It’s definitely nice (and all too rare) when you set goals for the season and actually meet them.
Our boys hadn’t won league since 2000 but thought this could be our year – it was.
With only eleven girls competing at the league meet, we knew we couldn’t hang with rival Garden Plain, but we finished a comfortable 2nd, winning 8 of the 18 events. We also knew the girls would fare better at the state meet once our firepower would outweigh or lack of depth. We finished as state runner-up in our classification by half point to the same Garden Plain squad who beat us by 52 at league. It would be easy to bemoan all the places we could have picked up a meager half a point, but going in to the state meet I decided I’d just be thrilled with a top three finish. The 3A classification turned into the horserace I predicted with the top six teams all finishing within ten points of each other. Plus, it’s a nice feather in my coaching cap to be able to forever say, when talking to future squads about the importance of every point, that I have lost a state title by half a point!
This year my primary role seemed to be sport psychologist to my top athletes. They had all had success in the past but struggled with the weight of the unspoken expectation to be the best. We made the effort to focus on the process, not the result. So while at the beginning of the season I tried to fire up the girls with the thought that we could be chasing a state title, the week of state I spent only 10 seconds on it, saying, “We could win, we could be tenth, it’s not even worth worrying about because too much of it lies outside of our control.” Okay, that’s probably not verbatim, but my athletes will tell you, I do talk like that at practice.