Sports Ethics: “Step Up”

“We were down. Coach told me I had to step up my game and I did.”

How many times have we heard this expression from coaches and players: step up.

I think the notion of step up carries real weight as an ethical and psychological moment in sport and represents a model to carry into professional domains.

Think about the metaphor for a moment: step up. It places the person on a step, a place, even a plateau. The notion specifies that the athlete or professional exists at a particular level of performance on an upward climb. The level may be a plateau or it may be a lower rung, does not matter. What does matter: the metaphor urgently states that the present step/level/plateau does not suffice to achieve the goal. Staying at this level, this step, means failure.

Let’s think about some classic situations where a player or coach must step up their play. I am going to use team here but this applies as much to individuals in individual sports as team competition.

• ·      Seniors or veterans have graduated, and the younger players of the team have to step up and perform at a higher level of skill and commitment.
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• ·      The team has fallen behind in a contest, and the contest verges on getting away from the team. The player must step up and perform to bring the team back from its lethargy and gain energy and focus.
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• ·      The team possesses a lead but the other team makes their expected run. The momentum seems to be shifting, and a player has to step up and stop the run.
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• ·      Players can step up when a window exists to excel to break the game open like avoiding a tackle and finding a fourth gear or making a free throw shot with time running out.
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• ·      Players are challenged to step up when a championship or playoff or chance is on the line.

All these situations differ but carry a common denominator—the existing level of performance will not work and must change. To the point of the game, the performance must rise up from its immediate level.

Step up has two related connotations. First, it might mean that a team is playing below its normal level. The below norm can occur when a team has not prepared for the challenge opponents pose. They took an opponent for granted and must literally snap out of lethargy and step up to their normal level of play. A team might be surprised or tired and is not containing the other team’s comeback. Athletes must change their emotional and mental mind set on the spot and take the game seriously. They need to respond with integrity to the challenge before them.

Second, step up suggests that just being competent or playing at the norm, even if very high, will not work. A team might be playing hard and well, but just not good enough to win. A team may have been playing very well, but the opponent is roaring back, making a run, or they opponents take the lead. This calls for exceptional performance. Exceptional does not demand the impossible but dictates that a player pull it all together and bring the absolute maximum physical, mental and emotional presence that they are capable of at this stage in their development. 

Stepping up means bursting past a performance plateau. This exceptional moment meets the test of the moment. Often players may not know they have it in them, but they achieve it. They step up.

A player can have a career game responding to the quality of the opposition or stakes of the game. They can have a break out performance or a breakout moment—they escape a tackle at a critical moment; they sack a quarterback to end a drive; they intercept a pass; they stop a run with an exceptional block or spike; they perform an extraordinary save. Each action not only personifies a great individual action but galvanizes a team. Stepping up can be contagious, and fellow teammates take heart from the action; they bear down more and give a more attention and energy. Not only does the opponent’s run stop, but momentum shifts as teammates gather up their focus and their collective performance rises.

Players on the verge of giving up recover. Coaches who started to call plays based on minimizing a loss take heart and re-infuse their play calling with risk and energy; they coach up, not down. A team comes back from behind.

Multiple players express their commitment to each other. They cheer and encourage each other. The team as a whole steps up, and the coaches respond in kind with deeper concentration and focus upon plays or the energy they convey to players.

To step up does not mean just to try harder. The player calls upon him or herself to attend more deeply, concentrate more intently and push their body and memory more powerfully. Step up involves physical and mental rising from a baseline to a higher baseline for a moment in time. It may presage a higher level of performance in the future for the player or team, but it succeeds for a moment, that is enough.

Successful stepping up expands a person’s imagination of the player he or she can become. To step up need not be a one shot moment, but a new possibility.

Reset Games: the Logic of Football

The Seahawks numbed my mind this weekend with seven punts and one failed fourth down try. But what struck me beyond the futility of it all was watching the repetition of a sequence. Before the punt, all the action stopped and two totally different groups of players ran onto the field; they punted, returned, then stopped the action, had a commercial and then two other completely different groups of specialized players ran onto the field.

Now this happens so often we take it for granted. But think about this. Unlike in life, in football all the action just STOPS. The game STOPS AND RESETS. The players huddle, coaches call different plays for offense and defense, then the down plays out and action stops and the whole cycle repeats itself.

