick look here.  I don't have to explain myself to anyone.

Second of all, I'm still exhausted from the volleyball marathon I coached yesterday.  As always, though, I spent a good part of today rehashing my performance as a coach, looking for what I did right and finding plenty I did wrong.  My biggest mistake of the day?  Saying the "W" word.

I rarely talk to my teams about winning.  Almost never, in fact.  It's one of the first things I explain to any new group of athletes I work with - we will focus on effort, we will focus on improvement, we will focus on finding ways to feel successful.....but we will not focus on winning or losing.  Everyone loves to win, and it's easy to talk about how much we want to win, but as soon as we start throwing that word - win - around, we pull attention away from what's most important in the development of an athlete: the process necessary to become a winner.  Not gonna write about that process tonight....exhaustion, remember.

As we competed (the word I use in place of win) yesterday and began to play better, and win more, I got swept up in the possibilities of winning even more.  I have a pretty strong competitive gene, and it was fully activated by mid-afternoon yesterday.  Enough so that I started mixing the "W" word into some timeouts and pregame plans.  In my self-analysis I now realize I spoke too much about winning before the first set of our championship game, a set we played poorly and lost.  In our second set I spoke about the challenge ahead of us, the need to move from one point to the next, the chance to prove that we could compete through tough situations.  I moved away from the "W" word.  And we won that set.  Me being me, weak of mind and prone to slow learning, I went back to the language of winning before we served up the first ball of our final set.  And once again my focus on winning took my players' focus off of playing.  We stunk.  We did win, however, and it felt great...but it also felt a little hollow, seeing as how we didn't really play our best volleyball of the day.

So there's the problem with speaking the "W" word to young competitors - creating a focus on winning leads to a sacrifice of focus elsewhere, and it's almost always a loss of focus on quality of play.  And I know this today, just like I knew it yesterday, because of how strongly I've known it for years.  But I still messed up and nearly cost my team a, ahem, win.  A good lesson learned in several different ways; keep the focus on the process, not the score.  Celebrate effort, not results.  And for me, never stop learning.  For a quarter century I've coached, but I still have so much room for improvement in pretty much everything I do as a coach.  I thought I had developed a better grasp on the use of the "W" word, but found out yesterday (by reflecting today) how crucial the right words at the right time are for team growth.

Third of all, I need to sleep......