The Essence of Basketball

Something special happens inside our gym. Only those privileged to be a part of our program sense it, and among them, even fewer grasp its essence. Every game night, most opponents and their respective coaches misunderstand what occurs during the course of the game. They think it's about basketball. Accordingly, they play or coach a game. Similarly, parents from both sides pay admission to watch the fruit of their loins ripen into athletes competing in a physical game. Eager for their child's success, quantified by the stats line, they yell for their child to TAKE THE SHOT, SON! and then berate myself or someone from our coaching staff for benching their child for, coincidentally I'm sure, following parental directive in taking the shot. Our players who take that shot are those who fail to grasp the essence behind that special something that occurs inside our gym.

Coaches aren't necessarily immune to this sort of thinking or rather, misunderstanding--this fetishism over a game. Back when it all began for me, three years ago, I thought that I had signed up to coach the game of basketball. Everything and everyone around me suggested that this was so. As one loss stretched to two, three, four, five losses in a row, my players questioned my knowledge of the game. Why do we only have one offense? Once their questions couldn't be answered convincingly, the questioning turned into advising. Against an even-front zone, we can't run this offense. Five games into the young season, I didn't even know what an even-front zone meant, and here my players were telling me, their joke of a coach, that I needed to know the game before I could teach it. Unsurprisingly, none of my players respected me as a coach (certainly, none of them referred to me as such), and my physical image, especially then, didn't help my case either. Their coach looked like and approached the game as a stereotypical Model Minority would. To their credit, they stuck with me, though I suppose the alternative would have been worse for them. Better to have a token coach then none at all, if only so that we can complete our abysmal season.

Other coaches in our program questioned the head coach for hiring me. I was, in all matters with respect to the game, substantially worse than the previous coach whom I replaced who, despite his college-level playing experience with the game, just couldn't get it done as a coach. He had, I'm told, something like two wins that entire previous season. Consequently, the remaining assistant coaches believed that the new hire should, to the benefit of our program, have even more knowledge and experience with the game. These coaches made my first year more difficult than it already was. Maybe it was their way to encourage me to resign after the season, but doing so reinforced my players' disrespect towards me. Whenever an assistant attended my practices, he took over, ignored or overruled my suggestions, and taught the game with unflinching confidence and authority that made me seem, next to him, invisible. He would constantly make it known to me that I'd have to step up my knowledge of the game, somehow some way, giving me glib remarks like This stuff is simple. When you see it, you'll understand it rather than taking his time to slowly break down a drill or play beforehand for my comprehension.

Parents of my players, though, took it to a whole new level. Unsatisfied with me feeling like I was in purgatory, they crucified me and brought me hell for my inability to coach the game of basketball. After about the eighth or ninth loss of the season, in an away game against Mercer Island in which we were slaughtered by at least thirty, a mother decided that she had enough of me coaching her son and refused to allow her son to ride home on the team bus so long as I, in her words, could not figure out how to counter the opposing team's strategy. (MI exclusively ran a 1-3-1 zone defense, a defense that I had never encountered before). Citing my lack of knowledge of the game as evidence, she attempted to get me fired through the school administration and, when she couldn't, rallied other parents to heckle me at home games to make sure that each loss my team incurred would doubly sting for me.

Much to her and other parents' chagrin, instead of quitting, I acknowledged my ignorance of the game and was determined to learn, understand, and begin mastery over basketball that following summer. Accordingly, I ravenously devoured from the buffet of coaching manuals and DVDs, Youtube practice footage from various high school and college programs, varsity practices, game film, and televised games- basically anything and everything I could get my hands on. The more basketball I indulged, the more the game slowed down for me and the faster I could react to any given situation. The more I saw the X's and O's from other resources, the more confidence I gained towards drawing my own plays. And to everyone's surprise, I came back the following season looking more like a knowledgeable basketball coach and less a seasonal baby sitter.

All the pressures around me convinced me that understanding the game of basketball would result in victories and that victories were, for a coach and his program, the most important thing about basketball. The thing was, though we won a few more games in my second and third season, the margin of win totals was not a marked improvement from year one and certainly did not parallel the significant amount of knowledge of the game that I gained from year to year. So, in the weeks preceding the spring and summer seasons of my third year, I reflected on my current approach to coaching and why supreme self-confidence in my knowledge of the game did not translate into drastically greater amount of victories for our team.

And then it hit me. An overwhelming majority of my pre-game, post-game, post-practice speeches were about basketball. Sure I'd throw in an anecdote with a lesson about seizing the opportunity or playing hard, but they had never been the focal points of my teachings. They were merely motivational speeches designed to hype my players up to win the game. Other times, instead of personal stories, I would color my speeches with metaphors and humor towards the same end of achieving victory. We're gonna fucking press them today, and I don't want a half-assed press, but we're gonna instill fucking fear every time they touch the ball. When they inbound the ball, I want Matt to fucking harass him like Freddy Kreuger, and then James will fucking rush him from behind like he's Jason. They won't be entering a basketball game, they will be entering our slaughterhouse. Your hands are your claws and knives, and the two of you will trap the ball handler so hard he feels like he's in a Jigsaw contraption, shits his pants and turns the ball over. Every time. At the end of the day, because I wanted to win games so bad, and felt that this was the external expectation of me and the measure of my success, my eyes were on the prize and the breadth of my messaging reflected that vision. I failed to see that basketball was more than a game. In my approach to the game, I de-humanized my players and took away their agency in the process. By making it solely about the X's and O's, they were my pawns and I was the chessmaster. Clearly, my approach was not working and I was getting too caught up in the bullshit of obsessing over the W.

I reflected on what basketball meant to me and why, in only three years of exposure, I loved it so much. The answer was not to be found in the game, but in the journey. Basketball had liberated me from my own insecurities and lack of self-worth from being trapped in stereotypical roles constructed by a racist system, but doing so required that I had to embrace the challenge, not back down from intimidation, learn from failure, enhance my mental capacity and reflexes, believe in myself, and find a way to persevere despite the odds. When I really sat down to think about it, basketball wasn't just a game to me, it was a medium for self-growth and a metaphor for life.

Heading into the spring and summer, I changed my core messaging to my players from basketball to the life values I discovered through basketball. I told them, the point is not the points; the point is the process. Neither the stats nor outcome ultimately mattered, but the process of how we represented ourselves was what really mattered. My promise to them was that if we could buy into this new understanding of the game, the results would speak for themselves. When my players began to see that I wasn't just changing my emphasis to extract a quick victory, but that it genuinely came from my heart and that these values were about more than the game but would inform their relationship to the world, they started playing the game for themselves and their growth as human beings, instead of playing for me or for the W. They started to exert themselves harder than I had seen that preceding winter, exemplify discipline and patience with their shot selection, trust in each other to help defensively or be at the right spot offensively, and find a way to battle and win games even if we were down by a heavy deficit.

