In his book “Creativity, Inc,” Pixar founder Ed Catmull highlights a philosophy of one of his directors, Brad Bird. Bird described every creative organization as an ecosystem: “You need all the seasons. You need the storms. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. But if every day is sunny and it does not rain, things don't grow. And if it is sunny all the time - if in fact we do not have night - all kinds of things do not happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict/ struggle as essential…”
When reading this passage, it is impossible to not take that train of thought and apply it to coaching a team during a season. It is so easy to get caught up in the daily grind and just focus on the end result of a specific game. Each team, just like in the example Bird gives, is like an ecosystem. The team is constantly growing and evolving. Like the ecosystem, if there is not ‘rain’ and ‘night’ then the team will not grow and reach its full potential. It will die, just like the ecosystem that always has sunny days. Do not get me wrong, sunny days are great but as I sit here and stare out at the snow, I realize that snowy days can be great too. The same with rainy days and night time… it really just comes down to how you approach them; how you view those events. Our perception and our attitude towards things that happen are really the few things that we truly can control. Do we strive to score more points than the other team in that isolated game? Of course! But if we do not happen to score more points than the other team it does not necessarily mean that we ‘lost.’ Did we learn? We will adjust? Will we grow? Will we realize and truly believe that success is not measured solely by scores but by our resilience, adaptability and determination to continue to work together toward our goal of becoming better players, teammates and people? Keep rolling Tide!