Ruminations-A Memorable Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving. All of it. From the food to the time of the season. The change of season from Fall to Winter is especially poignant as the weather becomes colder and the land takes a deserved rest. The spectacular foliage color spectacle signals the end of the time for growth and the beginning of the time for the earth to rest and rejuvenate. It also signals the time for people  to stay indoors and appreciate the warmth of home and hearth. It is a time of respite and recovery.

One of the most memorable Thanksgiving I had ever spent was, ironically, not with family or close friends, but with some strangers in the basement of a sterile institutional building.

Thanksgiving is an awkward time for gradual students, they are in the midst of the push towards the end of classes, ongoing research, performing never ending experiments, or writing interminably. It is a slight four days off, but really just one day off as most gradual students assiduously put their noses to the grindstone on the other three days, trying to make up for lost time that aren’t really lost and only take Thanksgiving Day off. Some take Thanksgiving Day  off because everything in town is closed and they are having to fend for themselves. It was during this situation that my friends Rick and Joy came up with a grand plan. Rick was a doctoral candidate at Georgia Tech, as was I, and Joy is married to Rick. They both matriculated at University of Illinois for undergrad, so we had something in common which created an instant bond. They lived in the married student housing buildings just north of the Georgia Tech main campus.

Architecturally, the buildings were plain ugly, but they served their purpose well for the families that lived there. The institute own the buildings and the rent was reasonable. They were probably built in the 1970’s as the lack of character suggested a utilitarian intent; that is, no thought was given to the aesthetics, both interior and exterior. This was as close to a building in a Soviet Gulag as I could have imagined.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Rick came to me and asked if I was doing anything for Thanksgiving. I frankly had not thought that far ahead. My parents were overseas and I was maybe planning on going out to a restaurant that was open and just grab a meal there. Having spent my first Atlanta Thanksgiving eating a chili dog, onion rings, and a Frozen Orange in the TV room of The Varsity, any hot meal is a good Thanksgiving meal. Rick said that he and Joy were going to host a potluck Thanksgiving feast with their neighbors in married student housing, and would I like to join them. I leapt at the chance.

The ground rules were that they were going to make the turkey and everyone else brought a dish from their country. The vast majority of the married American student couples had plans to go home, so the people who said yes were foreign gradual students. There were a few other single electrical engineering gradual students that joined in the festivities. I had no idea what to expect, and I suspect, neither did they.

That Thursday came and I schlepped my single guy contribution to the feast. I don’t remember what I brought, it might be alcohol, or it might be store bought goodies, this was way before I cooked for real, and had discovered food programming on cable. As I entered the basement of the common area in the married student housing, the smells wafting from the room guided me to the right place. I was a bit early but there were a few dishes already sitting on the large tables in the center of the room. A few of the neighbors were there, politely nodding hello and perhaps wondering what they had gotten themselves into. I set my meager contributions on the table and went into the kitchen. Rick and Joy had hedged their bets and made a few traditional Thanksgiving side dishes, just in case. They shouldn’t have worried. As time wore on, more people appeared, until the tables were groaning under the weight of the accumulated goodies. The conversations became livelier as the time for indulging drew closer, the kids became used to the strangers and all shyness went away as they worked hard at their playing.

I don’t remember all that was served, but there were dishes from all around the globe: Chinese, Korean, Indian, Icelandic, French, Lebanese, Greek, etc. It was a global smorgasbord. When the time came to partake, no one was a stranger, everyone jumped at the chance to serve some of their dishes to their new friends. The sound of conversation grew louder as everyone was describing their dishes as well as articulating the traditions behind their dishes. It was obvious that everyone took seriously their mission of introducing their cultural heritage to their friends and took great care in thinking about this strange American tradition of Thanksgiving and relating it back to their cultures.

I remember that not much food was left after the crowd was done. Everyone had that fat and happy warm after glow that can only result from great gluttony. Even the children were slowed to a mere trot by that meal. The conversations continued to flow, some were about our research work, much of it was about making it all work here in a foreign country, and the challenges of living in a completely different culture and social norms. The few Americans tried to explain American football and why the Detroit Lions always played on Thanksgiving Day, neither one of those topics went anywhere as everyone tried to draw analogies with sports from their own countries in an effort to make heads or tails out of watching large steroid filled men bash each other, continually falling, and getting back up just to have the same things happen again.

The party broke up in the early evening if I remember correctly. I have since colored that memory in the soft sepia tones as one of the best experiences of my life, so the memories are fuzzy, besides it has been decades since I was in gradual school.

I do remember making my way home with an enhanced appreciation for my fellow humans, regardless of our differences in cultures, loving our commonalities in our humanity, and the beauty of the experience of sharing food, conversation, and amity.

That was perhaps the perfect exemplification of the spirit of Thanksgiving. That afternoon in the basement of the Georgia Tech married student housing showed me a glimpse of what could be if we saw one another as individuals with significant differences which we can easily bridge on a one-on-one basis. It is the memories of those times that gives me hope for today.

Volleyball Coaching Life-A Salute to Us, Volleyball Coaches

As the months become colder, the high school and college volleyball seasons are drawing to a close. This is the cycle of volleyball, dependable and inviolable. Except that it did not happen last season, this season happened but it happened through a combination of sheer will and serendipity.