When I started de-prioritizing basketball and prioritizing the essence of basketball--the meaning of life--the results indeed spoke for themselves. We surprised a lot of opponents, who were bigger, stronger, faster, more athletic, and more skilled, by means of our fearlessness, discipline, focus, and trust and accountability with each other. We finished second place in two tournaments, won our pool in another AAU tournament, and had a seven-game win streak. I began receiving compliments from referees and opposing coaches for my vibrant, high-energy coaching style. While these accomplishments are nice experiences, they ultimately symbolize, and perhaps mask, the fact that for those who really get it, the secret of basketball, as a legend once put it, is that it is not about basketball.

Spock's Sacrifice

"Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." -Spock, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

The signs were there. It was only a matter of time before it was made official. First came the call to the floor signaling a substitution with six minutes left in the game. Then, the very next match, he rode the pine the entire second half. Coach, I'm ready. I know you are. Please coach, let me in the game. Dee is struggling. But he's done better than you, I think in response. His teammate rushes to me when there is a quick break on the floor. Coach, we need Tod in the game. Dee can't score, we need a scorer on the floor. Hiding my uncertainty and feigning a calm demeanor, I refuse to budge.

If he ignored the omens then, the very following week of practices should have hit him with frightening clarity. Zero minutes assigned during scrimmaging. Third string on drills designed to improve guard play. My 5'3" point guard never looked his size until now, head down, seated with back sulking in the corner of the gym.

It's official the next weekend. As they had methodically done for each of the forty games together during our combined winter high school and spring AAU seasons, with 1:30 left on the clock prior to the game, my players rush to the bench from their warm-up lay up lines. Okay, here's who's starting. Randy, Noah, Mike, Klay, Nat. We may be outmatched because our [AAU] opponents recruit stars from all around, but we are from one school, one mind, and one unit. We play as the better team. Set the tone from the start. Play harder than them, outhustle, outrebound, fight for every possession. Slow their offense down and be in help position. Don't let them get in the paint. Make them fear our defense. Let's go. Tod looks at me in disbelief as if I were the Grim Reaper. He stopped listening after the omission of his name, and treats me with a blank, ghostly stare. While I talk, I return his stare with my own quick, assured glance as if to presumptuously acknowledge, yes I seriously removed you from the starting rotation.

In the moments before tip-off, my mind questions my decision to replace the point guard who started for me in each of our previous forty outings; the point guard who singlehandedly got us back from huge deficits and won us games; the point guard with whom I achieved my most conference wins as a high school coach. My memory races back to January 21st, away game against Bothell. We are down 13 at the half. Bothell's students roar in approval as they anticipate a similar dominating showing for their varsity squad in the game to follow. In one of the most spectacular moments of individual performance during a game that I coached, Tod scores 18 in the second half for a game-high 29 points to lift our team to a comeback victory. After the game, the Bothell coach approaches him incredulously, then collects himself and remarks I'll be watching for you over the next few years.

While this game stood out for the end result, Tod's scoring touch came regularly throughout the winter and, in fact, came to be expected. After a 28 point performance against Redmond one week before the Bothell game, I designed a play strictly for him to score a quick lay up off a post hand off (which he exploited in the Bothell game), or, if that primary option did not work, an open three pointer from a down screen off the same play. For his lack of size, Tod was an exceptional scorer, especially behind the three point line. His shot release was anything but natural and, from my distance, always looked like a struggle; instead of snapping his wrist and producing a high-arcing backspun shot, he had to shot-put the ball with the force of his entire arm. But his straightaway three-point shot would go in approximately half the time, and, in a game where amassing points is key, finesse is not the factor to scoring.

In the game of basketball, there are off-game shooting slumps; and then there are why-is-this-kid-even-wearing-a-jersey, Black Tuesday slumps. Prior to actually witnessing Tod's plummet, I only believed that the first category, game-to-game slumps, existed. Sure, even the greatest shooters have their off-nights or few in a stretch of games. The latter category, of which Tod embodied, was an issue of confidence. The short-lived miraculous presence of Tod during the winter high school season turned into the never-ending calamitous presence of Tod during the spring AAU season. In about eight spring games, he had successfully scored one 3 pointer in around 30 tries. Despite his broken shot, his instincts told him to continue to shoot himself out of the slump, so he attempted and missed horrible shots outside of his comfortable range. He began missing lay-ups. He made horrible decisions and turned the ball over a quarter of the time off the first pass. Defensively, he could not keep up with the size or speed of any point guard we faced in tournaments. Even in practices, he seemed like a liability, refusing to listen and only sinking deeper into his mental abyss. It was unbearable to watch, as if a loved one with whom you conversed on a daily basis suddenly ended up in a coma. I kept on asking myself how this was even possible and why this had to happen to me, of all coaches, as if my localized team wasn't disadvantaged enough without losing our best scorer.

With Tod out of the starting line up, we end up blowing out our opponent for our first win in a remarkably tough league of teams composed of recruited players from all around the region (as a comparison, our team is the only unsponsored team in this league). Instead of feeling accomplished from my keen substitution patterns, my pregame skepticism turns into postgame anxiety. I can't help but feel responsible for the slump Tod is in. At the very least, my deliberate lack of practicing and playing him has crushed whatever last inkling of confidence he has suppressed inside. And on the other end of the spectrum, my conscious overvaluing of his offensive capabilities and simultaneous overlooking of his weaknesses, particularly on the defensive end, during the winter season has made him unable to compete this spring against better competition when his offensive ability is stripped from him.

I approach him as practice ends and place my hand on his shoulder. He looks at me and it takes a minute before words leave my mouth. I don't know what I can possibly say to inspire confidence and shoulder the burden of responsibility for his struggles. The humanity in me wanted to reach out to him because I care for his development, but I failed to do so with a clear purpose and plan. Without that clear purpose, the cold, Vulcan logic of coaching took over. I end up saying something uninspired along the lines of Tod, you're a great player. I want to play you more but you gotta focus on defense now that you're struggling offensively. Great defense will lead to offense. In spite of my words, he shakes my hand and thanks me.

The measure of a great coach is in the mantra by which they are remembered to have coined. (Just joking...sort of.) In my journey to the coaching hall of fame, I recently coined my own saying for my team. The point is not the points, the point is in the process. If I live out the quote, then I must consciously reclaim and reintegrate my humanity in the cold Vulcan coaching process and value the progression of all my athletes. In the end, the results will flow from the expansion of the roots.

