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Cori Close has a problem for you.
If you convey your child to one among her pregame clinics at UCLA, do not get caught up within the thought of her taking part in basketball there sometime. At least not but. Instead, as she works with the ladies’s basketball employees and gamers and soaks within the power of sport day, look ahead to her smile.
“This hour-and-a-half clinic is not that important,” says Close, the Bruins’ head ladies’s basketball coach. “The most important thing is that your daughter leaves having great joy for the game and having a great experience with her friends.”
When some women grow old and follow the sport, the grins have vanished. Close sees the burden on their shoulders, the strain to win, to carry out, to justify the huge investments their dad and mom have positioned on their careers.
“Everything has been leading towards, ‘Get a scholarship, get to college,’ ” Close tells USA TODAY Sports, “and then they get to us, and when they should have the most joy and the most freedom and the most good habits, they’re completely burned out.”
To repair them, Close says, it’s like peeling again an “onion of woundedness.” The wounds are deep and emotional, physical and mental. Despite a participant’s convictions to play on, they want time to heal.
Under these layers of each younger athlete lies the muse of his or her athletic outlook. It’s formed by the forces of oldsters, coaches and friends of their youth sports activities expertise.
Those forces drive many of these kids away lengthy earlier than they discover their method to Close, and even to highschool coaches.
“I see both sides of it,” Close says. “I see the good, wind-in-your-sails side, the equipping side. And then I see the burdensome, pressurized, performance-oriented side that it’s saddening to see.”
As you watch her eighth-ranked Bruins start their quest this week for a deep NCAA event run, she needs you to recollect it will not be all in regards to the consequence. It might be extra about her staff’s shared journey.
Oh positive, Close burns to win – “It’s taken me a number of days to recover from our semifinal loss to USC,” she says – however she always fights the urge to have a look at sports activities as a collection of outcomes.
Instead, she operates below a lesson she realized from John Wooden: It’s not about her. The late UCLA males’s basketball coach knew it was about everybody – coaches, gamers and even dad and mom – collaborating as one unit to create a life-altering expertise.
Close shares classes from her 5 a long time of taking part in and training sports activities that can assist you create that have in your athlete.
Coach Steve: Big Ten coach asks, ‘What are we doing to youth sports?’
1. ‘The actual change-makers:’ Know that while you coach youngsters, John Wooden believes in you
It’s not about you, but it surely begins with you. Close started her faculty teaching profession in 1994-95 on UCLA’s employees, and in Wooden’s den, listening to the legendary coach’s instruction. The expertise modified her life, but it surely additionally helped her notice there have been so many others who did, too.
“Coach Wooden taught me that, really, some of the best culture-builders, teachers of the game, coaches are at youth levels,” Close says. “We may get interviewed more, but they’re the real change-makers.”
The greatest position fashions are typically those whose names others wouldn’t acknowledge. There are Steve Cain, the boys basketball coach at Milpitas High, within the San Francisco Bay Area, who lived up the road from Close. He instructed her to get her elbow beneath the ball, or bounce it more durable, when she dribbled by his home.
There was Julie Plank, a future coach within the WNBA however then an assistant coach at Stanford, who pulled her apart at a university camp and instructed her “you can do this” when others known as her too brief and too sluggish.
And there was her father, Don Close, a former small-college soccer participant who believed within the instructing powers of sports activities. Don Close taught educational topics at Milpitas and character-building, management and vanity to its groups and to Cori and her buddies.
“I think he was a girl dad before he really knew what that was,” she says.
Her UCLA ladies’s basketball staff takes roots within the soccer expertise her dad created.
“When I play up at Stanford every year, several people from my youth soccer team come,” says Close, 52, “and they don’t come because we won a lot of soccer games. They come because my dad had a program and not a team. My dad taught lessons and made them feel loved unconditionally. And, they, to this day, still come back. In fact, two of them spoke at my dad’s memorial service.
“It was a soccer relationship, not a soccer staff.”
2. ‘Get out of the pity pond’: Look at adversity as an opportunity
Like his daughter, Don Close was an intense competitor who wanted to do everything he could to win. But losing was never about why it happened. It was about how she could use it to her advantage.
How can you grow through this?
How can you be a better teammate?
How can you be a better leader?
Those were the kind of questions Close heard from her dad when she was a senior guard at UC Santa Barbara and her team was 0-6 but coming off a 27-5 season.
“The late (N.C. State ladies’s basketball) coach (Kay) Yow used to say, ‘You can twinkle your ft within the pity pond, however you may’t swim laps.’ And I feel the fact was, I used to be swimming laps, and my dad was like, ‘Get out of the pity pond and make a distinction,’ ” she says. ” ‘You cannot management a few of that different stuff.’ “
His words made Close think about of her six freshman teammates.
“Instead of looking at it, like, ‘They’re such a pain in my side,’ ” she says, “I’m like, ‘How can I serve them better? How can I make their jobs easier? How can I make them better?’ And it’s sort of like the shine theory, right? That the more you shine, and help others shine, it actually multiplies your own.”
