Coach Max
I have learned, when you coach a kids’ sports team, not all the parents want you posting
pictures of their children on the internet. This is just one of the many insights I
have gained, as coach of a kids’ sports team.
The kids are all girls aged under 11, and the sport is
netball. You might not have heard
of netball, if you live in one of those non-netball-playing nations, such as all of them
except for a handful of ex-British colonies. It’s like basketball, except
instead of dribbling the ball, as soon as you catch it, you have to come to a dead stop
and try not to blow out your kneecap.
Imagine my netball team like this, but with players a quarter of the size, and some looking in the wrong direction.
Also the players are restricted to particular zones. This makes netball very tactical.
One thing that makes it less tactical is when the players are under
11 years old. But it’s super-engrossing to a person like me, who loves closed systems
where you set up a bunch of agents with instructions and let them loose and see what
happens. It’s like writing novels, and programming, but with real little humans.
Another similarity I noticed between writing and coaching a kids’ sports team
is that delusion is helpful. It’s best to be heavily deluded while writing,
to avoid the awareness that your first draft is garbage. You need
to think it’s fantastic right up until it’s time to rewrite it, so that you actually get there.
Coaching kids’ sports is the same: There’s really no place for
objectivity. I’m not there to tell a ten-year-old what her weaknesses are; I’m there to
make her feel good about the time she made a smart pass, so she’ll want to do it again.
In both cases, there is a lot of wilful blindness to incompetence while
seizing on hints of gold.
It’s way more fun than I expected when I answered the netball club’s call for volunteer coaches,
no experience, expertise, or prior knowledge necessary. One thing I love about sport is
how it creates a tension-soaked contest that is 100% artificial, with no real-life
consequences. You can watch a game of something and get happy or sad and then go right back to whatever
you were doing. This works even with kids’ sports, apparently, because I care a lot
about what happens on the court each Saturday morning, and it also doesn’t matter at all.
I value things like this, because I have a habit of turning my hobbies into jobs,
and then a thing I was doing just for fun becomes work. Not real work. Not the kind
most people do, with bosses. But it’s fun and invigorating to do something new that
doesn’t overlap with anything else.
Having said that, I did build a website to
generate netball rosters, since it gets complicated
when you have eight or nine players and seven positions and four quarters and at the
last minute Stephanie can’t play Wing Attack because she hurt her foot chasing a
butterfly. It runs a mutating genetic algorithm to sift through tens of thousands of
combinations and find the most efficient one. It’s free and public, so you can use it for your
kids’ sports team, too.