Beware of Veryl the Bully

It's 4:30pm. We're en route to Juanita High School for Game 2 of the KingCo 4A Varsity Tournament. The four coaches occupy the first four seats on the team bus. The cheerleaders are sandwiched between the coaches and the team. The bus is eerily quiet. You could feel the focus in the air. Like guerrilla fighters approaching a colossal military force, fate unknown but purpose clear, we are up against the only team to defeat Garfield High School this season, the perennial superpower in our conference that produced NBA phenom Brandon Roy and most recently, Tony Wroten. Undeterred by the mission ahead, the team is fired up from the post-practice talk I delivered a day before. In it, I mention the undisputed, unanimous perception of our team from the students at the alternative high school where I teach: we're weak, we're shit, and we're losers. I mention that each game day, when I wear our team's athletic garb to the alternative school, my students come down extra hard on me. Who you guys playing today? *Insert school here* will fuck you up by double digits. Intent on where my story is heading, I redirect the team to our recent game against Garfield, in which we lost by only two points. That game shut up a lot my students, who expected nothing less than a blowout. Fuck external perception, we know what we're capable of and what we will accomplish. I tell the team that I'm proud that we're not composed of superstars, that we have to rely on each other and our bench to pull out each victory, and that we're the hardest working, blue-collar team in the league. Our 'star' (loosely used here) point guard who, just days before, was awarded a First Team All-League honor, pulls me aside afterwards and tells me I hyped him up. He's ready to play the big game right now. Another coach creeps from behind and pushes me off-balance while approvingly shouts, fucking Veryl. Getting us all pumped. Motivational speaking. One of the tools that I developed and refined through coaching.

4:35pm. Still not so much a word muttered. For most, the focus is at once intoxicating and infectious, like a meditative journey experienced in collectivity. I'm silent for another reason. I'm pensive. Just thirty-five minutes before, I was confronted by two parents of a player at my level with perhaps an ugly truth about myself. They accuse me of the polar opposite in skills that I picked up through coaching: bullying. They didn't outright label it as such, but the implication was clear. The conversation lasts for nearly half an hour. Just before we walk onto the bus, I talk to two coaches about it.

4:40pm. The silence is finally broken. They should put up a poster at the school with your picture that says, "Beware of Bullying," says the same coach who complimented me the day before. This generates a few laughs from the nearby cheerleaders.

Veryl the bully, the head coach echoes with a huge grin and a dreamy stare, as if recalling a pleasant memory.

I've learned from the best, I retort in a smart-ass kind of way. Coaching has taught me to become an asshole. I reciprocate the grin.

I get a lot of shit from parents. But it comes with the territory. Or so the head coach says. In the three years of coaching, I've received the most parental complaints this current season--the year when I'm most confident in what I'm doing and attaining the most conference wins. You don't win enough games, parents question your knowledge and hint at a replacement. A player gets injured, parents blame the hyper-intensity of practices and lack of education towards players regarding sports-related injuries. You don't assign minutes to a player, parents challenge the integrity or fairness of your rotation. After a while, complaints sound like a broken record. They have to, or you begin to doubt yourself, which reflects on your performance and reverberates back negatively to the team. Fortunately, since I teach at-risk youth who experience trauma or systematic and individualized violence for eight hours each day before I coach, these parental complaints sound like what they are. Yet, to completely write off these complaints runs the risk of missing a chance for critical reflection and self-improvement.

Given my own history of being bullied, conceptually I hate bullying. Given that some studies show, however slight the statistical significance, that those who were bullied in their childhood are prone to becoming bullies themselves, perhaps working in a profession where militarism is a prized value subconsciously increases my propensity to bully. After all, it's so easy to get away with what you say when you monopolize the power through controlling playing time and a player's status within the program.

Though the parents' accusation rested on a false premise--that I exclusively singled out their son--it made me reflect on how I currently interact with my players and what type of coach I aspire to be. If I want to embody a coach who values each player as a human being with potential to become leaders in their own right, I would need to temper some of my spontaneous quips to my players. I would neither have remained with the program nor become the coach I am today if the head coach repeatedly harassed me for my inconsequential knowledge of the game during my first season. Why should the dynamic be any different between coaches and players, especially since I'm coming from a theoretical framework that values athletes for more than their bodies, but also for their mental capacity as coaches on the floor? I want them to appreciate the game as a symphony from a conductor's point of view, and not as a second violinist obsessed with correctly playing each note from the sheet of music on their stand.

My fault is that I'm quick-witted with my tongue. As basketball runs on horsepower, I am quickly yelling in reaction to what happens on the floor. There's no time to censor my reaction and my words, because the moment it takes to think of what I should say to mitigate the emotional damage, another action will happen and I would fail to react to something new. In games, I might yell out I can't play this kid loud enough for the entire gym to hear after a player commits a mistake, bench him, and then turn to him with a mean mug and yell out Why did I take you out of the game? If he answers I don't know, I will most certainly come up with a smart ass remark along the lines of I know you don't know, that's why you did it before explaining to him calmly what the correct course of action should have been. I am not adverse to yelling at a player during games for two reasons: 1. I do not want the player committing the same mistake again when I put him back in and he should know that I'm serious as it seriously impacts the outcome of the match, and 2. I do not want his teammates to commit the same mistake as him. Calling players out for their shit is an effective way to get them to play smarter and harder.

Practices, though, potentially bring out my 'worst' because I am afforded the time to make an example out of a player who commits a mistake. I certainly need to change my approach in this area. I am haunted by one particular practice from earlier this season where what I said had a prolonged effect on the player. I introduced a new drill to the team. After most of my players demonstrated and executed the drill satisfactorily, one of the last players to participate in the drill stepped on the floor not knowing what to do. This player happened to be someone who goofed off and neglected to pay attention regularly in practices, so I put him on the spot...once again. Are you shitting me? Over half the team just did the drill, and you don't know what to do? He nervously stuttered and I heard him start to say, I'm s.... I cut him off and interrupted before he could finish his sentence. He may have wanted to apologize (I'm sorry), but I ran with the s sound to poke fun at him. You're what? STUPID? Or perhaps you wanted to say 'I'm SLOW' since you don't understand what's going on. At that point, he courageously attempted to repeat his original sentence. No I was going to say I'm s.... I cut him off again and, with disregard to his feeling, brazenly continued, What were you going to say? I only hear the 's' sound! Were you going to say you're SMART? That wouldn't make SENSE. If you were, then you actually mean you're SARCASTIC. The whole team laughed at how clever the whole sequence was, but I overdid it. One of the next practices, when the same player once again failed to demonstrate knowledge of what was taught, he told me that he did not know what to do because he was stupid. He said it with a straight face, as if he were citing a truth. I pulled him aside after practice to apologize for what I said before, but the damage was already done. When it came to basketball, he internalized his incompetence thanks to me.

It's 8:30pm. We board the bus to return home from Juanita after losing a hard-fought game. The playoffs are double elimination, so we live to fight another day. Atypical of most players who congregate together at the back of the bus, our 'star' point guard decides to sit in front beside me. We look at each other during the ride home but don't exchange a single word. We respect each other's silence. We pay our dues to the powerful process of reflection, in hopes that tomorrow will yield a better outcome. My mind wanders back to the interaction with the parents from earlier that day and the grander implications it held. I tell myself that if my players cannot experience joy in the game because of the way in which I interact with them, then I fail to get the best out of my players and together, as a team, we will not succeed. As the bus pulls into our school's parking lot, bringing us back to reality, I look to the players at the rear of the bus arising from the trance of deep meditation. I am comforted by how small I am in relation to the whole of the team, and in fact, changing for the better and growing are interwoven into the very fabric of each and every one of our DNA.