I am writing this after our club tryouts had happened and our teams are being formed, the high school championships around the country have been mostly decided. All divisions of college volleyball are going into its traditional denouement phase.

What defined this and last season is the same thing that had thrown the world into a cataclysmic disruption: the COVID pandemic. The disruption is real and profound, we had hoped that the it would dampen after a year, and we could go back to our normal routines. For some, that had happened with varying degrees of the unexpected, while for others the disruptions continued unabated.

In our world of volleyball coaching, changes came at us fast and hard. It forced us to adjust quickly and drastically. Coaching staffs, administrators, players, and parents tried to react like the Marines: adapt, improvise, and overcome. We all had varying levels of successes in the many different aspects of administering a program, coaching a team, and playing a season.

The fact that we had a season at all the last two years is a tribute to the people I am writing about: the coaches. I have been reading and listening to some of my coaching friends in the club, high school, and college ranks describing their experience these two years. It was astounding to me that these people who I love and hold dearly have survived these events in the environment that was imposed on them.

COVID and its attendant protocols and the fog of the unknown plagued all sporting events. The ever-changing public health situation and the uncertainty associated with what the greater society does not know wreaked havoc with the determinacy and certainty that all coaches thrive on, turning us all into basket cases as we are pushed far beyond our comfort zones. Dealing with the possibility of positive tests for athletes and the implications of contact tracing  made any kind of regularity in lineup and practice cadence impossible to maintain. Sudden cancellations of matches and tournaments due to COVID became de rigueur. All of this carried over into how our teams reacted on and off the court to the sudden changes. What little predictability we felt we had in regard to our teams disintegrated. We adopted to the circumstances and tried mightily to teach our teams to do the same. Except that it is much more difficult to go with the flow when you are a teen than if you are an adult. Assuming that adults were able to go with the flow themselves, that is not always the case.

This was all stacked atop the usual team sport emotional roller coaster. Coaching during COVID is like hitting driver in golf: every weakness, every miniscule imperfection in the team and program became amplified. In this case, multiple magnitudes, as the mundane become gnawing problems, the manageable blows up into the unmanageable, and previously unknown situations become catastrophic.

It was the unanticipated and unintended that became the most challenging.

How do you deal with a middle school team whose teammate lost a parent to COVID? How do you get them to show respect and yet also be socially distanced? How do you handle this situation as a coach and a leader of the team, including the families of the players? People will always look to the coach for guidance. This is something they never taught us in coaching classes.

How do you deal with the players — who read and watch news — express fear of what might or might not happen when they see the increasing infection, hospitalization, and death rates?  As the vaccines become available to players, how do you reconcile the differences in beliefs amongst the heterogeneous people which make up a team? How do you organize productive team practices and meetings in according to the myriad of intrusive, confusing, and conflicting guidelines?

How do you deal with the situation of players whose usual demeanor and mien crack under the stress of living with uncertainty, their protective space that was provided through team sports violated by the intrusion of the unknown? Some will withdraw emotionally, while others will explode emotionally.  

Some will make the case that the team is a microcosm of society in general, that the reactions of all involved are just an example of what is going on with the rest of the world. Except that being on a team is different. The team experience is that of creating a safe environment for a select group of people to interact intensive within the framework of the team for the purpose of pursuing a common goal. For many, the team is the safety bubble that isolates them from the vagaries of everyday life, and that safety bubble has been pierced and have disappeared. To make matters worse, the intimate setting of a team makes the relationships between everyone associated with a team much more intense and personal. People are more likely to become more vulnerable with teammates and coaches than they are with anyone other than family; that is what makes a great team. But that intensity and vulnerability makes the relationships volatile, both positively and negatively. The crucible of COVID has created an unnatural dynamic within the already volatile team environment.

I can not say that there is an optimal way of dealing with all these challenges. Indeed, every team environment is unique and the potential response to any guidance from the coach is also unique. There is no roadmap. There is no how-to guide. There is no recipe. There is no formula,

All that we have available to us is our experience, our character, our integrity, our love of every single player on the team, and our reason to coach. Indeed, this is where the exercise of finding our philosophy of coaching helps, but that is not enough, there needs to be an inviolable love of the people that we are working with. So much love that we are willing to sacrifice our own well being for the good of our charges.

There was a meme that appeared recently that read: Coaches lose sleep over other people’s children. They do much more than that.

I know coaches who scramble to get any playdate scheduled, just so their players have that hour or two of respite from the realities of life.

I know coaches who juggle the needs of their entire team during road trips, at the expense of their own health and well-being, that’s just coaching. But to do so in the COVID environment means that the constraints and the consequences of their decisions are much more dire.

I know coaches who cry in private because they are frustrated by situations they can’t control, and injustices they can’t correct.

I know coaches who throw themselves into taking care of the players who have lost a parent, just to give the surviving parent a break.

So. This is a long-winded way of saying that I salute to all my coaching brethren for persevering and bettering the lives of their players; for sacrificing themselves for the greater good of their team; and for having the integrity to do the right thing most of the time, whether they know it or not. I am in awe of their ability to think laterally just to keep the train rolling and on track. I am touched by their love of humanity. I am inspired by their empathy. Indeed, I am proud for knowing people who are great coaches of people because they know and understand  that it is the people that matters.