Chance or Consequence

I recently watched the Odyssey and it was amazing.  One line immediately stuck out to me while watching and has been lingering in my mind.  Listen to this short podcast episode to hear what it was and how it can help you to think and prepare for the upcoming season.  

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Hello, Minnesota Volleyball Coaches. All right, we're going to try something new today. Normally we have a guest. Today we do not. Normally, the podcast is about an hour long. Today it won't be. All right. So this podcast was inspired by a movie that I recently watched with my sons. All right. So we went to see the Odyssey. If you have not heard about the Odyssey, it's basically the biggest movie of the summer, maybe in competition with the Spider-Man movie, but it is a big blockbuster. The Odyssey is a historically based movie about the Greek leader Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, trying to get back home after the Trojan Wars. All right. So I'm not going to go into all the details about the movie, but you do need to know that Odysseus is a leader, and he is trying to get back home, and he has a bunch of men under his command. Now, along with this, it is a Greek story. So you have a bunch of the gods and goddesses of the Greek mythology. And this particular story that we're going to talk about deals with the Greek goddess Athena, the goddess of wisdom. So there's a scene in the movie in which Odysseus is sailing with his men. He and his men have been through a lot. A lot of his men have died as a result of conflict and problems and things like that. And they're sailing, and Athena shows up to Odysseus and says the line When you see your men die, do you see chance or consequence? Now, that is spoken in kind of the middle of this journey trying to get back home, but I think it asks a question that we as coaches should wrestle with. So when our teams struggle, when we lose a big match, when our players uh don't perform the way we expect, what's our first reaction? Do we blame chance? Uh so was it the result of you know bad officiating? Were did we catch the opponent uh on their best night? Uh did we have one of our stars sick for the uh the match? Or do we say our schedule is just brutal? So those things may be true, all right, but sports are unpredictable and there are plenty of things outside of our control. But if that's what we focus on, I think we miss out on an opportunity uh to grow. All right. So I think a better question is what was the consequence of our preparation? So did we spend enough time teaching out of system offense, or did we just hope that, you know, we're gonna magically stay in system most of the night? Uh, did we prepare our athletes for the pressure, or do we only practice in perfect situations? Uh, do we create competitive habits every day, or do we expect them just to magically appear during competition? So the great coaches understand that uh some things are difficult to omit. And one of those uh big things is while we can't control every outcome, we can usually control more of the causes than we think. All right. So the teams that consistently win aren't lucky every season. If you've won multiple state championships over the course of you know a decade, you weren't lucky. You probably have built a system. You created standards, and you repeat habits until those habits are automatic. So here's a part that really challenges me. So I have to think about when something goes wrong, what's my first instinct? Is my first instinct uh to think outward or inward? All right. So maybe instead of asking what happened to us, maybe I ask the question, what did we prepare our players for? Instead of asking or saying, man, we were just unlucky tonight. Hey, the other team got all the all the right bounces. Okay, maybe we ask ourselves, what can we improve upon before the next opportunity? Uh, because every consequence uh becomes a lesson that we can use tomorrow. So as coaches, I think our responsibility isn't just to prepare our athletes for uh the big match, it's to prepare them for the moments uh that they haven't seen, but we know are going to happen. All right, we're gonna play in a loud gym with a with a very energetic crowd. All right, missed calls are gonna happen. They're gonna happen for you, they're gonna happen against you. There's gonna be injuries. Unfortunately, uh, they happen. There's gonna be momentum swings in a game. So those moments are not gonna be surprises, or they shouldn't be surprises. They're part of the game. All right. So this week, as you're preparing for the start of the season, ask yourself a question. Was today's result more of chance, or was it the consequence of the standards we've been building every day? It's not an easy question, but it's gonna lead to more growth because if our losses or uh our shortcomings, we just always say are it's just just the way it is, you know, then them's the breaks, right? Uh we're missing out on our opportunity. So just remember championships aren't usually won by avoiding the bad luck, they're usually won by consistently preparing for the moments when your luck runs out.