What We Have Here is….A Failure to Motivate

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The pass was off, I’ll give the wide receiver that. Maybe he ran his pattern wrong as well, but the ball definitely floated.

So in many ways, the interception wasn’t that big a shock after you saw the pass go up.

The receiver standing there after the ball was picked off, unwilling to run after the ball? I’d like to say that was a surprise, but after two months with this player it’s not.

I don’t know how to motivate some of these kids.

There’s a point in anything—not just football, but any aspect of life—where you get metaphorically kicked in the teeth. At that point you either fold or you get off the floor and get back to work.

We folded. Well, not all of us, but enough of us for it to matter in a sport which requires your whole team to be on point.

Some kids it’s easy. They’re natural competitors, whether on the field or in the classroom.

Some kids, it’s not.

And I don’t know how to reach them. It doesn’t compute for me, at all.

That’s on me, because as a coach I need to be able to do that. When that interception happened, the air went out of our team and, quite literally, a chunk of the team quit. Shoulders were slumped, heads down, efforts became half-assed.

You can encourage them, yell at them, talk them up, bench them—but what I can’t seem to do is get them going again. It’s like a car engine when the carburetor is flooded. It’s just not starting again for a while.

The thing is, opportunity—again, whether in football or life—is fleeting. It’s there one minute, gone the next. If you spend time moping, you miss your chance and sometimes it doesn’t come around again.

I know of what I speak.

And I hate to harp on it because these are kids. They aren’t the people they’ll be next week, much less next year, much less once they’re grown.

But the ability to get off the mat, to pick yourself up when you get knocked down—to overcome obstacles—is something you can instill in a person early.

Forget football for a second, that’s a critical habit for life.

Because life is really, painfully, unfair. There are times it flat out sucks. It has no qualms about kicking you in the groin and then spitting on you as it walks away. Most of us get nothing handed to us. Most of us will forever have to fight tooth and nail for what we want or believe in.

We are promised nothing and things are constantly—painfully—ripped from our grasp if we aren’t careful.

So it bothers me I can’t reach some of these kids. It bothers me that I can’t manage to teach these kids to be resilient. That I can’t instill the will in a player that when something goes wrong he shouldn’t shut down.

Because at some point he’s going to need that skill.

Of course, I realize it’s not all on me. It’s not all on the coaches, not when you see a kid three or four days a week and it’s only been about two months. There’s only so much you can do.

It’s a combination of all the people around him (or her) daily—the parents, the schoolteachers, everyone—who will help a kid find their way.

I guess at the end, all I can do is my best. I can try to instill them with confidence, teach them that a bad play or moment isn’t the end of the world and hope that they hear me (which, frankly, is a whole different post).

Some of the kids will get it. Some won’t. And some might five years from now when the “light switch” goes on because of something else.

It’s frustrating though, as I think over the loss yesterday. Could I have done more to help the kids turn it around and keep their heads? Could I have done something differently, whether for the wide receiver (who never got his head back in the game) or any of the other players?

I guess I don’t really know.

All I can do is pick myself back up, dust myself off and work harder to get better.

Hey, are you following Dad Moon Rising on Twitter or Facebook? Why the hell not?

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