📍 White Plains, NY
One of my favorite coaches of all time was my freshman coach in high school. He would break down each huddle with a call and response technique — which I’d never seen or experienced before, and haven’t since. As we all touched fists, he would say, “Together…” and us players would respond, “…We attack.”
As a 14-year-old, I judged it as a little clunky, but it set the tone for what he wanted to emphasize, it was different, and memorable, apparently. What more could you ask for from a 3-word huddle breakdown.
I’d been playing around with what I’d do the next time I’m a head coach, and I’d settled on me saying, “All Play.” With players responding, “No Work.”
The word “work” is so prevalent in coaching and sports. I use it naturally all the time. “Work Hard” and “Hard Work” are among the most common huddle breakdowns I’ve experienced, along with “Team” and “Defense” and “Family.” As coaches, we routinely tell youth players to “do their jobs.”1 But playing a sport is not a kid’s job, and even for professional athletes whose job it actually is, it is still a kids game after all.
So I’ve been curious about how this reframe — insisting we are not at work here — might resonate with my next team. We may indeed be challenging ourselves, pushing our physical fitness to levels we never have before, committing to months-long seasons and dozens of practices and games. But ultimately, we are playing.
A life-changing book I’m reading (“Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life” by Marshall Rosenberg, PhD) took it even further, turning my curiosity into conviction. Rosenberg advises, “Don’t do anything that isn’t play!” And that includes work. “When we are conscious of the life-enriching purpose behind an action we take, when the sole energy that motivates us is simply to make life wonderful for others and ourselves, then even hard work has an element of play in it. Correspondingly, an otherwise joyful activity performed out of obligation, duty, fear, guilt, or shame will lose its joy and eventually engender resistance.”
I never want to forget that.
All play. No work.
Zach Moo Young (Coach Moo)
- I once witnessed a middle school AAU coach admonish his team after losing a game that “if you guys don’t do your jobs, we’ll find other kids who will.” ↩︎
Ball Philosophy 