“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 12th 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.