Crafting a New Coaching Pedagogy

In light of my previous post being re-blogged and discussed among radical educators, I have written its spiritual successor to introduce a new pedagogical role for coaches. I do not waiver from my initial position that coaches are indispensable to their teams' culture and inexorably linked to the success of their teams' performance over time. In this piece, I argue that an essential undertaking of a coach should be to build leaders among men, or more aptly, coaches among athletes. Given the theoretical implications and intellectual treatment of my previous post, I have deliberately chosen to write this current piece in less of my usual tone as an entertaining and lyrical blogger, but more as a calculated scholar. This is the thoughtful song delivered a cappella in an otherwise bass-heavy, thoroughly danceable album. My operational framework for this piece draws upon the organizational legacy of Malcolm X and the case study of Jeremy Lin and the current 2013-14 Houston Rockets team.

As it stands, the current standard of coaching at the highest levels is top-down, resembling a militaristic organization equipped with its own parallel culture, procedures, and discipline. Communication is entirely vertical. When a coach speaks, the athlete listens. When a coach commands, the athlete obeys. Early this April, when ESPN aired footage of Mike Rice physically and verbally abusing his players, Americans appeared to be in shock at how something so inherently fun to watch and to follow during the month of March could be so brutal and psychotic behind the scenes. Like the SEC placing Goldman Sachs alone on trial for the 2008 financial crisis, Rice was singled out from all corners, most notably the New Jersey state government, culminating in his termination. In the imagination of the public, Rice embodied the degradation of the profession under only the most atypical and the extremest of circumstances.

Though some of his methods of discipline were unconventional, Rice's power relation to his athletes and his freedom to impose his will on players are far from anomalous in the profession. Similar to any other worker under capitalist social relations, when an athlete becomes part of the team, they relinquish their rights to their physical body. This is true in both the processes of production and punishment. To train for the consistent production of victories, the athlete's limbs are manipulated and appendages are outstretched to exact specific physiological motions routinely. At the most basic level, practices are designed to build muscle memory and make permanent certain footwork (the jab step, lateral defensive slides). Conversely, when the athlete's body fails to perform a certain way, the body is subjected to punishment (running Monsters or suicides, wall sits, or in Mike Rice's case, ball chucking). Most importantly, athletes are stripped of their agency and the full use of their mental capacity--reduced to cogs in the machine--when their bodies are externally synchronized to a coach's playbook.

Despite what I laid out as the standard pedagogy of coaching today, coaching is an indispensable means to sustained victory. Please refer to my previous post for reasons why I believe so, including the coach's role in reigning in the excesses of superstars, crafting a team orientation, building a culture of effort and attitude, and strategizing on the fly to adapt to the opponent's playbook.

Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity

Malcolm X's vision for his Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which was never brought to fruition due to his assassination, serves as an analogous vision for a new coaching pedagogy. Influenced by the state socialist revolutions that swept the Third World, Malcolm's idea of Black Nationalism evolved from an internal African American struggle for political, cultural, and economic independence in the form of a separate state to a Pan-African, internationalist struggle whereby African Americans were part of the majority (and crucially no longer minority) of oppressed peoples struggling for land and independence. Once he formally broke from the Nation of Islam, he constructed the secularist OAAU based on this internationalist conception of struggle to prepare African Americans of all stripes to train for the impending revolution in the heart of the beast.

Of relevance is Malcolm's organizational vision, which radically departed from the Civil Rights organizations of the immediate years before (1960-1963) and the Black Power organizations to immediately follow (1965-1969). These organizations were dominated by male chauvinism and hierarchical structure. The latter proved especially potent in the undoing of these organizations. With so much concentration of power in the hands of a few leaders, both the Kennedy-Johnson administration and the FBI were given easy and obvious targets for co-optation and repression respectively. Like any good coach innovating and refining their tactics and philosophies, Malcolm was a man of constant learning and growth. He freed himself of these two organizational pitfalls. Upon his return from his second trip to Africa in 1964, he stressed that "Africa would not be free until it frees its women" (*this quote, on a side note, is much more shocking and blasphemous than the Mike Rice revelation due to Malcolm's significant Muslim following). To succeed in revolution, Malcolm realized that the OAAU needed democratic decision-making, gender equality, and a focus on leadership development. The OAAU, and by extension, the movement, could only grow if more leaders were trained who took to the streets and in turn, reached more youth and workers. Additionally, numerically increasing the amount of leaders would dually prevent the government from any divide-and-conquer strategy and would organically create checks and balances within the organization to reign in the excesses of one or two individualistic, electorally-minded leaders. Malcolm's visionary genius was ahead of his time, and these twin pitfalls still characterize most radical and progressive organizations today.

Malcolm's shortcoming was that he did not realize his own role as the charismatic head coach in the OAAU. While he was abroad on his trips to Africa and the Middle East to build connections with and emphasize commonalities of the African American struggle to Third World state socialists, he allowed the membership of the OAAU to enact his vision of democratic participation. Rife with interpersonal conflict and indecision, the organization failed to move forward. The nails were already in OAAU's coffin before Malcolm's assassination. Malcolm needed to guide his membership, most of whom joined due to his charisma, to the realization of becoming leaders of a new model of democratic organization. Moreover, he needed to convince his future leaders on the merits of democracy, collectivity, and gender equality in order for them to carry on these tasks autonomously and willingly when Malcolm moved on.

Jeremy Lin and the 2013-2014 Houston Rockets

In this final section, I turn to the current Houston Rockets team to illustrate the potential benefit of athletes as coaches on the floor. On paper, the Houston Rockets have a team that can win it all. They have a top 5 scorer in shooting guard James Harden and a top 3 center in Dwight Howard. However, these two superstars lack the sustained discipline to play with a team orientation. To complicate matters, Hall of Fame inductee Coach Kevin McHale is unable to reign in the excesses of either superstar and is content with winning games through the performances of his two stars. Of course, I deliberately emphasize games and not championship because despite how the Rockets perform this regular season, they will not go far in the postseason with this type of undisciplined mentality under their current coach.

James Harden is a superstar who needs to have the ball at all times, which is uncharacteristic of shooting guards, since point guards are the playmakers and facilitators on most teams . Coach McHale does not utilize his point guards in this traditional role, and allows Harden instead to freely dominate the ball and decide on shooting or passing the basketball. This is problematic because Harden is currently shooting at an abysmal 27% from 3-point range, which is his go-to shot on many occasions. What makes his shooting percentage so low is because his shot is predictable and is usually guarded tightly, so he ends up shooting with a defender's handing in his face. Coach McHale hopes that Harden will make plays for his teammates, but this conceptualization entails Harden driving to the hoop, and then passing to his open teammate when a second defender collapses to defend against Harden's layup. There are two problems with this "drive-and-kick" strategy. First, Harden is only an average ball handler and a sloppy passer and turns the ball over most among the current Rockets. Second, the offensive formation is essentially stagnant (with four of Harden's teammates stationary looking for a pass), so even if a second defender collapses on Harden's drive, a third defender can quickly predict where the pass heads and defend the pass recipient. Other NBA teams stacked with superstars will still run plays and have strategies that are designed to facilitate offball movement (the movement of other role [non-superstar] players to get them in open spots where they have the highest percentage shots if they receive the pass). In other words, while superstars can create their own shots, plays are drawn up to involve their teammates to get open in spots where they'll have the highest success.

