The very worst team

As I sit at a court watching a bunch of really unskilled younger teams play, I started thinking about the hierarchy of our game.

Coaches often cite the fact that only one team can win their last match of the season or the tournament for each division as a consolation for their players. My contrarian mind then turns to the other end of the spectrum. There must be a team that never won during that season: the team that brings up the rear.

This team hasn’t won a set, let alone a match. They go through an entire season without ever having a glimpse of the promise land. I see them as being not very athletic, not very tall, and are beginners working really hard at doing something that they don’t know how to do very well. Yet I see them persevering, staring at adversity in the face and trying their best at something that they are not very good doing. And yet they persevere.

I see them huddling after every point, arms around each other, eyes locked on each other as I try to teach my players to do and they huddle tightly, almost desperately, like their lives depend on it. It must be very difficult and mentally draining. And yet they persevere.

I think of the quiet rides home from tournaments: kids locking their lips shut, choosing to not respond to well-meaning parents, fighting their own frustrations in their heads. I see them talking to their frustrated team mates in hushed tones and rack their brains for the solution. They manage to survive the post-match entreaties of their coaches, yet another loss, yet another talk about rainbows and unicorns or yet another talk about the doom and gloom of failure. And yet they persevere.

I think about what it must take to keep going practice after practice, doing the same things that never seem to click, doing the drills that seem to make your team worse than better, scrimmaging against the worst teams in your club because your coach is trying to give you a reason to keep fighting. And yet they persevere.

Time after time, I see them shanking passes, get called for unskilled touches on the ball, hit the ball way out or forcefully into the net. I see them lose points in bucketful and yet I also see them smile and laugh and pat each other on their backs, telling each other to work harder, to believe, to do every lesson their dispirited coach tries earnestly to teach them. I marvel at their hope, their faith, and their trust in this person who must have expressed his or her frustration multiple times in fits of exasperation and despair. And yet they persevere.

How do they do it? Why do they do it? What keeps them coming back? What kind of people would do this to themselves.

Being a thought experiment I imagine them fighting the good fight every step of the way, never giving up. Yet I know most people would have written off the season or talk about not playing again next season, such is the nature of our culture. Yet I think there must be someone who is willing to lay it out on the line, to persevere through the darkness. I also imagine that everything that we say about the benefits of having grit and the patience and discipline to persevere will win out over the darkness of realizing the reality, that what we preach as coaches will come true for those on the left end of the normal distribution.

I don’t know the answer. I have no empirical evidence to say definitively that this team comes out of the trials and tribulations of such a season triumphant in their spirit and stronger in their convictions. 

I hope that they do.

Chinese Christians

Growing up Chinese has its own lessons. Every mother is a tiger mom. What you did in life was never going to be good enough; your best always fell just short of their expectations. Your every accomplishment was compared against the accomplishments of some unknown scion of one of her many friends who was the perfect son or daughter, who was a doctor/lawyer/billionaire/perfection.

In time, some of us were able to overcome this fiction and survive, but living with psychological scars that would mark us for life. You manage to ignore the criticism, but it is never easy.

Yesterday, my mom told me that one of our family friends had died this week. He was a religious man, someone who was obsequiously disapproving of my atheist belief; someone who is dismissive of my doctorate, saying that it is not quite as impressive as being a real doctor, a medical doctor. While I seethed and fumed, my mother would sing the praises of his two sons, who are both doctors and active member of their church. They went to Stanford, you only went to a state school, blah blah blah.

Over time, as we all got older, these sons got married and thrived in their practices. My mother would regale me with their salaries and the luxuries that their salaries were able to afford them. She didn’t see this as rubbing it in or being provocative or mean spirited, she saw it as a matter of course, the Chinese thing to do, to use other people’s kids to be an inspirational beacon to me, hoping that I can use their example to improve my own lot.

Then the stories started to change. These beloved sons slowly metamorphosed into uncaring and selfish sons. Their parents moved to where the older son lives, some place that was much more expensive than where they were living. Their retirement nest egg is not going as far as they envisioned, and their two sons, the ones with the upper six figure salaries refused to help their parents financially and practically. The oldest son, with his own child now spends his every waking moment with his boy, and rarely, if ever visited his parents. When the parents needed help going to doctors and needed medical advice, he left them to rot. It would have been easy for him to intervene on their behalf, to ease their difficulties in dealing with the medical establishment.

When ailment after ailment struck his parents, the sons seemingly abandoned them to their own devices. All of that fine Christian charity pounded into them having evaporated under the heat of selfish greed and hubris.

When the father died this week, the oldest son, who lived in the same town, refused to come to their house. The father’s body was taken away by the hospice ambulance, and the mother not being able to accompany the body as she had no way of coming back to her home. The body was cremated and no services will be held because the sons are uninterested in it. The second son is flying in next week, as he could not abandon his lucrative practice.

Fine Christian hypocrites.