Year 4: Up All Night To Get Lucky

“Luck? I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and I’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: Hard work – and realizing what is opportunity and what isn’t.”

 – Lucille Ball

Before you categorize this article as an ode to the scandalous actions that take place after dark and ONLY after marriage in a loving home (hat tip: Daft Punk), I’d like to make it clear that I’m speaking of a different kind of “luck,” if such a thing exists outside of the lottery. The sports world has always had a fascination with the notion of luck. One team gets “lucky” and wins, the other just had “bad luck” and walked away losers. This, somehow, has become an acceptable form of explaining the outcome of sporting events. As to not sit on a high horse, I should disclose that I’ve been guilty of using luck to explain how things transpired in a competition. Whether it was coach-speak or I believed it, I was a perpetrator and not an officer of the law in this case.

One of the most common practices in our culture is to tell someone who has an event drawing near, “good luck.”

“Good luck on your test today!”

“Hey man, good luck in the game tonight!”

“Good luck with your job interview. You’ll do great, I’m sure!”

“You bought your wife a half-eaten box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day?! …Good luck!”

Luck insinuates that you haven’t done the preparation necessary to be successful in your opportunity; that you need to rely on some power that deals out “luck” to some but not to others (a “luck fairy” if you will). Preparation for, and recognition of, opportunities are the only way to make sure the Luck Fairy sprinkles her Luck Dust¹ upon you when you need it most.

Hey, I get it. People only mean well when they wish you luck. It means they care. “Good luck,” is a universal phrase meant to convey that you are hoping that person does well in their craft. I understand. My thoughts aren’t directed at those who use the phrase as much as it is to those who believe it. You cannot bank on luck. You have to do the work necessary to perform a task, as you won’t walk blindly into success. What you’ll find is that if you do the work before your opportunity arrives, “luck” will have found you.

Last season, I coached a team that went 4-21. This season, I coached a team that went 17-8 and finished 3rd place in the same conference as last season’s 12^th place finish. I’d like to say it was due to our staff’s ability to come up with the right play or say the right thing, but it is really a credit to how our players prepared themselves for their moment. Their skill development, conditioning level, and their attention to detail all played major roles in their success. Want proof?

In 25 games this season, we played in 12 games where the final score was decided by 9 points or less. In those 12 games, we went 11-1 (including 2-0 when the game went to overtime). That’s the difference between our 17-8 season and a “bad luck” season of 6-19; that’s a HUGE difference!

So, as a coach, what do we do to facilitate these opportunities? We watch countless hours of film, looking for correctable deficiencies in our players, and exploitable tendencies in our opponents. We spend hours each week coming up with plans for practice to help correct our problems. We spend the bulk of our time on the road recruiting players who (hopefully) have strengths where we need to be stronger. When we get home at 1am from a long road trip, when everyone else has gone to sleep, we download, upload, cut, merge, watch and clip film so we can watch film with our players the next day. The only time I’ve ever dared to count the amount of hours we worked in a week it was 101 hours (we didn’t even get any Dalmations!). Regular are the nights where I see the strike of midnight from the confines of my desk or the open road returning from a recruiting trip.

We, quite literally, stay up all night…just to get “lucky”.

¹ – “Luck Dust” can be bought at your local Target. It only costs your credit card information and your first-born child. Batteries sold separately.