In contrast to the strategic incompetence of Coach McHale, his player Jeremy Lin possesses high basketball IQ and sees the floor like a true point guard, or coach on the floor. I speculate that Jeremy's high IQ stems from being the first and only Asian American basketball player in the NBA. It's a survival mechanism to ensure that he can thrive despite the change of scenery. Early in his NBA career, he was tossed around from team to team like an old rag doll. As such, he's been forced to play under coaches with very different systems, playbooks, and philosophies. He's had to quickly pick up the versatility of the point guard position and thus knows the game on a very strategic level. His roles in the past have included being a spot-up shooter with limited minutes (Golden State), being an aggressive Pick-and-Roll starter (New York), and now being an all-around sixth man (Houston). Because he primarily plays with the Houston second unit (he is a sixth man, not a starter), he is not impeded by the selfishness of his superstar teammates.

His smarts really come through on this second unit. Though the playbook (dictated by McHale) is still nonexistent, with Lin on the floor, his second unit teammates naturally move around a lot more without the ball because they know that Lin's first instinct is to look for open teammates. His presence makes his team play unselfishly and smarter. Because he creates for his teammates, Lin only shoots high percentage shots (he doesn't force his shots when defended). Unsurprisingly then, he leads the entire team in Field Goal percentage at an astonishing 54% (this is better than Dwight Howard's, who, as a center, only shoots within three feet of the hoop). While racking up assists, Lin is also the second highest scorer on the team. I want to emphasize that his team-orientation is infectious: the second unit of the Rockets routinely outplay the first. When he broke through in New York two years ago, Linsanity was more than Jeremy Lin. It was about how he elevated his team to play together as a unit, believe in each other, have fun in the process, and win games.

Lin's smarts are rare. I believe that they were developed through struggling against racial barriers and adapting his play to different styles for different teams, which forced him become an analytical general on the floor. A head coach, however, can expedite this process by emphasizing mental, analytical, and leadership development among his team.

Conclusion

Hypothetically speaking, what if the NBA had an entire team of team-oriented, high IQ players like Jeremy Lin or Bill Russell, and they faced off against an entire team of statistically superior superstars like James Harden or Wilt Chamberlain? Though the latter will undoubtedly win a few battles, the final victory will go to the adaptive, strategic team of coaches on the floor.

Malcolm's organizational vision highlights the role of the head coach in creating leaders among men who will, in time, be able to organize in society independent of him. They will appreciate the values of democratic organization, gender equality, internationalism, and revolution on their own merits in contrast to those values under capitalism. The key here is that the pedagogy of Malcolm needed to be intentional for the OAAU to survive and thrive. The case study of Jeremy Lin reveals the championship potential of a team of coaches on the floor and unselfish players. Despite the lack of a cohesive playbook from Coach McHale, Jeremy's informal coaching, through his mere presence on the floor, inspires his teammates to help each other get open for Jeremy's passes. In this way, the Rockets' second unit are reclaiming their bodies and acting with collective agency. To synthesize the lessons from both Malcolm and Jeremy, more leaders like Jeremy need to be created, but it takes a specific type of coach armed with this pedagogy--one with the vision, strategy, flexibility, and charisma of Malcolm--to reach revolutionary championship level.

The Legend of the South End, Mr. Lee

With the exception of our varsity starting point guard, the best jump shooter at our high school is not on the basketball team. Clearly, this distinction belongs to me. I'm the real-life version of an NBA 2K video game mash-up between Stephen Curry and Jerry West. Splasshhhh! Joking aside, the top two shooters at our school are a duo of Somalian brothers who shoot the lights out from any range under any pressure. You just can't guard them, and if you try to put a hand in their face, then prepare for great embarrassment. Like the current backcourt of the Golden State Warriors, these brothers aren't just catch-and-shoot shooters, but possess the dynamism to beat a defender off the dribble, power their way into the lane, or step back and create their own shot. What's more, these Somalian brothers started playing basketball in middle school, in contrast to most of the basketball players on our team, who began playing while still in Pampers on their Fisher Price set and were reared into fundamentally sound players by the best training programs that top dollar could buy. White privilege. Curious to know the secret behind the brothers' success, I probed into their lives for that elixir, in hope that perhaps my game too could exponentially improve in a short period of time.

Mr. Lee! came the enthusiastic response of one of the brothers. You've got to meet him! All the Lee's whom I've come across over the years have been Asian, but in this case, my common sense resisted the urge to link my past racialized associations with this Mr. Lee. He was probably white like David Lee, but it's possible that, since these brothers lived in the South End, this Lee was black like Spike. No Veryl, he's as Asian as you. Sure, Asian elders existed who coached ping pong or martial arts like Bruce Lee or Mr. Miyagi, but basketball? He had to be shitting me, so I pressed his brother for the real scoop. Nah V, you just don't know. Mr. Lee is a legend in the South. For those ill-acquainted with Seattle, the South End, though somewhat gentrified over recent years, remains home to a substantial population of low-income East African and Southeast Asian immigrants. A lucky few from the South each year, such as these brothers, win the lottery to go to an academically esteemed public school like ours in the North End rather than a neglected neighborhood public school in their own community. With the pressure off of them to join a neighborhood gang, handle a gat and become sharpshooters, these lottery winners aspire to join a school team, handle a basketball and become jump shooters.

The legend goes that Mr. Lee never misses his shots. Now probably in his 70s, generation after generation of Holly Park (a neighborhood in the South End) street ballers have come under his wing. Notoriously known for the Holly Park Crips, an East African gang set, only recently have locals enjoyed the landscape of the neighborhood after gentrifying families brought along comprehensive gang sweeps a few years ago and frequent police monitoring. Unlike the cutthroat exclusivity of gangs, Mr. Lee embodies an Africa Bambaata-esque unity. His presence in the local housing project courts alone inspires commitment to the game of basketball, of which he is the very definition. Much like farmers rising to a rooster's crow, the brothers tell me that while they were in middle school, they would wake up to the sound of string music coming from their nearby project court at the break of dawn. By the time that the boys finished breakfast and arrived at Meany International Middle School in the Central District, Mr. Lee had somehow migrated from that South End project court to Meany, where he would open the gym for a zero hour basketball session before class commenced. Back in their middle school days, Mr. Lee earned his keep as a Bilingual Assistant at Meany, but he earned his reputation for his love of the game. In the darkest of nights and the snowiest of winters, Mr. Lee's court presence never wavered. I've heard it said that passion is contagious. There is no greater proof than in these Somalian brothers who, from literally no experience, ascended to the top of jump shooters in comparatively no time.

