The Four Seasons of Snow

There are a variety of cliches, words of wisdom, great calls to action, and motivating speeches about the virtues of not quitting. Today’s story is NOT one of them.  This is a story about chicken salad and the “ill” virtue of not giving up. This is NOT a story that Vince Lombardi or Tony Robbins or Dale Carnegie or your minister would probably approve of.  It is stark realism at its best. 

 
The story starts a dozen or so years ago when I took over as boys varsity basketball coach at Northfield High School.  I love basketball, I love coaching, Northfield was on quite a run of bad luck, and I thought I could turn it around. I am really a sucker for challenges.  I always see things the way they could be and generally have a good feel for how to get there. I can’t play racquetball worth crap, but I can figure out how to get an organization from point A to point B.  That love for challenge has both benefited me and hurt me over the years.   

Northfield boys basketball was horrible. They won 2 games the year before, 3 before that, etc.  They graduated a lot seniors before I came, and so we were left with a lot of inexperienced players and a system depleted of players in the younger grades.  The players were smaller, slower, and less skilled than what I was used to, and certainly less so than the competition in this league.  But I ran them and practiced them and motivated them to think that they were going to win. And by the time the first quarter of the first game was in the books, all of those dreams of being a winning team were shattered. I’m pretty sure the score after one quarter was 24-4.  They literally ran us right off the court. It was a very tough year, with nearly every team thrashing us, despite my best attempts, despite my best thinking, despite the boys’ Herculean efforts,  and despite their never quitting.    

The low point came in a game with Randolph, in which despite my calls for hustle, and my team’s fulfilling those calls, despite my best efforts at coaching strategy, and my team’s greatest attempts at executing  that strategy, we went into the locker room down 36-2.  I was so embarrassed, and I didn’t even know what to say to them. The next day I got a telephone call from a sage old coach who had seen good days in Northfield boys basketball many years before.  He said that he believed I was doing as good of a job coaching as one could expect, especially for a first-year coach.  But he said something else that made a terrific difference in my outlook for that season and my outlook in life.  He said “Fred, remember this; you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken crap (except he didn’t say crap).”  “Some things just aren’t going to work, no matter how much you cheer them on, no matter how much you try, and no matter how much “you want it”". 

That had an amazing impact on me.  I took it to heart.  No one had ever said that to me.  You know, not everyone is blessed with a team like Vince Lombardi’s, and so Vince’s exhortations, loud as they may be in the values that we, as sports people, have come to internalize, sometimes make us feel inadequate and guilty because we cannot live up to those performance standards. It’s not the first part of their statement “Never give up” that is the problem.  It’s the silent promise at the end, where never giving up always yields success.  It’s just not true. 

The next game was a long bus ride (everything in Vermont is a long bus ride, up and down mountain roads, through tiny villages, etc.) to a town up north. Their starting five were 6’5, 6’6, 6’6, and two guards who could shoot the lights out  of the hoop. We went into the locker room down by 25 at half-time.  Before I tell you what I said, you have to understand that this was Vermont, one of the most backward states in the country. At that time, we only had two McDonalds and one Walmart in the whole state.  Most of our team had never been outside of Vermont, and so there were some things that we might take for granted that they didn’t. As the boys sat there looking dejected (which is how we are taught to look when we are not winning), I simply said to them, “Boys, we’re not going to win this game, so I’m not going to ask you to do so.  But if you go out there and just give it your all, we’ll stop at McDonald’s on the way home.”  Well, you would have thought we just won the state championship.  There was a tremendous scream, and they ran out on the court with great fervor and excitement.  They scrapped and dove on the floor and ran and hustled and fought for rebounds and loose balls, and they slapped each other on the butts……….and got totally drubbed.  But, they were happy.  ON the way home, I reached into the bag and pulled out the scorebook.  On the top of it, our scorekeeper, who was really a part of our team and who was in the locker room during half-time, had written in great big letters at the top of the book:  “WE’RE GOING TO MCDONALDS!!”.  The rewards in life can sometimes be very simple.

I am a person with a very long time horizon.  I don’t mind investing in things for long periods of time.  In fact, this is generally how I approach everything.  Let’s fix the very basic problem or address the very basic variables of what is needed to be successful.  If they are too bad off, let’s abandon them and start over.  Addressing the fundamentals will result in long-term success, success that is sustainable, and success that is not easily copied by competitors. So it might surprise you to find out that I quit that job after one season.   For the first time in my life, I was a quitter.  I realized that this was never going to change unless it was approached from a completely different angle.  There were no players in the system, and it is very hard, emotionally speaking, to go out and lose night after night after night.  But what I DID do was start a youth basketball league.  Its first class included my son and all his buddies.  And we started from scratch, we learned how to pick and roll, how to get our hand under the ball and our elbows straight when we shoot, how to play man-to-man defense, how  to help on the back side, how to box out, how to pass instead of shoot,and how to play together and have a good time. They played together for six years, and they were pretty good.  The town got a new police chief, and he was also a good basketball coach, better than I.  He did a great job with those boys, and they made it to the state final four.  I don’t take credit for that.  There were too many hundreds of hours in that gym between him and those players.  But I will take credit for knowing when to quit and knowing when to attack the problem from a different way. 

Nonetheless, we as humans are prone to repeat our mistakes, and I am certainly among the most human of humans. Failure is part of the fabric of life.  Some things are doomed to fail; they just don’t have any of the makings for success and are plagued by years of bad decisions.  They have eroded all points of leverage upon which to build success. Despite that, some people will give their all in trying to make them work. And while giving their all is virtuous, society has many other uses for their time, energies, and fortunes.   

I currently work for an organization that has great fundamentals, great talent, enormous potential,and the definite makings of chicken salad. It’s not quite as challenging, but it definitely tastes better.

Next week, I’m going to unveil, in fine detail, one of the most obvious chicken crap situations I have ever come across. And you will laugh. And I will cry.

Have a great week. ….  By the way, I’m weighing in at 209.5….down 10 lbs.  Wayne is a pound or two behind me. I can taste the money.