Volleyball Coaching Life-The Convention

 This is usually the most exciting time of the year for volleyball dorks like me. The NCAA tournaments are ongoing, and there are massively parallel showings of the matches during the  four days for two weekends, culminating in the Final Four weekend. We usually have our TVs on, as well as any number of laptops and desktops tuned to the online streaming, trying to catch as many matches as we can find.

All that has changed thanks to COVID-19, but it is as it is.

While some conferences played in the Fall, many conferences did not. The NCAA, doing the best they can while dealing with more uncertainty than certainty, has decided to move the tournament to April and has adjusted down the number of teams invited to the Spring tournament. I will definitely miss my annual ritual, it has been the focus of my existence for more years than I care to recall, what I will miss more than anything is the chance to see, speak to,  and hug my coaching friends at the AVCA convention. It is the one time during the season where we are all more or less on the same page: relaxed and looking forward to socializing.

Even though most people take the opportunity to learn and get better at their craft at the convention, the best part of the four-day run is the ‘tweens’: Between sessions, between matches, between speeches during the banquet, between the practices, between the exhibition booths, and all the other between’s you can imagine. This is where old friendships are renewed and new friendship kindled. There are friends that I see once a year at the convention, since we are from different parts of the country and we don’t all attend the same tournaments in season. They are club coaches, college coaches, former players who played for and against my teams, past and present colleagues on the same clubs, past and present  rivals from different clubs, mentors and mentees, the famous, the infamous, the legends of the game, the everyman who makes up most of the coaching community, and the people who had shared more than a few ignominious but hazy memories of conventions from the past. I once even ran into a guy who used to supply us with uniforms from many years ago. The passage of time did not matter, the prior differences did not matter, we were together to celebrate our common obsession: volleyball.

The equalizer was the convention, we all roamed the hallways, looking for a conversation, a point in common. Of course, we all are searching for an advantage, in the classrooms, on the practice courts, in the exhibition booths, in private audiences with the gurus of the game, or in swirling conversations with the rebels of the game, but the common thread holding it all together is the game. For it was time.

"The time has come," as Cecile Reynaud said,
   "To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and volleyballs—and knee-pads—
   Of at-large bids—and automatic qualifiers—
And why the server is boiling hot—
   And whether pin hitters have wings."

I will miss all of this.

I will miss getting together with people that I have met with annually for the last decade or more.

I will miss the good times at the matches, whether we are sitting in the nosebleed seats, the designated coaches’ seats that the NCAA so generously allows us to purchase, or the luxury boxes that allows us to chit chat without reservation as we missed play after glorious play.

I will miss the experienced sages dispensing their wisdom as well as the young thinkers challenging us with their creative energy; both generously spending their time with us in order to share.

I will miss the spectacle of the coach’s tournament, watching my friend, who is older than me playing a mean old man’s game and loving life.

I will miss the long sessions dawdling over libations with some randomly aggregated group in some anonymous bar whose only salient distinction is that it is located close to the convention center, the arena, or the hotel.

I will miss going out with my closest cohorts to consume massive quantities of big slabs of meat, consuming more calories, fats, and spending more money on one meal than anyone would  normally spend in a week of meals.

I will miss seeing all the All-American players dressed to the nines and sashaying to their seats walking on their seven-inch heels at the All-American banquet; some precariously, some with beaming confidence, making them even taller than they already are; I will miss seeing their pride and joy as they reap their hard-earned recognition and their moment in the limelight.

I will miss recognizing coaches who sweated all the details in a long career as they celebrate their successes, their longevity, and finally breaking through the obscurity and having their moment in the sun among their peers, with all due attention on them for once.

I will miss trying to figure out which booths hands out the best freebies.

I will miss talking to my exhibitor friends, reminiscing about the deals that brought us together.

I will miss telling tall tales of our glory days when we all used to play. Of course, as a short fat guy playing a tall person’s game, I had no glory days to speak of, it was just my imagination, running away with me.

So my friends, just to let you know: I am missing all of you already, but I will miss you even more when the convention dates rolls around this year. I will have your visage in my mind, your humor and your tall tales  in my ears, and my heart hurting for not having a chance to meet this year.

Alas, hope springs eternal. Here is to 2021, may we all see one another in person next year. For those who will have the opportunity to play in the Spring, in college or high school: good luck and be careful out there.  May you and your teams stay healthy and well.

Love you all.

Living-Do Something Everyday

 

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.” Jim Valvano (Valvano 2013)

Jim Valvano, in his now famous speech at the 1993 ESPY’s encouraged everyone to do three things every day: laugh, think, be moved to tears. The idea is that if you did these three things every day, you have lived a full day. This was a speech given when Coach Valvano knew he had very little time left on this earth.

While I agree with Coach Valvano, I also think that we can do more in the time that we do have  on earth, because we would be remiss if we did not strive to be more ambitious, more greedy with what we desire in our time on earth.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca takes a different viewpoint.  On the Shortness of Life,  Seneca reproaches his friend Paulinus for grieving over the shortness of life,

The majority of mortals, Paulinus, complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live. Nor is it merely the common herd and the unthinking crowd that bemoan what is, as men deem it, an universal ill; the same feeling has called forth complaint also from men who were famous...It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly. ,  (Seneca 1997)

The difference between the two thought pivots on one point: Coach Valvano’s advice was his last word for those us who are left after his passing, a bit of wisdom from someone who has learned the value of life and who is resolved to his fate. It is a last exhortation to live life as he would have liked to  continue to live.