The game stops. I mean think about it! The game just stops, everyone regroups and starts again. Would that life was so accommodating.

Football epitomizes an entire class of games I call reset games. The shape of the game and competition is determined by full stops in the action. At the end of a play, not even a point, everything stops. A new play can be called; players take their positions and then they play again. Each team has time to regroup and call a play. The reset effect is amplified because teams turn over positions—the teams switch from offense to defense with a staid almost ritual transition. So after three and out and punt, the other side gets the ball. Each team gets to play offense and defense in sequence. Volleyball, tennis, baseball and softball all have the same reset structure, but I will focus upon football.    

       

Reset gives a sport a particular cast. First, it injects the coach far more aggressively into the game. Each reset gives the coach time to call a play, talk/yell at players, adjust to the other side and send in substitutions. This injection makes the games more cerebral because not only can coaches call plays and substitute, but they can change a formation or recast it with new players. Each coach endlessly adjusts to micro-changes from the other side resulting in an interactive battle of wits.

Second, reset games spawn specialization and place immense stress upon stopping the other side. Not only does play stop after each point or score, but in football, if the other team does not score within an allotted time/down sequence, it loses the ball. So team defense becomes incredibly important not just to stop the offense, but to gain the ball back for the offense to score again. Volleyball and tennis changes this dynamic even more when a defensive stop actually gets a point awarded to the successful defender.  Reset games place huge emphasis upon defense and specialists.

Third, reset sports have rhythms but not flows. The reset stops play. Runs and cascading moment are discouraged; reset sports slow pacing, undercut momentum and give chances to regroup. The games move with stop/start staccato rhythms. These stops break momentum and give teams chances to recover, and unless complete collapses occur teams can claw back into games.

Fourth, reset games spawn elaboration and complexity in their offenses and defenses, and football represents the most luxuriant growth of this. Because they have the time to stop, think, reset and play again, coaches anticipate and scout and prepare packages and sets just designed for the other team. Modern football breeds unbelievable complexity in play design, scouting, adjustment and specialization. All this is made possible by the combination of reset and substitutions.

The pattern of allowed substitutions profoundly alter reset games. Free substitutions permit coaches to constantly tinker with teams and invite intense specialization. In football whole new teams come for punts or offense and defense. Coaches fine tune formations by putting in specialists for nickel defenses or running or passing plays. If you limit substitutions like in baseball or arrange them like in volleyball, the game becomes much less specialized or unit oriented.

Stop. Think. Reset. Play again. Stop. Think. Reset. This reset structure means that players can reflect and adapt or they can disengage. If they are struggling with the other teams offense or actions, it terminates action for a second. The reset can protect teams from roll ups and huge runs. Each play can be analyzed and adapted to. In football it evolves into elaborate chess matches where teams have studied each other’s tendencies and personnel and have time to implement them because of the stops.

The reset configuration unleashes a bonanza for TV and radio. Each reset offers time for commercials, and now the reset times are determined by commercial breaks. The commercials themselves are constructed to fit within the time of reset.

The structure points to strategies to take advantage of it. The hurry up offenses or no huddle offenses are all designed to disrupt the specialization and regrouping aspects of reset games. Oregon’s speed demon offense lives as much by its ability to disrupt and tire the other team as by its sophisticated approach to the game. But it depends upon subverting the default rhythms of the game.

Reset games encourage disruptive tactics. Because teams rely upon reset and coaching domination, teams tend to plan and invest in sets. If an opponent comes up with surprises or finds a weakness, it discombobulates the other team. Specialization, planning and commitment become a problem as the team and coaches struggle to adapt to the surprise or the suddenly exposed weakness.

Finally reset games encourage teams to get try to work on headgames and influence the other team's mind set. Because of the time to stop and think, reset games can lead to over-thinking. The stop, reset, play pattern lures players to think too much, and the cognitive pattern of thinking diffuses their attention and undermines their pattern recognition and reaction time. Given the speed and force of modern sports, players depend upon trained pattern recognition and trained reaction, if they stop to think, their game dissipates. The same thing can happen to coaches who get twisted up in trying to anticipate the next move and fall back on predictable patterns.

The reset logic highlights how football is just a game with invented rules. We need to remember that despite our penchant to saturate life with sports metaphors, life does not offer instant resets. Life does not stop time and permit substitutions. Life is not football and we should not forget that.