How did he teach you to shoot? I asked. Confidence. Mr. Lee taught us Confidence, came their nonchalant response as if it were painfully obvious. With selfish curiosity to improve my own game, I rephrased my question. Confidence, that's cool, but I mean, what specific techniques did he teach you? Different coaches emphasize different techniques, but nearly every single coach breaks down the shot to a science. Some emphasize footwork, balance, and posture. Others emphasize the placement of the ball in the shot pocket, the squaring of the ball to basket, and the follow through. Still others reduce the shot down to focus and the placement of your eye on a specific part of the rim. No V, you're overthinking it. The reason our shot goes in is because we know it will go in. Every single time. You can try to stop me, but I guarantee my shot is going in. As a coach myself, this sentiment is beyond absurd-- it's unthinkable! I devote a significant amount of time in practice on preaching the fundamentals. I tell my players that if they follow through on their shot every time, then they will consistently hit their jumper. I drill, Drill, and DRILL that technique over and over again. But, if it's scientific to develop theory from reality, who am I to say that the tried-and-true words from a Legend is absurd? Perhaps I should be taking notes from the sensei and simplifying my own game.

One rainy evening late last winter, I went to the project court frequented by the Legend. Just as I pictured in my head, raindrops pounded the barren concrete court. Even legends have their limits, I thought to myself. Old age had finally exhausted his chameleon-like adaptability to play in any weather. As the school year closed, one of the brothers surprised me with a video recorded on his phone. I see an image of a basket immediately followed by a swish. The camera pans over from the basket to a right arm following through from the shot, and then finally to the shooter. A small, old Asian man turns his head to the phone and, in boastful fashion, tells me, Coach, that one's for you. It's all about confidence. Tell your team to believe in themselves. You believe in them. Funny, that following summer season, the team I coached was the one to beat in Summer League. Perhaps I had been too quick to dismiss the hocus pocus of the street game.

There's an inside joke that the brothers and I share now whenever we play pick up ball with varsity players at the school. Every time one of our shots go in, the others would yell out Mr. Lee! As all legends do when they reach legendary status, their legacy is passed down to younger generations and transplanted far beyond their original reach. From the South End through the Central District to the North. With less than a second left, he hoists up a miracle from half court. For the win--- it's goooooddd!!! Unbelievable, and they win on the miracle shot! Mr. Lee!!!

Dear Crystal,

You'll probably never read this. I hope that one day this reaches you and you do. You probably don't even remember who I am. Honestly, I don't even remember if your name starts with a C or a K. But you're the one person in my life I never got to thank who deserves my genuine gratitude. And it eats away at me like a cancer because thank you's come a dime a dozen. It rolls off my tongue like a personal introduction. Thanks for taking my money and serving me. Thanks for the compliment. Thanks for your help. Thanks for driving. Thanks for spending time with me. Thanks for listening to me. Thanks for kissing me. Thanks for last night. Thanks for everything. And, of course, the occasional thanks for nothing. I say thank you so much, probably above the average of 5,000 per year, that those who know me should question my sincerity when I do say it. But I'll never forget what you did on my behalf on the first day of middle school in Virginia, the act to which I owe the thank you, because no one else, not a single soul, stepped up in a similar way to you in all of my three years there.

I remember it vividly. I moved to the city just one day before. No friends, no foes, didn't know nobody. We had a pep assembly that day, in large part to inculcate school spirit and introduce middle school to us incoming sixth graders, but the only new-blood to get 'hazed' would be me. Because I didn't know anyone and by nature was introverted, I sat alone high up in the nosebleed section of the bleechers. Before the band got going and the cheerleaders got cheering, three boys aggressively approached my position yelling out racial slurs and, when they arrived, pushed me around and continued their taunts. Fucking chink, youse go backa to China. Ching chongy ching chong. One got behind where I sat and put me in a choke-hold. That was the second time I cried in public, and right on cue, kids from the lower sections of the bleacher turned their heads and laughed. I remember looking at a teacher in the lower section, telekinetically crying for help, only to see a chuckle on her face.

Before that day, I never cursed in public, let alone directly at someone else. You'd probably laugh at this statement if we so much as even conversed today, because the one thing I utter more than thank you is an obscenity. I've got no fucking respect for goddamned social norms, pardon my French, s'il vous plait. But during that moment of that day that is now forever engraved in my memory, I managed to mutter a fuck you and to give them my middle finger while fighting the choke-hold and battling my tears. What the fuck did you just say to us? Do you want to fucking die? While this happened and everyone in the lower sections laughed at the entertaining skit, you intervened and told them to stop. Did you hear what he just said to us? He said 'fuck you,' so he deserves what's coming. You unflinchingly responded along the lines that they deserved the fuck you and that they'd better leave now. They listened and left with haste. I'm honestly tearing up as I'm writing this to you right now, because like I said, you were the only person in my entire three years who stood up for me, who stood up against racism while I experienced it. While it's pathetic that no one else came close to my assistance, I'm glad you came through because I know it was the unpopular option and put you on the spot that very moment in front of the entire section of the gym. Because we were in different classes, I don't even remember interacting with you for the rest of middle school, but I wish that we became friends and more importantly, I wish that I had the chance to tell you how much your brave act meant to me.

You see, the remainder of middle school was hell for me. It's funny, now that I live in the Pacific Northwest, I frequently encounter people who adamantly dismiss my experience living "in the South." They tell me that it's barely the South and that it's not really Confederate. I distinctly recall, in one of my initial weeks in Virginia, that one of the big news items was a cross burning in a black man's front yard. These Northwesterners are something else, I tell you. Mostly passive aggressive fucks, in contrast to the racists from our childhood state. To a degree, I appreciate the racist honesty of Virginians than the affected "anti-racist" mannerisms of Northwesterners. I would've been a confused motherfucker if I spent my whole life here, blind to institutional racism and forgiving of the occasional epithet.

Virginia genuinely fucked with my head. My neighborhood in Virginia taught me how to internalize racism to survive. Down my street lived a popular kid from our school, Josh O'Grady. If you don't remember his face, I'm sure you recall the name. He had his posse of cool kids constantly around him. There was Mike, who practiced WWF finishing moves on me. The Undertaker's Tombstone. The Stone Cold Stunner. I grew up loving the WWF, but once this kid turned it into my existential reality, I ceased watching it immediately. Then there was Geoff or Jeff. I was older than him by two years, but he used to kick my ass every day and push me into a berry bush afterwards. I now have a few good friends who love picking and eating wild berries at first sight, but they have no idea what these berries convey to me. Weakness and insecurity. Oh, and how about big Mason. He made up the chant that everyone on the block used to sing when they saw me. Veer-o, Queer-o, Where'd he get his ear-o? What the fuck did this even mean? Yet somehow, this nonsensical saying was something I embraced, like Aladdin's call for Genie, because I knew that beyond the hurt of the call lay the fact that I had a group of boys to hang out with that day. My friends were kids who called me chink. Moving to the Northwest, I heard every other epithet or stereotype for Asian except the word chink, which surprised me. Apparently there were limits to the racial jokes that the Northwest employed. But while in Virginia, I accepted being a chink, laughed along like Sambo (hey, that's me!), and hung out with the chink-callers when they accepted me as a tenth wheel.