Seneca’s view is in reaction to those who have been slothful and wasteful with the lives that have been given. He is disappointed, if not outright disgusted, with the way we humans are wasting the life that we are given.

Most of us, and I am among the worst offenders, live our lives as though we had infinite time to do infinite things. This blind belief in our immortality starts when we are young, based on youthful hubris when we were on the precipice of adulthood, fueled by confirmation and optimism biases. We carry that belief in our immortality into our middle and, to a large extent, into our old age. It isn’t until the finality of our very definite mortality has made abundantly clear  that we begin to regret our wasted lives. There is a refrain that is often recited derisively by the old in admonishing the young: you are wasting your life; you need to do more with your life. The dominant interpretation of “not wasting your time on earth”  is usually skewed to the  puritan work ethic that has been ingrained in every cell of our being since time immemorial. We are led to believe that living a productive, high achieving, and hard-working life; while contributing to the economy and society is the only definition for having lived a worthy life. This is definitely not my view. I am not of the opinion that we should all just stop working, that being productive, high achieving, and hard-working are undesirable; I believe that while they are important, they are not the sole defining qualifications for having lived a worthy life.

There are many facets to our lives, it is up to us to

Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are.

Nkosi Johnson

It is our actions in meeting the idea which is encapsulated in the previous quote that assures us of lengthening the time that we have to live:

•  doing what we can
•  with what we have
•  in the time that we have
•  in the place that we are.

I have been thinking about this topic for a while as I was going through a mid-life crisis and looking backwards at my past and the roads not taken, then I started to deliberately explore myself, I started to look at the me that occupies my mind when I am not occupied with paying my bills. I will grant that this is a luxury that most of us can ill afford, but it is what kept me sane in my time treading water in the corporate miasma.  In diving deeply into this thought, I started feeling  pangs of regret: for making the conscious decision to concentrate on the rational and certain parts of myself while also making the conscious decision to  neglect the sentient and amorphous parts of myself because that is what I was expected to do, as a productive member of the society, contributing to the burgeoning economy.

As with most humans, uncertainties bothered me, so I chose to ignore uncertainty and embraced the deterministic and predictable. I ignored the uncertain, the random, the unmeasurable and the unknowable; and in so doing I failed to leave room for grace, for beauty, for serendipity, for the unknown, and for the irrational real.

As I have come to the middle of my life, I appreciate the uncertain, the random, the unmeasurable and the unknowable. I did not realize that grace, beauty, serendipity, the unknown, and the irrational real  is such an essential part of my life. Indeed, I was mentally, intellectually, and emotionally skewed for a long time without realizing it. This was the key revelation which helped make me whole; I am now ready to make up for lost time.

I started the list as a way to feed my need for order in my life. I have planned, kept journals, and tried uncountably many different methods of organizing myself. I have always failed because I have never made it a habit to be organized. As a lifelong perfectionist, I have always put off executing my organizing because the conditions were never perfect, I always felt that I needed to wait to pull the trigger because I can always make the conditions better so that my execution of my organizational plan will be perfect; it was the act of a mad man, I was foolish, delusional, and definitely self-deceptive. My response to this failure to execute is to self-flagellate, bringing all the years of Asian guilt that had accrued in my psyche to bear on myself; until one day I came to the realization that Life is not a Game of Perfect, that instead of punishing myself, I needed to take care of myself, my whole and undivided self. This is when this list germinated.

I have tried to implement this list for the past year, I have found it difficult to execute consistently, yet I have found pleasure in meeting its challenges mainly because the ideas are so abstract and it takes a bit of imagination to actually accomplish. I have not quit even though I have yet to accomplish the list completely in one day, but I have had a very nice journey, I have enjoyed the process; which indirectly became a valuable part of the lesson: it is in the perseverance that the process becomes well hewn. I have not had a desire to not complete the list every day because I believe in this list. People like measurable results because they are tangible and obvious, while the immeasurability of the process is intangible and abstract. The magic happens in the confluence between the measurable and the immeasurable , the tangible and the intangible, the obvious and the abstract. It is not about seeing my choices as a dichotomy, that is a human construct; it isn’t about the either/or; it is about the alchemy which blends both; it is about the greater whole, the yin and yang as two halves of the whole circle.

Here is the list. I will explain each bullet later. I have had some excellent days engaging in the serendipitous process of doing while also reveling in the amorphous and ambiguous.

Note that this is not a definitive list, it is my list, it serves me. As with all things that I have done or are doing, I reserve the right to change my mind, this is a capture of this moment in time which is reflective of me.

I try to do all these things in a day; but more importantly, I also try to do it as a natural part of the ebb and flow of the daily rhythm. I do this without calling for notice or recognition, i.e. do it without an ego. Finally, I do this while in wu-wei, that is: I try not to try.

Things to do Every Day*

• Learn something new
• Teach something
• Experience something beautiful
• Be inspired by something wise and profound
• Allow something to move you to tears
• Do something unfamiliar
• Do something uncomfortable
• Do something that makes you feel vulnerable
• Do something kind and generous
• Love someone unconditionally

*In reviewing my list against Coach Valvano’s list, I can safely say that I embraced the spirit of his three things, except I am much more pedantic and nitpicky, but that is my nature.

Works Cited

Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. "On the Shortness of Life." In On the Shortness of Life, Life is Long if you Know How to Use it, by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 1-33. New York: Penguin Books-Great Ideas Series, 1997.

Valvano, Jim. "Jim Valvano's ESPYs Speech Transcript: Full Text." MyTownTutors. March 28, 2013. https://www.mytowntutors.com/jim-valvanos-espys-speech-transcript-full-text/ (accessed November 25, 2020).