Women and Children First?

I'm not sure whether or not I can make a connection to sport here or not, but I'll try anyway! The Week magazine recently reported about a study in which Australian researchers looked at what occurred immediately during the minutes and hours during the rescues of the Titanic and the Lusitania. They found that the percentage of women and children who were rescued from the Titanic, which took about 3 hours to sink, was much greater than the percentage of women and children rescued from the Lusitania, which took a mere 18 minutes to sink.

The hypothesis is that altruism is suppressed during those first minutes of crisis when the survival instinct is at its peak. And , once people have the time to ponder their values, that they then make different (in this case, more altruistic) decisions. There are numerous incidents of poor decision-making in sport (and of course, other situations) that are made in the heat of the moment. When the game is on the line, and something goes wrong, there is a strong instinct to react in a more primal way, not always one that is consistent with what one values personally, or even with what is best competitively.

Take, for instance, the age old situation of the basketball player who drives to the basket and misses an easy shot. Her opponent grabs the rebound and, in frustration, the player who missed the shot immediately fouls that player. The coach gets mad, her teammates glare at her, and the player who just fouled walks back down the court hanging her head with the full weight of knowledge that she let some sort of base pissed-off-ness get the better of her. And even in other sports, we know that it's usually the second fouler that gets caught by the official.

Seems like an excellent training ground to teach the benefit of restraint, or perhaps the re-channeling of emotion. Ultimately, a player wants to win. By mastering the emotional part of the game -- recognizing when an instinctual act may harm the team -- an athlete can gain a useful skill that can be used to great advantage outside the bounds of the athletic arena. In a March 9, 2010 posting on Fair Game News, Laura Pappano makes an excellent point about the recent incident where college basketball player Brittney Griner punched an opponent after tangling with her under the basket.

"If we believe competitive sports teach lessons that matter as much off the field as on, then let’s not just sit back and hope lessons emerge. A 19-year-old freshman like Griner may not intuitively be able to handle the pressure (including expectations that she is the future of women’s basketball), without explicit support. If press reports are even half right, Griner will someday be both a superstar and a stand-up person. But players (especially those with targets on their uniforms) must be taught to shrug off trash talk and physical contact under the basket; not everyone is comes to college play with that skill."

Rappano addresses the developmental aspect of this perfectly. Many athletes don't come pre-packaged with that restraint, particularly those under a great deal of pressure to perform. While we can't excuse such behavior, we also need to see it in its developmental context and seek to help athletes gain the skills that will do them good once they enter the working world.

I've coached "hot heads" before. I think I actually was one as an athlete for awhile (at least that's what some of my former coaches have told me). They have their place on a team. They can be inspirational leaders, can bring positive and passionate emotion to a team when it is in the midst of crisis and needs a lift. Learning the skill to channel that instinct of emotion in crisis, so that it helps, not hurts, the team is the trick. It's hard. Being in the middle of a hotly-contested game, for someone who is innately competitive, is a difficult place to cool your head. And sometimes you don't even want to cool your head as much as you want to channel it. Luckily, most careers, seasons, and games, last more than the 18 minutes it took to sink the Lusitania.

I once heard a sports psychologist who worked with Charles Barkley talk about how he helped the basketball player gain control of his emotion during the game. Barkley, who played with lots of emotion ( and still is not a master of restraint when he speaks his mind!) used to get extremely mad at himself when he missed an easy basket or made a stupid mistake. And he couldn't shake that emotion. Using a Keep It Simple Stupid method, the psychologist taught Barkley to, as soon as he made the mistake and started to get mad, say to himself "STOP." This unspoken mantra was powerful for Barkely who, at least according to this psychologist, was able to master his emotion by using the technique and immediately focus on what he had to do next.

I don't think Barkley's next thought after "STOP" led to thoughts about how he could save as many women and children as possible, but it probably allowed him to help his teammates win a few more games.

Breaking the Unwritten Rule

I was interested to read the comments of the coach of the Yates High School (Houston, TX) boys basketball team after the media and public response to his team's 170-35 shellacking of another team on January 5, 2010. Greg Wise, the coach of this obviously talented team, responded to criticism by saying:

"The real story isn’t getting out, and that’s what hurts me. If you are interested in breaking records, that’s not the main focus of high school sports. That’s not the stuff I’m teaching my kids. Nobody shows me taking kids home in an impoverished area where there is gang violence, or calling kids before school and telling them to get on the bus. Nobody shows them doing study hall before school. It’s crazy.”

His frustration is not unlike that of many whose stories are reported by the media with an eye toward simplicity, sensation, and what will grab the attention of a CNN Headline News viewer. But I have to ask, how would showing his players in study hall contribute to a well-balanced view of this issue? As far as I can figure, the issue at stake is one of sportsmanship, a commitment to the unspoken, unwritten contract that two high school teams enter into when they play each other. That contract, as I see it, includes the assumption that both teams will play hard, play fairly, and will treat each other with respect. Pressing, running the break, and allowing starters to play when you have a 100-point lead is not respect. Even if you are a regular participant in study hall.

I will allow that there is some gray area when it comes to "running up the score." There are countless stories of teams that were soundly beating another team, let up, and then ended up losing the game. But this doesn't look gray to me. It looks as black and white as a Holstein (and smells just as bad). And why do I think this is one of the more blatant acts of unsportsmanship I've seen lately? In part, because it is disregards one of the most important elements of team competition: that the game simply wouldn't exist without the full participation of two teams. The Yates team relied on the other team to even have a game (and the referees too, of course). They couldn't achieve any of their goals if the other team didn't exist, show up, or play. Unlike, say, pole vaulting, they couldn't score their hoped-for 200 points and have it count for anything if there wasn't an opponent (and I don't know enough about international track and field to know whether or not a pole vaulter actually needs to have opponents for his or her vault count, but let's say for argument, that they don't).

We can rationalize such running up the score, particularly in professional sports, for all sorts of reasons. But this coach's rationale is weak at best. In fact, his argument doesn't even address whether or not what his team was wrong. He deflects the issue by saying "My players and I do all of these other admirable things so you should ignore this particular act." Like many "rules of the game," not running up the score is unwritten. And these unwritten rules are most vulnerable to abuse since they are followed only when teams and coaches demonstrate thought, restraint, and discretion. This is REALLY hard in a competitive arena. How do you tell competitive players not to score or to play soft when all of their training has been geared toward the exact opposite?

No doubt, successful athletes have the "killer instinct." Successful professional athletes almost as a rule, need to have that characteristic. But to cultivate that at the high school level to such a degree that the utter humiliation experienced by the other team isn't even recognized, is a disservice to all involved in high school sports. The chance to blow out another team (and resist the temptation) is a great teaching moment. It is an opportune time to instill in players that competition and at least some level of empathy are not mutually exclusive. And it's a great time to demonstrate the honor of respecting another team's presence and participation in the game.