10 Minute Rule

The weeks race by during the flag football season. Every day is a hesitation between saturdays when I get to watch my boys streak across the fields laughing and feeling great about themselves. This was Jets week. All three boys were playing against the Jets in different age groups and the Jets would all represent the toughest challenge of the season so far, and perhaps at all. Three teams with three different challenges and results I never expected.

The 4-5 yr old games are always fun. It is less about play calling then it is about having the fastest kids and the kids who pay the most attention. I’m fortunate to have a team that has enough of both to remain competitive against the best the age group has to offer. These Jets were the best the age group has to offer, and we managed to survive with a 4 pt win.

6-7 is where athleticism and play calling start to balance out a bit more. The experienced kids can do a lot more than a learning the sport for the first time–no matter their athleticism. We have enough raw athletes to have earned that 3-0 start, but these Jets are more athletic, and far more experienced than our players. Beyond that, they were better coached on both sides of the ball. We suffered a 42-6 beating that was far worse than the score indicated. One of our players completely came unglued, booing at the other team and behaving like, well, an undisciplined 6 yr old. I pulled him from the game and let his parents handle the rest. The trouble is the team considers him a leader and they go how he goes. They fell apart after that. We recovered enough from the early disaster to put six on the board and in that we learned a bit more about the toughness of our players and where the true team leadership lives. It is my job moving forward to cultivate that leadership and start directing my team towards sportsmanship, understanding, and some pretty good football.

8-9 is already playing pretty good football. The problem is the 1st ten minutes of every single game is a disaster. Once we get going we’re tough to contain, but it takes too long to get started. at one point the 8-9 Jets were up 12-6 on us. We recovered to turn in a (44 or 50) to 21 victory. My wife is afraid of our boys getting injured in tackle, but I saw more kids banged up in today’s flag game than I do in the average tackle dust up. One fractured arm, one twisted knee, and several boys with their helmetless heads driven into the ground. We had what the Greeks would call a Pyrrhic victory. The kid with the fractured arm was our top receiver. Now he is the kid who’ll lead the workouts in practice and the honorary team captain for the remainder of the year. Maybe he can be more. Maybe he can be that kid who makes our team function as one and turn into something greater than they are at the start of games; greater than they are as individuals.

There are some fundamental skills the kids still lead to learn in order to be effective players at all levels in the remainder of the season. They need to learn how to carry out play fakes, a fundamental part of the tackle game and the core stunt of the flag game. They need to learn how to be better teammates and communicators. That’s my job as a coach, so it really means I need to get better at what I do.

 

The most common form of communication I bear witness to is complaint and various forms of derision. It took me 38 yrs to figure this out. At first I thought it was my particular circumstance. I’m a New Yorker and we complain a lot. So I moved from state to state, trying to land in a place where being positive (vs. being resilient) was the nom de geurre. It appears to me that place only exists in the heart of certain individuals and they are independent of location, even if they are influenced by it.

Mean people suck but complainers linger. I say this with no malice. In truth, I understand the need to unshoulder a load of personal misery. I’ve become one of the legion myself. As I look back at the 10 minute rule over the last few months I see a lot of short posts that remind me how much I’m battling the urge to unleash a wicked tirade of complaints upon the world. There is value in complaining. The catharsis of sharing your worldly ills with another person not only helps you get through it, but reminds you that there are others who are living less than perfect existences and in your shared disappointment lives a particular kinship. Yet complaining can be a high as well. You get hooked on the feeling of telling someone how shitty some person or situation is and you feel good about yourself—you feel above it—or maybe you feel a certain sense of relief in recognizing that someone understands what you are going through. Case and point: when I share about my cut up kid who keys my car and forgets his shoes and book bag for school, It warms my heart to hear a friend say, ‘yeah, I’ve been through that’. This is especially true if I know their kids are not presently incarcerated or 36 and still living at home and playing xbox all day. That kind of stuff gives me hope.

Too often hope is confounded with derisiveness, as if to feel good about your possible future you have to demolish the standing of those around you. This is a New York thing, but it isn’t only a New York thing. If people aren’t complaining about someone then they are generally talking smack about them. I am guilty of this as well—especially in situations where that individual has wronged me and I have no power to right the wrong. Again, catharsis. I understand why we do it. I see the need to do it. That doesn’t mean that it propels us all forward in any sustainable way; instead the act of demeaning and degrading others brings everyone down.

I want to live in a world where we can all be honest with each other and escape the petty confusions and competitions that fuel our mutually assured misery. I want to live in a world where the bottom line is, ‘how does what you are doing make us all better’. I want to live in a pipe dream, I suppose. Still, when we can put aside individual grievances and personal goals to reach a place where we can come to an amicable conclusion on any issue, that’s when I start to feel positive about the world I’m in.

