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Honor What You Value and Value What You Honor

by Jack Bowen

02.27.2019


 

Harry S. Truman once quipped, “It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit.” Social scientists and leadership experts now empirically confirm this already intuitive claim. And yet, in the context of team sports—especially in youth sports—the adults in charge often celebrate just the opposite. We fervently collect and publish individual statistics, newspapers report top scorers and award weekly Players of the Week, and coaches select athletes for capstone awards indicating one player as more “valuable” than another, along with a slew of others such as Best Offense, Best Defense, and the nebulous “Coach’s Award.” As such, a disconnect looms amidst what we should honor and what we otherwise do honor.


This is an understandable quandary, captured by yet another well-known aphorism, “Not everything that counts can be counted. And not everything that can be counted, counts.” It’s the first part of the phrase here that’s relevant: any successful coach or athlete recognizes the powerful yet intangible esprit de corps. But team spirit, and those who generate it, can’t be quantified. We’re left, then, with the quantifiables, and when honoring athletes we often celebrate those who have been quantified. Is there any other option?

As you might anticipate: yes. A few, actually. First, there’s an easy one. Don’t give awards. As the coach controls the team’s culture, this is yet another component of that culture under her purview. I have done this for my 19 seasons as the head coach of a successful water polo program, and I remember it being quite avant-garde 19 years ago. Our team won the section championship for the first time in school history. Our goal was not to win, but, instead, to “Be Your Best”— to do so as a team, in the truest sense of the word, all in it together, trusting each other, doing what was best for the group and often forgoing moments of personal glory.


When the time came for our end-of-season banquet, honoring one player as more “valuable” than all the others felt completely antithetical to our team’s ethos. And it’s not to say we didn’t have valuable players on the team—seven players went on to play at top collegiate programs. Instead, we celebrated something more aligned with what our team honored: our captains. At the beginning of the year, following our pre-season, the team elected captains. They were asked to vote for a teammate who best embodies our team’s goal, and who could best represent them to our league and community. This, then, is the only award we gave that night, and every season to follow.

It may seem like we’ve fallen prey to the “consummate trophy giving” trending recently, in which coaches and leagues attempt to avoid any sort of hurt feelings in the face of a truly meritocratic system. But it’s not that at all. The focus instead lies in creating a particular culture, based on specific core values, and then honoring that which aligns with the culture. Those top players still earn the “societal” awards given by newspapers, league, section, and, eventually, All American—and no college recruiter is waiting to see if an athlete’s high school coach gave him the MVP award.


En route to this season finale, though, looms another potentially counter-productive phenomenon, even more deeply entrenched in sports: individual statistics. This, again, seems unavoidable, as a player’s statistics play a role in many of those aforementioned league awards as well as certain aspects of the college recruiting process. And, yet, when the focus becomes who scored, blocked, and assisted, it directly clashes with the supposed team-oriented culture. “All 13 of you were instrumental today,” the statistics-focused coach would say to the team, “especially Pete who scored 4 goals. He was really instrumental.”

There’s a viable solution here and something that honors what we value, namely, the role a particular player has when he’s in the game, regardless of any quantifiable statistics. My first year coaching, we added a statistic not common to water polo, though quite common in ice hockey (and now, basketball): the plus-minus statistic. This tracks whether the team is scoring or being scored upon while each player is in the game. So, for example, a player could finish a game at plus-3 even if he scored zero goals and his team lost.

I took this one step further. I spent a few years researching and then compiled a thorough history of our program, including all relevant facts about the team’s history. As with all such documents, it includes a page on individual statistics such as All-Time Scorers, etc. But these athletes become replaced over time: the top all-time scorer in 2000 is no longer top-10 on that list. But, in our program, if a player finishes the season top-3 in Plus-Minus, then their name goes into the record books forever, never to be replaced. Again, just another small way to celebrate what we want to honor. This year, our team’s top plus-minus winner wasn’t even a starting player and, yet, he will be in the record books for eternity.

These are just a few ways to juggle the historically pervasive yet counter-productive practices prevalent in youth sports. And there’s a third, which takes a bit more savvy as a coach, all in line with honoring what you value.

A few years back, I served as our school’s Assistant Varsity Boys Soccer Coach. After each game, the head coach would break down the game and, in this debrief, he consistently included the energy, demeanor and support of the bench players in playing a role in that particular day’s game. I appreciated this and got the sense the athletes did too, taking it to heart in understanding their role on the team. Then came the section Championship Quarterfinal game, in which we were down 0-1, very late in the game. Every time the ball went out of bounds, as the opposing team walked slowly to retrieve it (thus attempting to allow the running-clock to wind down) our bench players had self-organized and scattered around the perimeter of the field, sprinting to each ball to get it back into play as quickly as possible. We scored the game-tying goal, and the referee instantaneously signaled the end of regulation play. We went on to win in overtime. The bench quite literally helped to win that game and yet, many of them didn’t play a single minute.

We finish with a third famous quote to tie this all together: “Anything worth doing is worth doing right.” This all begins with taking the time to set and establish a team’s core values. From there, it may require going against society’s standards for success. And then, when the group is all together, trusting each other, they can go out and discover the heights of what they can accomplish together.

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Jack is the author of 4 books, including his latest (co-authored), Sport, Ethics, and Leadership (July, 2017).  His other books include San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Amazon Top-500 selection, The Dream Weaver and, If You Can Read This, featured in the New York Times, USA Today, and NPR. Jack has coached water polo at Menlo School for the past 21 years where they have won the league championships 18 times. Finally, he spoke at TEDxStanford in 2017 on the topic of awe and in 2020, at TEDxGunnHighSchool, "The Unexamined Sport Is Not Worth Playing".  Jack graduated from Stanford University with Honors in Human Biology and earned his Masters Degree in philosophy, graduating summa cum laude.