3. ‘Banners hang in gyms, rings collect dust:’ Create your own story
Close was an associate women’s head coach at UC-Santa Barbara and Florida State before she became UCLA’s head coach in 2011.
When she first arrived in Westwood, she asked 10 men’s and 10 women’s basketball alums what they wished the school had provided for them but didn’t. She heard about financial planning and mental health tools, not basketball.
Another of those former players, John Vallely, sought out Close to tell her about the profound strength of Wooden’s teachings and the love that emanated from them. The coach, he said, was the reason why his marriage had longevity, why he had started a few businesses, conquered cancer multiples times and survived the death of his young daughter.
He didn’t mention to Close he was the starting point guard on two of Wooden’s national championship teams.
“I simply thought, ‘That’s it,’ Close says. “How many John Vallely stories can we create? It doesn’t diminish the competitive excellence at all. In fact, maybe it is exactly what led to it and equipped it.”
A number of years into Close’s head teaching tenure, Joshua Medcalf, then UCLA’s director of psychological conditioning, introduced her staff into middle court docket of Pauley Pavilion.
“I hope I’m at that banner-raising ceremony,” he instructed her gamers. “I hope your habits lead you to exactly that. But banners hang in gyms.
“That ring ceremony goes to be candy due to the character it is going to take to earn that. But rings simply sit in trophy instances and accumulate mud.
“The only two things that are gonna to stay with you for the rest of your life, from these four years, is who you become and who you impact.”
When Close instructed me that story, I considered how I by no means gained an outright championship in 10 years as a youth sports activities coach. But I typically pull out a observe from a mother or father in my desk drawer. It targeted not on our profitable season however in my religion in his son.
More Coach Steve: What young athletes can learn from the legendary John Wooden
4. ‘Be listener:’ Everybody is essential within the journey (particularly dad and mom)
As everyone knows, other parents can be an issue in youth sports. Close watches their behavior in the stands at AAU games and listens rigorously to what they are saying to her in conversations. It’s all a part of her recruiting course of.
They watch her, too. One UCLA mother or father who did not like one thing the coach mentioned in a information convention requested a Zoom dialog, which Close obliged the following day.
“I’m a big believer that performance equals potential minus interferences,” she says. “And sometimes, if the lines of communication are not open, it becomes an interference for the kids, because they are caught in the middle of an unsolvable solution for them.”
About a yr in the past, Close emulated a behavior of South Carolina coach Dawn Staley. She established a semi-regular Zoom name along with her gamers’ dad and mom. She tells them about her progress mindset. She tells them they will name her, even about taking part in time. And she tells them to be ready for her solutions.
“You have to be ready for the reality and the truth that’s leading to those decisions,” she says.
Close, such as you as a coach of children, in the end makes the staff selections. But it’s extra essential, she says, for everybody to really feel heard than for her to be proper.
“It doesn’t mean I have to change the standards,” she says. “But a way that I can serve them is to be a good listener.”
5. ‘It’s not Kumbaya and a sorority:’ Embrace sports activities for the enjoyment and in addition the battle
UCLA will enter its eighth NCAA event below Close. The runs embrace an elite Eight and 5 Sweet 16 appearances. When the losses come, they’re deeply felt.
When her staff was upset at dwelling by Washington State on Jan. 28, Close took several moments to compose herself earlier than her opening assertion.
“This one will be measured by everybody else on the outside by the end score,” she started, her voice shaking. “But it won’t be measured that way for me. What Kiki and the rest of her teammates, what they showed from the inside out, you have no idea.”
Her Bruins staff, which was coping with accidents and sickness and was lacking main scorer Lauren Betts, nearly got here again to win after trailing by 20 factors.
“They pre-decided they were gonna give everything, and they were gonna finish empty with and for each other,” she mentioned. “And there’s no doubt that they did that.”
At one level, when Close couldn’t get her phrases out and guard Kike Rice, who was sitting subsequent to her, mentioned, “I got it,” and answered the query.
“As usual, covering for me,” Close mentioned with a smile.
In our interview, Close recalled a dialog with a coach the day after profitable a nationwide championship. It appeared to lack related emotion.
“How do you feel?” Close requested.
“A little empty,” the coach replied.
Close was shocked. This was speculated to be the head.
“I just think outcome-oriented thinking is really empty,” she says.
The pleasure of sports activities, and the expansion you get out of them, she has realized, doesn’t simply come within the outcomes. It can come alongside the struggles, too.
“I’m not talking about just having fun all the time; it’s not Kumbaya and a sorority,” Close says. “It’s wholesome to have actual battle while you miss your first 4 pictures, or when the ref makes a foul name, or you do not agree with the coach, otherwise you’re having bother conquering a ability. Those are actually wholesome struggles.
“But I additionally need there to be nice pleasure, and pleasure just isn’t dependent upon your circumstances. Joy is a selection, a ability, a deeper factor.”
And we can find it even when we lose.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.
Got a query for Coach Steve you need answered in a column? Email him at sborelli@usatoday.com
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