My parents didn't help much either. I used to be angry at them for validating my response of internalizing racism. But, I realize like any immigrant trying to get by, they had to survive in this nightmare any way possible. I hated being Chinese though. We would be in Chinese restaurants in Virginia and I would tell them to speak in English. Fucking crazy. Shhh, be quiet; white people never talk this loud. Fuck, Crystal, I'm tearing up again recalling all of this because I'm ashamed. Josh O'Grady used to make fun of me for anything he could conjure up, including living in the worst house in the neighborhood. But because he was popular, I used to imitate him. He had this head nod thing he would do because of his asthmatic condition (if my memory holds up), and I would imitate his head nod gesture thinking it was cool. One evening, his father rings our doorbell. Both my parents answer. His father tells my parents that I was quoting Jewish racial epithets from a novel assigned to us by our English teacher. I believe the book was Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and the epithets, whatever they were, were mild enough to be included in our seventh grade reading curriculum. His family was Jewish. I remember doing this as my only weapon to get back at my predator, and when I do this one thing, I get busted. My parents apologize on my behalf and tell me to apologize to Josh the very next morning at the bus stop. They explain to me that they worked so hard to foster a good relationship with the neighbors, which, by the way, is funny considering that they were never invited to any neighborhood events. But being the obedient kid I was, I apologize to him the very next morning. Asian supermarkets were a rarity in Virginia, and I remember we would get these special brand of Japanese rice crackers that I grew up on only when we visited my hometown of Toronto every few years or so. My parents gave away our remaining stash of Japanese rice crackers to the O'Grady's that next night.

This fucked up mentality of hating myself stayed with me through high school even when the geography changed to the "Asian friendly" Pacific Northwest. I remember during Christmastime of my freshman year of high school, an attractive girl from my French class, who was a junior then, gave me a teddy bear and told me she thought I was cute. I threw the teddy bear back at her and, instead of saying my customary thank you, I ran away from the situation knowing that I was ugly. Girls throughout my middle school in Virginia laughed at me to my face, often spreading rumors about another girl by accusing her of liking me. The ultimate diss. So throughout high school, I didn't ask anyone out and I shut others out. In my senior year high school yearbook, another attractive girl wrote that she had the biggest crush on me during her junior and senior years. And as I read it, I took it as some cruel, malicious joke transported from my past. Today, even as I've overcome a lot of my insecurities and self-deprecating internalizations, aspects from the past continue to haunt me.

We don't know each other, but I hope you get to read all this. You may never have thought about what my middle school experience was like or its extended impact, so here's that perspective. As a middle schooler, kids tend to run with the pack, but you broke from it. I don't know where you are or what you do, but I hope as hell that you still break from the pack and stand up for what's right. I'm all about breaking stereotypes now. Back then, you showed me that not everyone had to be racist in a racist society. Thank you, or rather your middle school self, for being who you were and being defiant in the situation.

Sincerely,
Veryl

Are Coaches Necessary? Centralism vs. Democracy in Competitive Sports

As standardized education spreads at a breakneck pace across the nation to anoint a new generation of robotic workers for the digital age, progressives resist with freedom schools and community campaigns against standardized tests and the gutting of public schools and their budgets. To be sure, these fights to restore creativity, critical thinking, the Socratic method of questioning anything and everything, and, in a word, democracy in education, are integral to redefining education in terms of personal growth and learning through experience and debate. Of course, these fights point to the greater irony of America's critiques of East Asian education models being too rigid, fact-based, and formulaic--petty excuses to mask the fact that Asian students (future workers of China, Japan, South Korea, and India) will soon be at the helm of the global economy, and by extension, that Asian capitalism is the new America. All for the purpose to allow American dreamers to continue dreaming sweetly at night.

Like many political revolutionaries, I myself am schooled by Paulo Friere, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). How one is educated is inherently political, he writes, and in a capitalist or colonial society, schools reflect the political agenda of those in power. Students in these societies are likened to a bank in which teachers deposit facts, ideas, and agendas that inhibit creativity and resistance while fostering complacency to an oppressive status quo. Friere flips the script on this traditional banking model of education and advocates for a dialectical education process where students teach teachers and vice versa. As an example, in the context of at-risk youth, it is key for the young to educate the older teachers who likely come from the outside (if not geographically then generationally), for the goal of education is for the youth to empower themselves, control their community, and overcome the system that produces their state of risk in the first place. This can only be done if teachers are willing to be taught and advise as needed, and if students accept the role of empowerment and are willing to learn through experience and struggle. Democracy in the classroom translates to democracy on the streets. Our public schools preach the rhetoric, but deliver authority figures who choke out creativity and breathe in standardization. I'd say it's ironic or hypocritical, but I think the best adjective to describe such contradictions is simply, it's American. In the words of J. Cole, Look at this nation//that's a crooked smile even braces can't straighten.

So if democratizing a classroom and unshackling it from standardization is the ideal, then what of democracy in competitive sports? What if players on a team mutinied against their coach and declared democracy on the floor? Or perhaps more moderately and in direct application of Friere, what if coaching became a mutual process in which athletes also coached the coach?

This summer, I assisted in coaching a high-level AAU boys' basketball squad. At least one player on my team, our center, will be a future D1 college basketball player, and his dominance in games both inside the key and beyond the arc allowed us to compete with talent above our own. Towards the end of the AAU season, immediately after we defeated another high-level AAU team, our head coach (the same high school varsity coach referred here) pulled me aside and snickered, So Veryl, do you think coaches make a difference? For someone who usually hits hard with words, this question was an unusually passive aggressive way to doubly insult my coaching ability and praise his own. Exactly one week prior, I had lost to the same opponent. Our coach was conspicuously absent that game. Actually, we didn't just lose that game, the opponents imposed their will, crushed our spirits, and made us disbelieve in our ability to play the game. We left the court like it was a funeral service, solemn and silent, doing the walk of shame. Recently deceased, Veryl and his basketball team, 2013-2013. Cries were heard from all over the city. How tragic, they were oh so young.

I want to establish, first and foremost, that coaches in any respectable program are the ultimate authority, the final word. Unlike Kanye's delusional mind, coaches are gods in flesh. What coach says, players execute. Fail to do so once in practice, it's a barrage of insults questioning your intelligence. Fail to do so twice in practice or if another player makes the same mistake, the barrage turns into an onslaught. They are pulled out of the drill, someone else gets subbed in who better get it right. If they fail, then the "midget with glasses", Veryl, gets to play and run with the big boys while those triers and not doers sit out the rest of the drill. The failure to execute a play or perform your hardest during a game is another matter. Coach has no qualms about benching star players for extended periods of time or the entire game if they don't transition back on defense or cut to the basket hard. Winning is NOT an individual effort. It doesn't take star players to win if our team outplays, outhustles, and outruns our opponent. If all five players on the floor commit to locking down the paint, pressuring the ball, playing the middle on defense ready to help stop drives, then our offense will flow from our defensive intensity and win us the game. During the regular high school season, we shut down the star future-D1 players in our conference like Zach Lavine and Tucker Haymond because our five guys on the floor stopped them, had their eye on them at all times, not just the one defender 'assigned' to them. If you think the natural conclusion to draw about winning is that it is a team effort, then either I have understated the point of this paragraph or you've been internalizing one too many cliches from an ESPN color commentator. Make no mistake, coaching is the difference and the key to winning.

