Lessons from Camp: Make New Mistakes

At the UNI team camp last weekend, I was primarily responsible for our JV group, which was a group of incoming sophomores and juniors. I enjoyed coaching that group, as they were very teachable and seemed eager to learn.

The schedule at the UNI team camp is that teams play three games on Saturday and three on Sunday. On Saturday I did a lot of individual teaching. Younger players need experience and teaching, and they got both. Summer is great time to get that experience, as it's a low pressure opportunity to point out mistakes or ways that players could have done something better.

At the beginning of Sunday, I told the players that the theme for the day was simple - make new mistakes, not old ones. Whatever they had learned about the decisions they made on the court the day before, they should apply it on day two. I encouraged them to make a thousand new mistakes on Sunday, as that would be a thousand new opportunities to learn. However, they shouldn't make old mistakes again. You can't grow if you never change.

It's pretty easy to tell which players will be effective for us in the future and which ones probably won't be. The effective ones didn't make Day 1 mistakes on Day 2. They learned, they adapted, they improved. They weren't perfect, but they were better. And others wallowed in the same errors. They'll probably make the same ones in November and December as well.

It's not any different in life: don't make the same mistake over and over again. The book of Proverbs from King Solomon has a great quote for this - "Like a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly" (26:11). That's quite graphic, but it's with that amount of filth and disgust that I've found myself making the same mistakes twice. How many times have I strayed in my temperamental prayer life? Or let my anger or pride dominate? Or simply spoken too freely, which almost always results in negative consequences for myself and for those who hear me? As I type these words and recall my frequent revisits to my folly, I cringe and feel filthy. Like that dog.

Don't make Day 1 mistakes on Day 2. One thing this does require is a coach. We have to have someone in our lives to point out the folly, to show us our mistakes. I know my players didn't know what they were doing were mistakes. How could they? Only experience and a teacher could help them. They wanted to get better, so they listened. I wanted them to get better, so I taught. And here's what's missing in most of our lives. We have to be willing to listen to those pointing out our mistakes, and we've got to have someone in our lives strong enough to be willing to point them out.

I'll make new mistakes today. Probably hundreds of them. But I desperately want to avoid the dog vomit. I've been there before.