10 minutes, out!

I am starting to believe I live in an environment in flux. The cat told me. She stated one day that things were no longer at a standstill and adaptation would soon be necessary. Cats don’t speak English, but they have a way of saying things with their urine. At first I thought the peeing was petty revenge for the wifey snatching away her bedroom rights, but such actions seem far too complex for a cat. Now I’m starting to think she’s done with the status quo.

The understanding came during a feeding. I gave her the standard meal and even threw in a few treats to suggest that things didn’t have to be bad between she and the wife. Kitty snubbed the food and just stared at me. She mewled a few times and walked away like I’d just offered her a tasty lump of poo. My treats are the good stuff. I spend on the goodies for my pets. Unfortunately she seems to be in a place where she wants something different and she is going to speak her bright yellow language until I figure it out.

The family is not good with this deductive method. They want answers yesterday or kitty whuppins today. Obviously we aren’t going to spank a cat, so I gotta come up with a solution before they do. It’s kind of exciting this race to deduction. I just hope I win.

I’ve been pretty silent about who I think will win the Super Bowl mostly out of respect for my friends lining up on either side of the equation. The fact is these teams are not actually evenly matched. The road to this disparity lies in their past schedule. You see it when you look at their loss to the Colts and again in the way they closed out the season. While the games were wins, and seemingly big wins, the team exposed their fatal weakness: The Seahawks cannot sustain offensive drives unless the passing game is effective.

I’ve heard all the talk about the weather and Manning (his accuracy supposedly dips in the cold), but i’m not convinced. The Legion of Boom is an awesome secondary that, despite this, will be hard pressed to cover the 3 star wide outs and the suddenly phenomenal TE that Manning has to work with. If that wasn’t enough, Knowshon Moreno isn’t just playing for a ring, he’s playing for his career. Moreno is set to become a free agent after the season, and given the arrival of Monte ‘can’t’ Ball, it is unlikely he will be resigned. As they said in Gladiator, “What we do here echoes in eternity.” or at least in the draft war rooms as the management teams decide to use Moreno as a stopgap or burn an early pick on an RB.

If there is anything that cements my pick it is the preseason thrashing the Broncos took at the hands of the Seahawks. I never made it to the pros–barely made it to college–but I understand the ego and pride that goes into playing and even coaching. See, the Broncos aren’t just here to win a game either. The Broncos came this far to lower the boom on the Legion.

Some Thoughts:

1. In a week where news breaks of a young woman being beaten to death, ostensibly over a photobombing incident and another woman makes the news after her ex-husband requests that she stay on living in the family home with him and his new family as their housekeeper, there isn’t much of a wow factor I can add.

The boys and I are back to playing minecraft after another hiatus. This recent return features a change in play style. Once again we have a major goal, which is to construct a massive castle with at least a 200 block radius. The compromise is a window of time early in the game where we were allowed to use creative mode to procure resources. Consider it ‘tutoring’ or a jumpstart for kids who don’t always have the patience to get through the initial toughness of developing resources on hard mode. This is about zone of proximal development; finding the sweet spot where kids are challenged and learning without feeling overwhelmed. I think the game helps me understand them more, because it creates opportunities to see the three create and collaborate in ways that force them to take advantage of their particular skill sets. The baby is too young to fully grasp the intricacies and dullness of mining for elements to build the walls, but he will hunt for food and protect build sites and dig new tunnels and do some wicked interior decorating. He learns from all of this and grows his patience as he discovers the relevancy of putting in the necessary time to do a job well.

This isn’t exactly the best training for a kid but it is a start. I believe in the philosophy of 10,000 hours to expertise. While I won’t be spending 10k on minecraft, I do sense that what I learn about them through the game will help me design a strategy for the 10,000 hour commitment they do need to make.

There was a moment in tonight’s football practice when a kid turned to one of the coaches and asked, “Why aren’t you voting for the Seahawks if you are wearing green?” Just like that this boy of 8 yrs reduced the complexity of watching and rooting for particular football teams into a laundry room scenario. Still, the boy wasn’t far removed from the truer philosophical questions: Why do we cheer at all, and how do we signify our allegiance?

Over the past week I’ve heard people take sides. It is Montague v. Capulet, Sharks v. Jets,   Dukes v. Hoggs, Broncos v. Seahawks. It always boils down to the insider v. outsider/good v. evil binary understanding that we seem to have of human existence. What bugs me is not the level of investment in these symbols of our sameness and difference, but the very idea that the two cannot be united and thus mutually grow from the competition.

