Ruminations-Why Did I Cry?

I cried happy tears as Jordan Larson collapse to the court after her last kill of the tournament landed at Ariake arena. The euphoria was indescribable and uncontrollable. In the aftermath of that match and watching the players, coaches, and support staff hug and cry together, I continued my emotional catharsis until I was able to get to sleep in the early morning hours.

As I read through the postings on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, I noticed people expressing surprise at their own emotional responses, as well as the responses of other people who had cried tears of joy at that moment. Perhaps a more reserved response is the more rational one, but I doubt it.

I can’t explain why so many felt the same emotions as I did, all I can do it try to explain my own reaction.

I first became aware of volleyball when I saw the fuzzy footage of the 1976 Olympic competition in Montreal. I remember seeing a small man, playing a big man’s game, digging everything in sight. It was the great Stan Gościniak of Poland, and I was hooked.

In the run up to the 1980 Olympics, I became aware of the USA women’s national team, I learned that they had a great chance at winning gold. I was excited, yet I knew next to nothing about the team nor the stories that swirled around them until much later in my life. Then, the USSR invaded Afghanistan and the world changed. The western democracies boycotted the Moscow games and politics interrupted the flow of what was supposed to be.

Ever since then, I have followed the USA men’s and women’s teams. I went to undergrad and then grad school, I played a little pickup in gradual school, I was a never-bloomer, a fat and slow grad student playing with freshmen and sophomores. I loved it, even though I was out of my league and got my butt handed to me every time I played. I continued to play in rec leagues after I graduated and started working. During a league night, one of my teammates asked me to help him coach a 14 and under girls’ team and I have been coaching ever since. I caught the fever.

True to my Type A nature, I dove into coaching: reading, going to clinics for both players and coaches, and talking volleyball with anyone who love it as much as I did. It was through coaching that I met John Kessel, amongst the many other things that he taught me over Mexican food and beer, he taught me the history of American volleyball.

It was while learning to coach that I met Arie Selinger in a coaching clinic in Chicago. A connection to that 1980 and 1984 USA team. It was also through coaching that I met Janet Baier (Howes), one of the original members of that 1980 team. An undersized middle, Janet was supposed to play in 1980 but was denied that chance. She was then replaced on the roster in 1984. Janet worked as an official and she also coached junior volleyball. While she was doing those things, she also always had a presentation with her. She had all her memorabilia from her time on the national team, all of them. She would show them to kids during her volleyball clinics and she would regale them with her stories. A true ambassador of the game of volleyball. She would tell me stories about Flo, and her beloved teammates on that 1980 team. Janet was usually a very upbeat person until the subject of the boycott comes up, then she visibly darkens, and the vitriol comes out. She never forgot and she never forgave. The pain of losing her chance competing in the Olympics gnaws at her even decades later.

All that personal history serves to give an idea of what shaped my mindset about the Olympics and the USA Women’s National Team. I always felt that there was unfinished business for that group of athletes, I deeply felt they were owed a debt for the missed chance to compete and claim their spot in volleyball history. It  was a debt that someone needed to pay them, and us, the American volleyball fan.

As I became more involved and educated in coaching, I started to learn more of the history of American volleyball from the people I met through coaching volleyball, as well as experiencing history in the intervening years. Every four years I lived and died following Olympic volleyball: 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and now 2020 (2021).  I followed the national teams in their journey to the quadrennial in the other three years of the quad. I watched players grow from club players to college players to national team players. I celebrated with every triumph and suffered with every defeat. I followed the scant media reports on the technical and strategic nuances of each win and loss, even though I was always on the outside looking in. While I would not consider my experience unique or comparable with the experiences of the coaches and players throughout the years, I would have to give myself credit for being committed to the cause. I am sure I am not alone; I know  others who have had the same fervent desire to see the USA women’s team get their gold. The silvers and bronze were great achievements, but to reach the top of the podium is the goal.  I suffered with the team and my fellow fanatics in 1984, 2008, and 2012 when we were so close, and I cheered mightily in 1992 and 2016 as the teams won the last match of their Olympics. Buried deep inside me, I had a mental ledger to balance, a debt that needed to be made good.

I knew rationally that I was being overly emotional and small minded, but rationality had nothing to do with what I was feeling. This was volleyball.

You ask me why I cried when the 2020 edition of the USA women’s team won gold? I cried because the ledger is balanced, the debt has been made good. I cried because Flo and Janet did not live long enough to see it. I cried because all the players and coaches who were a part of this team throughout history finally know that the mission is accomplished, built on the foundations that they provided for this group of #12Strong. I cried because the chase is finally over, and we can reset the balance to my personal volleyball scales. We can start anew, without that sword of Damocles hanging over us.

Of course, that is just me.

Ruminations-Medals and the Competition Format

Swimmer Lilly King rightfully went off on the general sporting audience for belittling the accomplishments of the silver and bronze medalists in these games. https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/olympics/lilly-king-slams-bull-5bexpletive-5d-mentality-of-not-celebrating-silver-and-bronze-medals-at-olympics/ar-AAMKAPV

The attitude that only gold matters is rampant throughout all the global cultures, there have been trolls on the Chinese social media platform Weibo taking the Chinese athletes to task for not earning more gold, even as China is leading the gold count.

