Is it possible to always leave training with a smile? It is possible, and we will tell you how to do it;

It made my blood run cold when I read the interview. It was given to the coach of a girls’ minibasket team (eleven-year-old girls) who was preparing to face an important championship. When the interviewer asked him how he had approached this preparation, his response, verbatim, was this:

“The preparation on the court has a common denominator, which is SUFFERING (written in capital letters in the interview). Only by suffering and pushing the players to the limit physically and psychologically can we generate that pressure, and that path is similar to what they will experience in a Spanish championship”

The response leaves little to be desired. At least when presented like this, without any qualification: the basic resource for winning is suffering; without suffering there is neither proper preparation nor any possibility of victory. Trying to recover from the shock, my imagination began to run wild as I wondered what methods our coach might use to carry out his “merciful” objective:

Would he replace the hoops and cones with medieval torture racks? Would he keep all the Rocky films as his bedside viewing and make the players run up and down the twelve floors of his building several times? Would he take them on a training camp to the Almería desert and leave them to fend for themselves so they could survive in that hostile environment? They were certainly going to suffer.

«Suffering can never be the common denominator of preparation»

What is most striking about the response, besides the bluntness, is who it is addressed to: girls of eleven and twelve who are going to an event that, for some of them, will be unique in their lives—full of excitement, eager to make new friends, to meet people from other regions, to play, to win and to experience something different in their lives.

But the price to pay for such bright hopes is high: suffer and live on the edge of psychological tension.

I don’t know what result these girls achieved in the competition. Nor have I bothered to find out. Whoever it was, I already know: failure.

Failure due to a training methodology that does not take into account the players’ needs and possibilities for improvement; failure because it assumes that the end justifies the means; failure because suffering can never be the common denominator of preparation. Even if they won the championship, unfortunately they have lost.

Possibly the ardour inherent in that coach’s youth led him to use terms that are not very appropriate in sports training, and calm and thoughtful reflection on them may lead him, at the very least, to reconsider them in a different light. I would suggest others: commitment, effort, generosity, teamwork, perseverance, motivation…

With them, any defeat will always be a victory and there will be no need to push eleven-year-old boys and girls to the limit.

«Commitment, effort, generosity, teamwork, perseverance, motivation… With them, any defeat will always be a victory»

I will end with something that happened to me a few days ago. I ran into a former player whom I had the good fortune to coach in his formative years. He was returning with his son (the same age as our coach’s girls) who had been training with his team a few minutes earlier.

After the customary greetings, I told him that I had heard that his boy was doing very well playing basketball. “Well,” he replied very humbly, “he’s not bad, but what his mother and I enjoy most is that we see him come out of every training session and every game with a smile on his face.”

I was shocked by the answer and, for a few seconds, I didn’t know what to say. There can be no better summary of a philosophy of what training work with young people should be.

Between leaving training with a grimace of suffering or with a smile, I know clearly which one I would choose. What about you?