Serendipity

Everybody's heard, used and practiced teamwork. We do it and talk about it all the time in PE. Teamwork simply means a group of people working together to achieve a common goal. But what do you call it when a team suddenly starts achieving more than people think it should?

This goes beyond mere teamwork. This is when a group truly works as one. It takes a special level of belief in each other to achieve this. I call it synergy. This is a story of a little team that was like this, and the one magical moment made them that way.

The Wallenberg High School Lady Bulldogs, a basketball team that I coach, didn't start out very well. We were very inexperienced and I was trying to teach them a lot of things in a short time. Sometimes it seemed like we would never get it, for we made the same mistakes over and over again. Every once in awhile, however, we would do something really good and that would give us hope. Through it all, I told the team that if just showed a little bit of improvement each game we would be fine by the time league play started. More importantly, the girls never gave up on each other and got along really well.

A high school basketball team plays two kinds of games; non-league and league. Non-league games are basically practice games, real games that don't count in the standings. League games are the ones that really count. Do well in league games and a team makes the playoffs no matter what they did in non-league games.

Wallenberg had a crappy preseason. We won 3 games and lost 6, including losses in two games that we lead in the fourth quarter. I didn't mind the losing except we seemed to lose confidence at the end of games, as if the girls expected something bad to happen to them.

"Don't give up," I'd tell them, "play as hard as you can all the way to the end, and good things will happen."

"Okay coach," they'd say, but the looks on their faces told me that they really didn't believe me. I knew that they had to learn this for themselves.

League season didn't start too well either. We lost our first two games. One loss, to a school called ISA, was another game in which we lead at the beginning of the 4th quarter.

The turning point of our season came against against Galileo, a school we hadn't beaten in 3 years.

The game started poorly for us. We were really sloppy. Early in the fourth quarter, we found ourselves behind by twelve points. Then, something clicked. We changed defenses. Galileo started having problems. We started to outplay Galileo and slowly began to catch up. We finally took our first lead of the game with 9 seconds left in the game but Galileo immediately took the lead back. It was now our ball but there were only 3.1 seconds left in the game. We had to move the ball 94 ft down the length of the court in order to take a shot for a chance to win the game. In 3.1 seconds.

I called a timeout.

I drew up a play that we'd never practiced before, not a good thing to do in a critical game situation. But, we'd practiced elements of the play many times, so I just combined these elements into one play.

The girls executed the play perfectly. The inbounder threw her pass to the halfcourt line where a girl caught it and passed to another player cutting to the basket. The third player caught it, took one dribble then took her shot. As the ball left her hand, the horn sounded, ending the game. But, the shot was already in the air, so it would count if it went in. The ball hit the rim, spun around it, then dropped through the hoop. We won.

We were lucky. But, it was luck of our own creation. A lot of things had to come together for this to work. We had two make two good passes. We had to catch those two passes. We had to make the shot. And we had to do it all in 3.1 seconds. This is synergy. Add in the luck and it becomes serendipity.

The funny thing about this is how that 3.1 seconds changed the way the team played. The girls now believed that playing hard till the end would make good things happen. After that, each time we took the floor, we felt like we had a chance to win. We did, too. A lot. All because of one magical moment.