Life is like basketball.

I've been consumed by basketball lately. While I love watching basketball (how could you NOT love this team?), the season goes on and on... with LOTS of games... Even with all of the games and all the time away from home, I would take in a hundred basketball games before ONE football game. I have to sit - make that STAND - through a LOT of football games too... I refer to each as "three hours of my life I can't get back."

Anywho... I digress...I started thinking about how life is like basketball. There are lots of parts of it you can do alone, but ultimately, success depends on the strength of the team.

I watch referees call a foul at one end of the court and not call the same thing at the other end. Similarly, "calls" in life seem to end up lop-sided many times. Life and refereeing are about perspective... not only visual perspective, but emotional perspective. A referee has got to make some calls simply because of the pressure put on by coaches, players, and spectators chipping away at him or her... you can see this in what seems like "make up" calls coming after a particularly contested decision. In life, we need to make split second decisions all the time, some of them are good, others are not good. Some of those decisions are visual, others are based on gut feeling that cannot be explained. Perhaps the benefit we have in life is that we can train ourselves to slow down and think things through before deciding what to do... Referees don't always have that luxury.

I watch players avoid dishing to a teammate they (must) view as weaker - we all do this in life. I will always go to the people at work who I know will do a good job. I don't want to have to do something over, so I always go to the same people. Unfortunately, some people I don't go to haven't completely screwed up in the past, it's just a few mistakes that color what I think about their competence. Not really fair, is it? Getting benched for a few errors? Getting benched can be a psychological hurdle! The player - or the person - starts to doubt himself and feel like he's no longer a valuable part of the team. The person/player can start to get inside his own head about the issue and end up making things worse than they really are.

The point is that in life and basketball, effective communication is key. Coaches (in life and in basketball) need to communicate with players to let them know what they need from them. If a player isn't performing, a coach should be communicating what needs to be done better. If a player isn't performing, the player needs to be working harder than ever to fix whatever isn't working. Communicating what needs to be done rather than leaving a person hanging honors the work that person has put in already and gives him a chance to improve.