A coach whose team won five of twenty-six games realizes the problem isn't talent or strategy. In a locker room moment, he sees players leaving as isolated individuals instead of a unit. He learns that better relationships between players, not better plays, change everything.
So we'd gone through an entire season and won 5 games. That's an 80% failure rate. Apparently I wasn't as good a coach as I thought. So as the kids got their stuff together, I walked over to a sink, splashing water on my face, and maybe this has happened to you, I looked up and I had a mirror moment. You know that unexpected instant when you realize it's the person staring back at you? Who's responsible for making things better. See, every one of those 21 losses had my name on them that season. For all my past success, for that big old bucket of ego I walked in with, the saddest part of the situation is I had no idea what the missing ingredient was. So I dried my face and walked over and I stood next to my assistant and our backs were literally against a brick wall. When Coach Minifield pointed out something I hadn't noticed. See, as the girls got up to leave the locker room, there's Allison, Xandy, Caroline, Casey. They get up to leave one by one as individuals. Coach Minifield said something that literally changed my life. He said, "Coach, if we want to have a better team, we're gonna have to have better relationships." See, they didn't walk out as individuals because we had lost that game. We lost that game and most of the others we had struggled with that season because all season long I had let them walk around and go through the motions as individuals.