We have a binary understanding of how the world works. If we believe in X, well then Y has to be wrong, because somehow it challenges our perceptions of X. Thusly tribes are sprouting up around the idea of these two teams. Seattle is the #1 defense, so their identity is carved out of toughness and willpower. Not coincidentally, this is the team name I originally requested for my 6-7 football team, a squad of never-played-before kids who exude the will to overcome. Denver is flash and dominance; an overwhelming passing attack headlined by a once-in-a-lifetime quarterback who was clearly born to the position. Not coincidentally this was the team name I originally requested for my 8-9 squad, a group of speedy and sure-handed boys led by a pair of QB’s that ache to fling the ball downfield. So, even from the start of the season I recognized the binary nature of these things and fought to unite them in some way.

When the Superbowl kicks off this sunday I’ll be cheering for the Broncos and I’ll be cheering for the Seahawks as well. Both teams are the best at what they do. Both teams earned the right to be there, and both have their extra-orbital superstars that make the competition one of the best ever. I am more interested in watching the cerebral Manning deal with the Legion of Boom than I am in any one team carrying away the show.

There might be something to this whole ‘cyclical nature of the craft’ thing. Check about three hundred posts ago and I’m sure I said the same thing then. As before it is these maddening fits and starts that is driving me away from the keyboard and towards my Vodka-filled freezer. I can see it in my recent posts, where I have a solid thread to work from and end up with half formed thoughts and ten minutes of what amounts to little more than a handful of sensible writing.

This is what the writing process looks like sometimes: you sit in front of a keyboard and frantically effort to unjumble your thoughts into a cohesive string of logical sentences that rise precipitously towards a point. Then suddenly you realize that everything you wrote makes sense to you, but not to anyone else. Then you go back and you do it again. And again. That revision process doesn’t apply to the 10 minutes of raw output I disseminate here, so that recursive process appears in its own way throughout the successive days once a solid idea strikes me and drives me back to the keyboard again and again.

I wonder what ideas will bubble up over the next few days. My mind is clogged with thoughts of magic, football, ghosts, and the Matrix. Few of these ideas are connected, but the mind tries to make sense out of things through dreams for some and through writings for others, and I wonder what dreams may come.

I’ve started to question why I coach. The questions came not from any lack of enjoyment but from the constant confusion and shock people seem to experience when they realize I coach 3 flag football teams in different age groups. The most common presumption of reason is, “Oh you must do it so you can control practice schedules.” but that never crossed my mind when I started. I just believed that I could put my kids in the best possible position to succeed. The more I coached, the more I realized I like the chess match and the chance to do what I wanted to do for my kids for all the kids on the roster.

What bothers me about the role is that there are so many guys who aren’t in it for the teaching and the strategy. They are in coaching in order to win and feel good about beating other people. I coached against a pair of those guys today, and it was clear that one was very devastated he couldn’t get his 4-5 year old players to do what they needed win the game while the other was angry with his team for not being very team-like in the way they played.

Both these situations sprang from the same source: Coaching. Both problems are more about the coaches not being able to motivate players and not staying where they are supposed to be on the field.

Coaching gives me a huge rush. I get to watch my kids grow into team-players and get to watch them work as hard as they ca in order to present the coming results.

The problem with bureaucracy is that it often gives comfort to those who have been in the system for a long time yet no longer have the desire to affect change and quickly burns out the young and passionate people it should be heralding. There is no quick fix to this problem. It seems to be engrained in most large-scale organizations. I see it where I work, where I used to work, and in places I associate with. As an employee all you can do is find your piece of happiness and do what you can without raising the hackles of those who no longer have that same level of passion or unaligned dedication that you do.

I say unaligned, because people will over time shoulder the baggage of allegiances and agendas. Sadly, the system forces us into these things and as a result we may become more beholden to these than to our own nascent understanding of why we started doing the work we do.

 

This MLK was marked in Phoenix by a TKE black party. A black party is basically a party where folks dress up like stereotypical blacks and get drunk by drinking out of hollowed out watermelons. This goes beyond insensitivity–especially when you factor in the timing of it. Still, I’m not sure the true impact of the act will be felt until the AZ black community has a chance to reflect on the event. and separate truth from sensationalization.

The problem with this sort of thing is context. These students either didn’t know or didn’t care about the context of the day in terms of the importance to the struggle. I’d ben in line for putting these kids on probation until they meet some criteria for advancement. Others I talk to are not so sure, claiming that due to free speech they should not get expelled or punished for their behavior.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. It is nuts that I am already thinking about 1400. That’s gonna be a big milestone. 1460 marks 4 years, so that will be even bigger.