Okay. So I’ve got a coaching dilemma. Well not a dilemma so much as a situation I’m just not sure how to handle. Anybody with coaching experience, athletic or otherwise, is welcome to chime in, because the questions I’m asking here are not rhetorical, they’re live.
So I’m the assistant coach of my school’s football team. We haven’t had a football team in years and years, so for all intents and purposes, we’re starting from scratch. One of the hard things about doing this is that there’s no football culture here. Yesterday was the first game in the summer passing league, which we play to help us prep the skill positions for the season. Before the game, we got kids walkin in talmbout some, “If I’m not playin’ today, do I hafta go to the game?” I gave him the look.
You know what I learned at the game, though? We have no dawgs. Well, we have one player with a little dawg, but his is not really the infectious kind. For it to really work, the lead dawg has to be as encouraging as he is critical. Encouragement is not our guy’s strong suit. Yet. Still, that’s just one person of seven. Now to be fair, one of the other kids is a pretty good athlete, but he’s not the rah-rah type.
But I guess my first question is, how many dawgs does it take to pull in the rest of the team? At what point does having a brave teammate cause one not to be afraid anymore? I don’t think it’s just one, though. There has to be a critical mass. I just don’t know what it is. But I know you can’t field an effective team with just one dawg.
Now taking this to a wider situation, I’m thinking about the line that some of my more nationalistic friends like to kick about one of us being oppressed. If it’s true that one person’s “oppression” (and in some cases, I’m not too sold on the quality of that oppression) means that we’re all oppressed, why isn’t the inverse just as accurate? If one of us is free, shouldn’t that mean that we’re all free? If not, why not?
But I still need to figure out how to bring out the dawg in my kids.
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