A non-exhaustive list
📍 Washington, DC
I started this Ball Philosophy thing by writing about how I decided to coach again. How thinking about the finiteness of my life began a domino effect that led to a philosophy reading habit, which led me to go all in on doing what I feel called to do. After a summer spent working 6 camps, and on the bench for 20+ games, with nearly 1,000 kids, I’m thinking more here about what it is about coaching that I love in the first place.
It’s where I can most clearly see myself Contributing the Most
When I tell people I’m reorienting my life to coach basketball (leaving the 9-5 in favor of project-based contract work that is both in line with my coaching interest and flexible enough to indulge it), they often spit it back at me as my “passion”: It’s so cool that you’re pursuing your passion. Or, I wish I could do that, I could never. Or, it’s great you’re doing what makes you happy.
What those phrasings get right is that I am doing this out of self-interest. But they don’t seem to capture the seriousness with which I approach it. This is about life itself. Living how I aspire to live. Giving what I have to give.
I saw Doug Lemov — author of “The Coach’s Guide to Teaching” and the former Managing Director of the charter school network Uncommon Schools — talking about how critical thinking is context specific, meaning you can only really think critically in domains that you know a lot about. So that’s why. The reason I feel uniquely primed to offer my gifts through coaching basketball is because I know a lot of stuff about and around the game. Not just its rules and tactics, but its culture(s) and history, its assumptions, politics… and its interconnections with all of those sorts of things outside of basketball. And that allows me to see how I can contribute via basketball in ways I just can’t in other domains.
Coaching is like the home base for how I relate to the world, and it’s also a good container for me to practice fixing my own problems. In college, I only turned my GPA around when I realized sport could be a subject of academic inquiry. And now, when my counselor introduced me to nonviolent communication (NVC) in the context of my relationship, I naturally turned to imagining how it could resonate within athlete-coach conversations.1
I want to see what it looks like doing it my way
Sean McVay — Head Coach of the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams — suggests coaches ask themselves, “Would you want to be coached by you?”
Undoubtedly, that is a big part of my motivation and ethos. I want to be a coach that I would have loved to play for. One that would nurture my younger self with truth but warmth, imbue confidence in my younger self, teach my younger self tips and tricks to succeed on and off the court. So it’s like I want to prove what my younger self already knew, in terms of what really helps athletes. And I’m curious about what I can become in the process.
I also believe that the coach I aspire to be can be really, really good at this coaching thing. Here’s my thesis: Analytics have made their mark on the basketball world. There has been plenty of innovation on the O’s (from the pick-and-roll to the Princeton to the Triangle) and X’s (from the Aboeba defense to the box-and-one). Players are more technically skilled than ever, and it seems like we are on the right track with sports science. But to me, the biggest difference-makers are based in humanity.
I want to see what happens when we heed the philosopher, the poet, the sociologist, the human-centered designer… and what we can apply from social work and spiritual texts. I believe sport is a deeply human endeavor, and no matter how much we try to optimize it, as long as the game is played by humans, the human condition reigns supreme.
The teams I want to be a part of represent what I value most in the human expression. They have an indomitable spirit, a gracious generosity, and an empathy and care factor. They are free and creative and aggressive and soulful. How do we cultivate those qualities? I think the humanities help.
Myth-busting
I believe the same things that turned me off to the game — or rather, its industry — are the same things that give me insight into the value I can bring.
For a while, my subconscious believed that to be a legitimate basketball coach I had to do what I believed the mainstream coach does: treat players like property or at least chess pieces, possess a mind/bank of endless set plays and defensive schemes, and obsess over the details of scouting your opponent. All myths.
I believe that the myths we believe in can make or break our ability to achieve our potential, and I am excited by the potential of basketball as a myth-buster and myth-maker.
For example, it used to be common knowledge that “bigs” couldn’t and shouldn’t dribble or shoot outside shots, and guards couldn’t and shouldn’t post up. It took particular players, coaches, and teams to legitimize the idea of “positionless basketball” (and I trust those teams had a competitive advantage for their early adoption). I believe that there are other mainstream, systemic myths that, when busted, can provide value visible through literal wins and losses (though the busting of the myth is worth it in its own right).
My interest is not just about proving how wrong or right certain ideas are, proving how smart I am along the way. I’m interested in basketball as a place where we practice how to live and live better.
After 30.5 years (about 23 of them basketball-filled), basketball feels like the place where I can be most useful in working to demonstrate “it doesn’t have to be this way”.