King is correct in her indignation concerning the attitude from the folks back home, and it is admirable that she was strong enough to speak her truth. It is difficult to even make it on the USA swimming team, let alone make the finals of these games. Of course, that has never stopped people from spouting off before.

Part of the general public’s cognitive dissonance is their understanding of the purpose of the Olympic games. The Olympic motto, as it was amended on July 20, 2021 became: Faster, Higher, Stronger - Together”. The addition of the word together reminds everyone that these games are meant to bring the world together in celebration of competition amongst all nations. The focus on earning a gold puts the focus on the winning and not on the competing. The emphasis is of course human, we look at competition as a means to an end, that the sole purpose of competition is to win at all costs rather than in the comradery of competing with the world.

The other influence on our thought process is that most think of winning as a domination of the opponent, a declaration of being the best of the best period. In reality, the Olympic competition is not formatted towards selecting the best of the best for all time. The Olympics are formatted to create a specific opportunity, at a specific time, demanding a concentrated effort by the athletes to perform under a high stress environment. It is selecting the best at a moment in time. Which introduces a large amount of uncertainty to the proceedings as well as mental pressures on the athletes under stressful conditions beyond that of normal competition. It is not just another championship, another meet, another series of games. It is the Olympics.

There are many ways to determine the winners in the sporting world. Each format affects the nature of winning. The amount of time that elapses between each stage of competition also affects that nature, whether we pay attention to it or not.

In the world of the NBA, NHL, MLB, and MLS, each stage of the head-to-head competition between teams are divided into a best of format, where teams are required to compete in a predetermined series of odd number of games and the one who wins over 50% of the predetermined number of games is the winner. This format ensures that the best team wins, without doubt. If you can beat your opponent more often than your opponent  can beat you, the nature of the win is unequivocal.  The probability of the underdog triumphing over the favorite is minimal, if all goes as planned, i.e. discounting the occurrence of injury etc.

In the Olympics format, as in the in the Super Bowl, college basketball, and most other collegiate sports, it is the bracket play format. The probability of the underdog winning is much greater because if you are not at the top of your game at that point, in that space, your chances of winning is greatly reduced. In sporting lore, we talk about having a puncher’s chance, this is the situation where the puncher increases their probability of upending the expected results. We, as fans, look forward to the upsets, whether it is because of one team overachieving, the other team underachieving, or whether it was just by fluke; the results stand forever, there are no mulligans. This is why we all love March Madness as we live for the spectacle of the lower seed beating the higher seed.

While the college basketball March Madness is held over a month, and the NCAA volleyball playoffs for almost all divisions are held over three weeks with each team playing two matches every week, the Olympics are much more compressed: two weeks of competition with the first week devoted to pool play every other day, while  the second week is planned for sudden death bracket play.

The Olympic schedule is super compressed for all sports because the schedule for the entire enterprise is two weeks. As a comparison, the Volleyball Nations League takes place over six weeks and the teams playing three matches a week on three consecutive  days.  In some ways the consecutive days of competition and the week-to-week travelling makes the tournament challenging, but each team is given the freedom of changing the rosters from week-to-week. While the roster is set for the Olympics, with designated alternates waiting outside of the Olympic Village if injuries occur.

Most of the general public does not understand nor care that the format of the contest, the format of the selection process, and the nature of athletics, has an impact on the results of the competition.  The athletes are asked to perform at a predetermined time every four years, and they have planned their training  so that they peak in those two weeks.  You cannot afford to have a bad day. A bad day in those two weeks means that all the training, learning, and effort are impacted and competing at the highest level during those two weeks may not happen as planned.

It also means that there is a large amount of uncertainty in the contests. Depending on the sport, the winner may not be the best of the best for all time, instead they had achieved their best performance at that moment in time at that designated place, as planned. They need to be the best at dealing with their own human nature towards pessimism as the competition evolves, the best at maintaining their personal “flow” at all times, and they need to have the best athletic reactions while under stress, for those two weeks. Indeed, the gold medal winners may also need to be the luckiest out of all the competitors in those two weeks.

Those factors make significance of recognizing the top finishers more important. In examining the great number of things going right, the massive amount of uncertainty that happens in a single elimination format, it is very plausible that any one of the top competitors could have won the gold. Depending on the circumstances, environment, and a myriad of factors, one can arguably say that even those competitors outside of the top three could have won it all. There are too many factors that must go right in order for one person or team to win it all.

The cliché of just making it into the Olympics puts you at the pinnacle of your chosen sport is true, because you have a chance to compete if you are just present. Getting a medal at the Olympics means that you  have been able to not only train physically but excel at maintaining your mental composure while successfully processing the challenges presented to you in a compressed two-week period. Being the top three also doesn’t mean that lady luck did not smile upon you, it means that lady luck gave you enough margin to put you at the top three; and that, is worthy of celebration.