We Keep Finding Ways to Lose

Okay so I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this for about three weeks and I’m just going to say it and see if it lands.

I’ve been watching this team lose close games. And what I notice is that it’s not a talent thing. We have the talent. It’s not a conditioning thing. You guys work. It’s not scheme — Coach handles that and that’s not my lane anyway.

What I see, and I could be totally wrong about this, is that something happens in the fourth quarter. Something in here — and I’m pointing at my chest — changes when the game gets close. Like the team that was playing loose and confident for thirty minutes becomes a different team in the last three minutes. And it’s not that you’re trying less hard. It’s almost like you’re trying harder and it’s making it worse.

I’ve seen this before. When I was coaching high school, we had a team that was the most talented group I ever coached and we went .500. Because they couldn’t close. And I spent a whole season trying to fix it with strategy and rotations and press breaks and none of that was the problem.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

The spirit of fear. That’s what I think I’m seeing. Not cowardice — nobody in this room is a coward. Fear of a specific thing. Fear of being the reason the team loses. Fear of taking the shot and missing it. Fear of making the wrong play in front of everybody when it matters most.

And here’s the thing about that kind of fear — it’s invisible from the outside. It looks like hesitation. It looks like the extra dribble before the pass. It looks like not calling for the ball in the corner when you’re open because what if you miss. It looks like the turnover that happens because you second-guessed yourself for a half-second and that half-second is everything at this level.

Paul tells Timothy that God did not give us a spirit of fear. He gave us power, love, and a sound mind. I want to sit on sound mind for a second because I think that’s the one that applies here.

A sound mind is the mind that can function under pressure the way it functions without pressure. It’s the mind that doesn’t add a hundred extra variables to a decision that should be simple. When you’re open, you shoot. That’s a sound mind making a basketball decision. When you’re open and you think about whether you’ve been shooting well, and what happens if you miss, and whether coach will take you out, and what the other team will do in transition if you miss — that’s not a sound mind anymore. That’s a mind that fear got into.

I asked my high school team that year one question: what are you afraid of in the fourth quarter? And the answers were not what I expected. One kid said he was afraid of letting the seniors down. Another said he was afraid that if they lost his parents would be disappointed. Another kid — and this is the one I think about the most — said he was afraid that if they lost people would find out he wasn’t as good as everyone thought he was.

None of that had anything to do with basketball. All of it was showing up in the basketball.

I’m not going to ask you that question out loud right now. But I’m asking you to ask it to yourself. What is the thing that changes in you when the game is close? What are you actually afraid of? Because until you name it honestly you can’t give it to the God who said He didn’t give you that spirit in the first place.

Roy intentionally doesn’t ask this out loud. If the room is safe enough to surface answers, let them come. If not, let the private reflection stand.