Emphasis Preaching Journal

The different philosophies of two high school coaches influenced their basketball teams. The first coach was a stickler for the fine points of the game. She often discredited an unskilled player on a technicality. She exacted such a high degree of finesse from her team that only a few performed for her. Because of her fault-finding, younger girls soon gave up. They saw no use in trying since their coach would always find something wrong with their efforts. Team spirit turned mostly negative.

The coach of the second team, however, was more concerned with issues of cooperation and a sense of team spirit than in winning each game. The bottom line for this coach was making certain her girls had a good experience. In her own high school years, she learned about important dynamics of relationships from coaches who valued the person more than the game.

The motto of this coach was that the game would take care of itself if the basics were there. She instilled in her girls the art of playing the game with an awareness of where the others were on the basketball court and with a sense of team support. Rather than competing, the girls became alert to assisting each other. With this attitude as a basis for playing the game, the team worked on developing the necessary technical skills that led them to be competitive with other teams.