Book Review-Getting to Us, Seth Davis

I am not sure where to put this book. Seth Davis is a nationally known sports reporter and he is a very good sports writer. The prose that he commits to paper reflects his sports reporting background, and to be clear, he is a very good sportswriter. He tells his stories well and he has a fine sense of the internal stories of his subject. The stories are taut and always gives perspective on the person being featured.

But there is a problem with this book, many problems actually.

It is a collection of nine profiles of successful coaches; almost all of them have succeeded in their profession and are recognized as the leader of athletes. Some have well defined personalities and known reputations, others are relatively new to the limelight and benefits from not being ubiquitous in the media spotlight.  One problem is that the chapters are relatively short, which makes for easy reading but it also make the profiles seem rushed and incomplete. Davis is seemingly trying to make his points and then rushing to demonstrate the challenges and obstacles they have faced in their inner life through anecdotes and personal histories without really examining how those headwinds affected their coaching philosophies and execution of their philosophies. What we get is a laundry list of what they do and examples. Davis lays out the facts as a reporter and then he links the professional practices of these coaches with the facts, but he never drills in deeply into the why’s of the relationship between the fact and practices. It isn’t a fatal flaw but it left me wondering. To be fair, he states in the introduction that this was not the intent of the book, it still leaves a void, a road not taken which could potentially be productive.

Another problem is that Davis uses a unifying theme to tie the coaches’ profiles. The theme is the title of the book: Getting To Us. He explains the theme thus: “A team begins as a collection of me’s, him’s and you’s. It is the job of the coach to figure out a way to get to Us.” A noble yet unoriginal theme, as our sports culture has always revolved around teams and teamwork. Davis uses the acronym PEAK to describe the desired characteristics of a coach to enable this ability to see the big picture and get the team to Us. PEAK is: Perseverance, Empathy, Authenticity, and Knowledge. Davis tries to apply these four characteristics to the story of each of the nine men and tries mightily to squeeze details about their experience and make up into these four niches. The effort seems forced and at times are inspired and at times clichéd. Davis stated that he only intended to highlight PEAK and try to connect those characteristics to Getting To Us. The results are uneven at best, mostly disappointing.

The coaches that came through with their reputations enhanced are Geno Auriemma, Doc Rivers, Brad Stevens, and Dabo Swinney. Stevens and Swinney are relative new to the national spotlight so the portraits are excellent at revealing their stories to us, through the Davis filter. Auriemma and Rivers were revelations to me, their stories were fascinating even though a little short. Rizzo came through unscathed yet also unenhanced.

One thing that Davis did was to give a portrait of these men that are unadorned, he reaffirms the portrait of coaches like Meyer, Krzyzewzki, Harbaugh, and Boeheim as they have been portrayed previously in the press. He does however, go into explaining why they are the way they are, he was not very successful.  Urban Meyer came off as somewhat reasonable until the recent troubles at Ohio State with Zach Smith. Ironically, Davis also featured Meyer’s wife Shelley, in this profile. Davis never fully explained Krzyzewzki’s decision to deal with Grayson Allen’s transgressions the way he did, other than repeating his defense. Harbough came off like a petulant child at times, albeit a very successful one. Boeheim reaffirmed his public persona as prickly personality, even though he seems more sympathetic.

If you came to this book as a means to get any insight on Getting to Us, don’t waste your money. If you can to read some quickie portraits of nine successful coaches, I would say go ahead and read this book, although I would also advise you to temper your expectations.

Book Review: Grit by Angela Duckworth

I had bought this book when it first came out but I had put off reading it since I was learning what was in the book form the mass media since this topic and Ms. Duckworth’s book was a ubiquitous subject amongst the education and coaching wonks. Grit and resilience had become the Growth mindset for the last few years. After a while, I finally decided to sit down and read it.

All of that is to say that my impressions of the book are affected by the widespread popularity of the subject and my lack of enthusiasm is not so much that I disliked what Ms. Duckworth wrote, it is that my impressions of the book suffered from being exposed to the subject due to her success in getting her ideas through to the reading public.

As with most books which appeals to the business crowd, Ms. Duckworth follows the tried and true business book formula: define the problem, lay out the solution to the problem, and give a lot of anecdotal case studies backed with qualitative summaries of quantitative studies in order to get past the general public’s impatience with numbers and lack of aptitude with statistics. In this regard, Ms. Duckworth did a masterful job. Every chapter is backed up with numerous anecdotes; she patiently attacks our preconceived notion of intelligence being the determining factor for successful people with wave upon waves of examples that makes her point for her. In fact, when she does goes to the solution phase of her book: Growing Grit from the Inside out and Growing Grit from the Outside In, she still couldn’t quite let go of her initial pedantic mode.

Even as the reader has become more than convinced of her thesis, she persists in attempting to persuade the reader to accept her premise that Grit is important and desirable in our lives. It was all this reader could do to NOT scream: I get it, it is important, it is a great character trait to have and develop, get to explain the HOW and not the WHY.

While I am a firm believer in letting each person develop their own methodology in teaching, it was somewhat maddening to be reading more anecdotes which illustrate her key ideas in how to train grit. In the end however, I did glean lessons on a process, I will have to apply this process experimentally and apply the scientific method to ascertain whether my guessing was correct. In the end it will probably be better for me to go through this process rather than being spoon fed a process, it doesn’t lessen the frustration.

Indeed, this book was indeed a landmark achievement, I just wish that the author did not choose to follow the business book clichés and be more direct with her conjectures on the What-If’s and How’s of attaining Grit.