Epilogue to a Season Part 2: The Grit

This is one in a series of posts reflecting on the most recent basketball season. My goal in each of the next several posts is to look at a separate aspect of what made this year such a memorable experience for me personally. 

I never imagined that dealing with 3 concussion diagnoses within a 2 week time period would be a positive thing. And it's not, of course. If I could go back and undo those and play the season out at full strength, I would. But the fact remains that the concussions did happen, as did a season-ending broken nose, a relentless flu bug, and a case or two of bronchitis. That was how we ended the season - short-handed and scrambling, not knowing from day to day who could play or how long they could play and even if they could play the positions we were going to have to ask them to play.

That was rewarding. And I don't think we could have appreciated what was going on without the adversity.

Going into what turned out to be one of the biggest wins in several years for the program, we were without three major contributors to the team due to injury, all of them post players. We were left with one post player who had played the position at the varsity level, and we were accustomed to having two on the court at all times. Also, we were facing a first team all conference post player. No matter. We won anyway. We won because we asked kids to do more than they were capable of doing, and they didn't flinch. They just said okay and went out and won the game.

At the end of that game we lost another player to a concussion. We were facing about 6 games in 9 days, three of them back-to-back-to-back. It was an easy time to say, "Well at least we had this win. It was a good run." Instead they just kept fighting.

In one of the games, we found ourselves with the score close in the 4th quarter of a game we really had no business being in. We had been down big. Then all of a sudden we weren't. It was a battle. Two or three of our kids were playing heavy minutes while sick. One of them was wrapped in a blanket and lying on the bleachers before the game. Up 2 with just a few seconds to go, the game was ours. It was ours until a player  of theirs air-balled a shot, which was rebounded just as awkwardly and thrown in to tie the game and send it into overtime. Our players looked shocked and exhausted heading into overtime. They had climbed the mountain, overcome the deficit, on nothing but guts, and now they had to go play some more. And they did. Victoriously.

I'll never forget the locker room after that game. Walking in, there was a general silence. Typically after a game like that you can expect a raucous congratulatory chorus. Instead, mixed in a sea of coughing and hacking, was a look of relief. They got to be done for a bit. They had used it all - everything they had left. There was no energy left to celebrate a come-from-behind overtime victory. Just a silent satisfaction to reward their exhaustion. And the knowledge that we had to play again in 18 hours.

Our point guard scored 32 with the flu. She was on the couch for the next 3 days. On her first night back, she managed another 20.

Our concussionees were told by doctors they probably wouldn't get cleared before the end of the season. They kept working anyway. They came back. We were desperate to have them, and they looked desperate to come back. They didn't choose to get an early start on Spring Break.

Going into the first round of districts, we weren't even able to go 5-on-5 for most of the practices due to all the illnesses attacking the team. We won that one by 20, against a team we had squeaked by in a 2-point win earlier in the week.

It's easy to be disappointed in high school kids. Really easy. They are not consistent. Toughness is a rare commodity. They seem self-centered and easily discouraged. Self-demeaning jokes trump perseverance and effort on most days. Daring to even try at that which is not guaranteed success is a foreign concept, particularly when their educational lives have been dominated primarily by concerns for self-esteem and personal exploration. To put all this bluntly, it was just really nice to not be disappointed in them, our players. To have somebody to believe in, and have those somebodies be 16 and 17 and 18 year olds who risked failure by caring and striving instead of accepting the free pass of excuses that was offered at their feet, one medical report at a time.

The losses were just as sweet. It's easy to talk about grit and hard work when you win. That same approach was there when they didn't. That fact was not lost on me. As a coaching staff we worked damn hard to find ways to win games in that stretch. Typically, the reflection after a loss is about who didn't play well, or what went wrong, or what we need to work on the next day. In the last month of the season, after a loss, the only real thought that came to my mind was, We just can't ask for anything more out of them. Even the losses revealed their character.

It's a hard thing to describe, but it just got to the point where we honestly didn't know exactly what we would see each night going into a game. We knew they would show up, they wouldn't disappoint, and there was a chance we would see something special. At the risk of overusing the word, this group is special to me because I came to expect the special out of them.

I am not thankful for the injuries. I'm not thankful for the illness. But we couldn't have been who we ended up being without it. Adversity is what allowed me to expect anything, and always the best, out of a group of teenage girls.

***Read "Part 1: The People" here.