BEHIND THE CLIPBOARD: Playing with Maximum Effort

It’s probably going to be my first year on varsity this spring, and I’m a little nervous. What do varsity coaches want from their players?

 K.L., Windsor

So here’s part three of the answer to that very good question, and the starting point is something I heard John Madden say long ago when he was coaching the Raiders: “I only have three rules,” he said. “Be on time; pay attention; and play like hell.”

This time, we’re on the “play like hell” part, and the answer, as always, is a little more complicated than it appears. After all, nobody goes out on the field thinking “You know, I don’t think I’ll play very hard today. I think I’ll just relax and let the other kids do the work.”

In reality, of course, there are games when it just isn’t happening, no matter how hard you try. Your energy level might be low, you might have trouble concentrating, or things just don’t go your way — and the result is you can’t quite get yourself into gear.

So let’s go back to another famous coach: John Wooden. Like all coaches, he knew it was too late to prepare yourself for a game when you got to the locker room. No dramatic speech was going to make a player ready who wasn’t already good to go.

Typically, then, coaches will emphasize a couple of things. Get to bed early the night before, eat well, spend some time thinking about what you need to do to help the team win. But Wooden, not surprisingly, took things a step further. He knew that the night before a really big game was not necessarily a night when an athlete was going to sleep all that well. Playing for a championship, or against a rival for a postseason berth, is going to make it hard to sleep like a rock (though some athletes can sleep no matter what).

So what John Wooden told his players was that preparation for a game began two nights before. That was the night to make sure you got a lot of sleep, and that day was also the day to make sure you had your life more or less under control. Good nutrition is also not something that just happens the day of the game, or even the day before. Eat well, drink a lot of liquids, all that stuff that you hear over and over again — you may be really tired of hearing it, but it’s also really true.

Another aspect, aside from physical and mental preparation, is learning how to be aggressive on demand. Girls especially have a tough time turning it out when the game starts. Sometimes they need someone to elbow them or push them a little to get fired up — and if no one does, they are too passive to play at their best.

When the game begins, you have to be ready to go, and successful athletes, like successful actors or successful musicians, develop a ritual that helps them play at 100% from the opening seconds. Some players listen to rap; others are quiet; others bounce around and pump themselves up with motion and noise. It doesn’t really matter what you do, but the first step is to find out what works for you, and then make sure you create space and time so that you can do it.

Again, though, that ritual won’t help you if you haven’t done all the other things that give you the best chance to play like hell. And if you don’t play like hell, the odds are someone will be doing the playing — and sooner rather than later. 

Clay Kallam is an assistant athletic director and girls varsity basketball coach at Bentley High in Lafayette. To submit a question for Behind the Clipboard, email Coach Kallam at clayk@fullcourt.com