To get specific… I was assistant coaching with a 17U AAU team this summer, and since we were running a switching defense, most other teams, as they rightfully should, would hunt our “bigs” to switch onto their smaller “guards”. From there, as the opponent’s guards would attack our bigs off the dribble, our bigs often resorted to hand-checking or purposefully bumping into the offensive player as they began their drives. Many foul calls ensued. When I probed our guys, they implied, insisted, that this was the only option: “They keep getting by us.”
As a coach, I wanted to convince our bigs that it doesn’t have to be this way. I wanted to convince them that as 6’6 and 6’7 players, they could guard 6’0 players, even those that might be quicker. “Hold your hand up as far as you can,” I suggested, while doing the same with my 6’4-on-the-roster frame. My hand could not nearly reach theirs. “Trust that you can contest shots with your length, even if you get beat.”
I got chills from witnessing that come to life in our final game of the summer, as they each blocked shots of smaller players at the rim, while minimizing their fouling throughout the game.
Sometimes basketball myths are contained on the court (see Brian McCormick’s “Fake Fundamentals” for plenty of good ones), relatively harmless to the “real world”. But sometimes their meaning feeds into racist, sexist, or otherwise dehumanizing logic, like:
- “White men can’t jump”2 and the flipside myth of the naturalness of the Black athlete’s abilities and supposed (dis)abilities
- The trope of the “dumb jock”
- Notions that “hard work” necessarily explains success (i.e. “meritocracy”)
- The idea that fear, shame, and violent tactics motivate players
- The view that players are merely containers to be filled with a coach’s knowledge, and that coaches always know best
- The belief that sports are inherently — rather than coincidentally or due to path dependence — male
I am hopeful that when we take time to bust such myths on the court, it can lead to their subtle unraveling off the court as well — that when you win (play well, inspire onlookers) it’s a win for what you believe in.
Coaching as Counseling
In America, we love our sports, and we worship our coaches. So much that we justify even abhorrent behavior that our religions or ethical understandings would not condone otherwise. When I think of Bobby Knight, the first thing that comes to mind is him throwing a chair on the court during a game in an expression of his outrage. But he knew ball, so…
Richard Reeves — in my opinion the foremost researcher / voice on men and boys in America (the population I typically coach) — has been rightfully pointing out the unique reverence of coaches in our country, and their potential as therapeutic, counseling figures.3 Growing up, I looked at my coaches almost as gods. The ones I respected most I imagined as omniscient beings, creating stories inside my head for how they became so knowledgeable. And with the ones I disliked, I certainly feared.
For better or worse, I held onto every word my coaches said. Maybe that’s because I grew up without much of a relationship with my father, or more simply because since at least 7th-grade I just wanted to be really good at sports as a platform for eventual economic security through an athletics scholarship to college. In any case, basketball is like a cheat code to reach kids, including many for which it may be a greater challenge to reach outside of sports.
Working so many youth camps this summer, I got to witness several different age groups. At the elementary and middle school levels, I found that the most important part of my job was judicial — handling disputes for which I did not observe. Inevitably, in the midst of some technical/tactical instruction, I would hear raised voices, and turn around to find tears flowing. What happened? Sometimes, a kid had said something mean to another kid on purpose. Other times, there was some sort of misunderstanding, or an accident like one kid passing the ball to another who wasn’t looking, hitting them in the face. Other times, it was something in between. Having to act fast (with nearly 100 kids running around a single gym there usually wasn’t much time to remove myself from the action), we tried restorative justice in 60 seconds. Seriously, I was shocked by how much repair we could accomplish — 1st-graders were especially ready to make amends, going from red-puffy-crying faces to handshakes within seconds. Those were some of my favorite moments of the summer.
In all of these aspects of coaching, I think what I value most are the values — the opportunity to physically, routinely, and visibly live into my values. Whereas so much of American life today is mediated, digitized, algorithmicized, and automated through computers and smartphones, and so many hours go to tasks like scheduling, meeting, meeting about meetings, and creating Powerpoints, all toward aims that either are not tangible or don’t seem tangible… the physical art form of basketball (and coaching it) is a powerful antidote to the dehumanization of it all. And phew, do I need that.
Zach Moo Young (Coach Moo)
- For the record, speaking with NVC continues to be a tremendous challenge for me, and I wonder how much of that is because of my (male) sporting background. ↩︎
- Codified by the title of the 1992 Spike Lee Joint ↩︎
- Before I decided on business school, I almost applied to Masters in Social Work programs (this makes my partner, a literal MSW, laugh), with an eye toward providing value to athletes. So when Reeves says this, it is deeply soothing to me. ↩︎
Ball Philosophy 