Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Pregame motivational speeches: Skip just one for the Gipper

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The pregame speech by the head coach: To call it a ritual is to cover up what it really is: a superstition.

From peewee to the pros, coaches believe they cannot send their players out on the field of battle without giving some kind of "motivational" speech.

The problem is, they so rarely have anything motivational to say. How could they? A dozen, two dozen, three dozen times a year, the coach is supposed to get up and say something to stir teamwork and togetherness in the hearts of the players?

Nope. In my experience, most motivational speeches are more like this pastiche of loudly mumbled clichés, to an audience of players who have heard it so many times they seem not to be hearing it at all.

See here.

The only coaches who don't give motivational speeches are baseball managers. (Even golf coaches give the goddamn things when they have the chance; witness all the bogus motivational hocus pocus surrounding the Ryder Cup and its honorary captain.)

Baseball managers ("manager" is such a cool, down-to-earth title  in the first place) realize it's impossible to give 162 annual motivational speeches to the same audience in a year. Why can't football and basketball coaches realize they don't have two dozen in their bag, either?

For a long time, I allowed that maybe that the players needed these talks, however clumsy, and that there was some emotional need for this ritual that only a player can understand. So I once asked a player of a team I was covering: "Do you guys really like to listen to those speeches, or do you sometimes wish the fucker would just shut up so you could get out on the field and play."

"Oh, yeah."

That's what I thought.

But the speeches will go on, until one coach—and coaches being the most conservative creatures on the planet, it will likely be awhile—utterly eschews the pregame speech for a whole season, and wins a championship.

Now, I know what every coach who's reading this is saying right now: That's impossible.

No, Coach, it's not. You can do it! You've just got to dig down deep inside yourself …

Good mornin’ America, who are ya?

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When I tell the average American what my wife does for a living, they get a glassy-eyed look of reverence on their face and immediately say that it's so awesome that my wife is a schoolteacher.

When I add that my wife teaches in the city, the reverence turns to exaltation—ohmyGodthat'ssogreat—and I fear if I don't change the subject soon, the American will begin speaking to me in tongues.

And change the subject is exactly what the American wants me to do, because when you talk about teachers, the subject of education could follow. And despite the fact that every American says education is the most important blah blah blah in the blah blah blah of the future of blah blah blah, no one—no one—likes to talk about education. (Ken Robinson is one of the world's leading experts on education, and he confesses that when someone brings up education in a cocktail party conversation his first reaction is, "Oh, why me?")

So, to sum up, the American thinks teachers are totally amazing, that teachers who work in the howling ghetto are even more, like, heroes, but that education is to be talked about little and thought about even less.

And, meanwhile, the average American seems to be be convinced that many teachers, if not most, are bums and burnout cases who, without their creepy unions, would have no jobs at all.

If there's a job harder than educating the American child these days, it might be communicating about education with the childish American.