If players buy into a coach's philosophy--in our program, effort and attitude at all times--and if the coach keeps players honest by rewarding those who execute this philosophy regardless of talent, then the team will upset teams appraised higher by analysts and statisticians who look solely at individual stats and team personnel to determine the outcome of matches. In contrast to our program, which devalues star players and emphasizes team effort, many other programs live and die by their star players' individual performance. This may work against another team with similar minimalist or non-philosophy, but against a team that plays team defense with integrity and intensity, they will often lose because their star players get shut down. And for those star-power driven teams, since offense runs through their stars, when they are shut down, then team offense stagnates. Just look at the Miami Heat's road to the finals this year, and how the Indiana series was so tough for them because Miami ran the majority of plays through one or two individuals, leaving the rest of the team frozen like statues beyond the arc. More importantly, coaches of these superstars tend to give them a carte blanche to shoot themselves out of a slump or to solely play a one way game and not worry about defense. At the State Tournament this year in the Tacoma Dome, I saw the star-endowed teams of Seattle Prep and Lakeside, whose coaches allowed their superstars total control on the court, lose to teams that were more disciplined and better coached.

A coach's personnel decisions are crucial to the game's outcome. Better coached teams are unafraid to sit out their star players when needed because coaches know it's harder to defend a team of five players who move on the floor, set screens for each other, and patiently look for a good shot. The 3A Champions this year, Rainier Beach, defeated Lakeside not only because they played much more cohesively, but equally as important, their superstar, Louisville-commit Shaqquan Aaron, who has a tendency to play loosely on defense, did not play at all during the second half or overtime. I will be in the minority in saying this, but I truly felt that the Miami Heat upset the San Antonio Spurs during the NBA Finals this year. Up 3 games to 2 in a best of 7 series, San Antonio Coach Popovich made unforgivable personnel decisions that cost them the title. Overplaying superstar Manu Ginobli and rising star Danny Green (who started the series with unbelievable three-point shooting but ended the series completely cold) and underplaying Kawhai Leonard and Boris Diaw, role players who were smart and secure with the basketball, especially during the final stretches of the game. Taking out Tim Duncan in the final seconds of regulation in Game 6 who had the size to potentially get a defensive rebound; instead allowing a second-chance opportunity by Miami that led to an unbelievable game-tying shot by Ray Allen. Taking out Tony Parker in final seconds of Game 7 and allowing Manu Ginobli to not only handle the ball, but drive the ball on his weak side, leading to a turnover and basket at the other end that all but closed out the Spurs. Perhaps in the case of San Antonio, without a coach in Games 6 and 7, the players would've decided to keep Parker and Duncan on the floor, thus winning the championship. But, this hypothetical scenario is an exception to the rule that good coaching involves smart substitutions and no loyalties to superstars. Because of their professional distance to players, coaches are ultimately poised to make the tough decisions to bench a star for the greater good of the team.

The aforementioned aspects of coaching--the philosophy and personnel decisions--come second and third to coaching strategy. Games at the highest level are duels between coaches. Players are pawns in a bigger chess match, and when the pawns do not run the play exactly as the coach called out and envisioned, then they are substituted with another on the bench. Some programs are defined by their strategy. Syracuse's 2-3 Zone. VCU's relentless full-court press. But most coaches have dozens of plays in their arsenal and a few aces up their sleeve for guaranteed buckets. They have thought and rethought how to attack certain defenses, how and where to utilize screens to get their best shooter open, and how to stifle an opponent's offense before they get going. Some coaches change defensive formation in the middle of the opponent's same offensive possession. Others change it up after every made basket. But the key is change and adaptation at a moment's notice. The skill and brains required for the task is extremely difficult and requires immediate decision making by an authoritative voice. Additionally, unlike chess players whose pieces from game to game remain the same, coaches have the challenge of creating, tailoring, and ultimately innovating their strategy to best fit their players from season to season. A "timeless, tried-and-true" response to situations created by the opponent, without regard to your own personnel, is not enough of an adaptation to win the duel. In its purest form, when players are executing a coach's strategy perfectly, coaching is art. Watching Mike Krzyzewski (Duke) duel Tom Izzo (Michigan State) is like watching Mozart duel Salieri, Alexandre Cabanel duel Claude Monet, or Biggie duel Pac.

On the subject of duels and strategy, winning in sports is like winning in war. The few moments that are enshrined in leftist history, where popular democratic militias were created such as in the Paris or Shanghai Communes, do not make good case studies for democracy in wartime since these militias were severely shorthanded in size. Nonetheless, without authority in situations of crisis and the ability to make immediate decisions that are enforced by the militia, parity in army size will not make much of a difference in the outcome. Currently, many progressives, in critique of the hierarchical structure that has plagued traditional revolutionary organizations, are making a big push for horizontalism--the dispersing of knowledge and the fostering of leadership among all members. On a sports team, it's ideal to have players understand why they're doing something (i.e. why they run a particular play against a zone defense) and be able to help teammates out when those teammates are clueless. But in times of crisis, in the heat of the moment, it's far more important to have players doing the right thing and being in the right spots even if they don't understand why they're doing it.

The game of basketball is so counter-intuitive to everything for which a political revolutionary stands. And it's so ironic, or to invoke an earlier phrase, so American, that I love basketball so much. If you ever go to a public court at a park and spectate a pick up game, you'll discover pure chaos. It's so ugly that sometimes I don't even recognize that 'basketball' is the game that is being attempted. Even in glorified pick up games featuring NBA players, such as the summer Pro-Am League in Seattle, there is no sense of urgency, intensity, effort, or defense. Players don't run plays and those who believe that they are heroes play selfish hero ball; the other players implicitly consent to extended conditioning sessions where they run up and down the court without touching the ball.

In basketball, structure and organization is beautiful. Even an unpredictable offensive strategy like a motion offense has rules within it, basket cuts that are imperative after each pass, and reactions players make based on reads on the defense. It's undeniable that the beautiful all starts with centralized leadership, the coach, who makes his players understand and respect the system and in turn, become the best players that they can possibly be. But not everything is counter-intuitive. Like all things with a centralized leadership, too much power can be abused and athletes pick up life lessons and perspectives, and not just the sport, from their coach. Some of these problems will be alleviated as society changes through struggle and newer democratic and liberating values are normalized. But in a competitive culture requiring quick planning and quicker action, coaches are as indispensable as the hoop itself.