Sports Ethics: Clean it Up

You hear it all the time. Losing at halftime or the end of a loss a coach will respond to the question, “what do you have to do better coach?” “We need to clean it up,” will come the answer. The answer makes a lot of sense to a coach and gives a focus for halftime discussions or practices between competitions. This approach defines a particular tactical approach to professional and athletic excellence that works in many but not all situations.

“Clean it up” carries strong assumptions about the nature of sports and professional achievement that are worth remembering. Clean it up focuses on the prior existence of form and technique.

To clean up actions refers to prior forms and techniques that players and coaches know and can practice to get a more exact fit between player intent and executions. This tactic presumes coaches and members of the team know what they should be doing. They have a plan, a schema and an approach—the problem lies not there but that players are not executing with required form and technique.  Individuals need more reflective discipline and focus in practice and finishing to clean it up.

“Clean it up” is central to a formalistic conception of professional and athletic excellence. The imperative depends upon the idea that a player and team have obligation to master the technique and form of their position and practice. It builds heavily upon a skill conception of sport that focuses upon teaching players to link perception, mind, body and emotions into the execution of complex, sometimes minuscule  expertise, and integrate them into a flowing performance.

This formalism in an almost Platonic way relies heavily upon knowledge of the proper form. The form should be able to trump conditions if executed well. It builds heavily upon the ability of individuals to use their trained and integrated memory to master multiple forms and techniques and practice them in a mindful manner until they become second nature. The intent flows as disciplined action.

Clean it up points to the profound mental and intellectual foundations of elite sport and professional achievement. Most often when a coach or player talks about cleaning it up he or she refers to either the need to eliminate sloppy play or mistakes or address holes in their technique of game.

Sloppy play and mistakes arise from an intellectual and emotional failure. Individuals know the proper form but executed it without full focus and speed. The individual failed to give full attention to the exactitude required by the technique. Their attention wandered or never focused. The sloppiness can also arise from lack of full effort; they go through the motions or fulfill the form but without speed and effort so that the opponent can anticipate and nullify the action.

Mistakes can arise from lack of attention and the player deploys the wrong technique rather than what is required. They misanalyse the requirements of the situation. Or they may act but fail to remember or fully achieve the technique. This may arise from the opponent’s own efforts to force a mistake or it may arise because the player has not practiced enough or with full attention. Or the player may be exhausted and beaten up and simply misses a signal or cannot get his or her body to act fast enough.

Beyond mistakes and sloppiness lies another type of failure—a player may have a hole in his or her game. Their knowledge or implementation may be flawed or unpracticed. The player may be young or new to the system or they may not have given full attention to film or practice. Whatever the cause, the opponents recognize this weakness and exploit it mercilessly. It may be something as simple that a player has not learned to disguise intent and telegraphs their action so that the opponent can expect and quash the action. Either way the player and team need to commit to more study and practice to rectify the predictable limitations in their technique.

At the same time cleaning it up carries a wider team implication. Teammates rely upon each other to execute well. Teammates act on the confidence that other team members will accomplish their tasks and execute at point x at time y. The entire coordinated effort of the team and the effectiveness of plans, schemes and plays unfolds with this reliance. The failure to execute not only manifests the player’s breakdown but ripples through the entire team and scheme. People get caught out of place or act as if an action occurred and it does not so teams get “blown coverages” or uncovered bases or unguarded players. Timing plays where passes are thrown to a point not a player break down. These collective breakdowns permit opponents to achieve their goals much easier and more efficiently. At worst other teammates get tentative in their own assignments and commitments because they no longer trust each other or the power of the system they execute. That mental and emotional hesitation becomes contagious and can undermine the entire team’s execution.

The demand to clean it up, however, has a basic limit. Cleaning it up is vital to elite execution, but it presumes that the scheme or system works, or would work if only properly executed. It remains a fundamentally tactical ethical position. It focuses upon precise assessment of actions but with a view to the ideal technique that should guide the action. The technique itself depends upon the larger scheme of action and the goals behind it.

Walking off a field at half time when a coach says “we have to clean things up,” the coach is giving a vote of confidence to the game plan and to the schemes. He or she is also giving a vote of confidence to the intellectual talent and discipline of players. This comment assumes the players, once they understand where they failed to execute, will adapt and execute with precision and impact.

If, however, the opponents simply outclass or outthink the team, then no amount of cleaning up the play will help. The very goals that the techniques and form support will be undermined either by the approach, the strategy or the sheer talent of the other side.

“Let’s clean it up,” drives people to focus upon the form and technique of their profession. It drives folks to practice and internalize the methods required to pursue the goals. Beyond the method lies the coordination and communication the team relies upon to ensure that each person’s execution of a clean and precise action integrates with the planned anticipation and actions of teammates.

Form without context can create beauty but not impact. So "cleaning it up" only starts the process with oneself and learning. Real cleaning it up to be impactful involves players combining and syncing their techniques and actions to present a seamless appearance. But this seamless front hides the  endless minute adaptations of technique and form to accommodate opponent's innovationsand the needs of the moment.

If a coach and team have the wrong strategy, no amount of cleaning it up will help.

As long as the strategic goal makes sense, cleaning it up makes sense. As long as players communicate and coordinate cleaning it up makes sense. If either fails, cleaning it up only means the defeat will have proper form.

Sports Ethics: Mistakes Were Made

I was startled last week listening to a coach interview when the coach uttered words no coach or leader should ever say, “mistakes were made." I cannot think of a worse statement by anyone in authority. The phrase is designed to hide responsibility for an action and make it even harder to isolate and rectify the problems. Mistakes were made is one of the worst ethical assessments a leader can make.

I don’t know who invented the passive voice in English but you could not ask for a better way to get people off the hook. The key to passive voice is that the object—a mistake becomes the subject, and the verb moves to past passive construction. Notice the key-missing ingredient—no subject exists, the actor, the doer disappears. Mistakes were made is a favorite locution of corporate and political leaders on the spot.

Bureaucracies love the passive voice. The passive voice hides responsibility and authorship. Any institution that creates products that emerge from committees moves to the passive voice that provides wide plausible deniability for everyone associated with the process. The organization can then hide responsibility or better yet disseminate it over so many people as to make it meaningless. This in turn permits people to go about doing crazy or failed or horrible things with relatively clear consciences. It also means no one has an incentive to learn or get better because no one internalizes responsibility for the outcome and no one is held responsible for the outcome. Accepting responsibility impels learning and growth.

The ethics of the phrase begins with its construction where no one accepts responsibility for the actions done. The speaker does not accept responsibility nor does the speaker accuse anyone else of making the mistakes. The phrase represents a completely neutered moral claim—I am not responsible and I am not claiming anyone else is responsible. It is hard to imagine a more worthless phrase except to escape responsibility or to exonerate oneself.

Beyond the responsibility denying construction, the word mistakes compounds the ethical elusiveness of the claim. Traditionally when we make mistakes, even when we accept responsibility, we basically state that we did not intend to do this badly or do this harm.

A mistake is a mitigated ethical category where one admits harm was done or failure to achieve a good. A person can admit responsibility for it—although not in this construction—but the person denies that he or she intended to harm or not achieve the goal. A mistake is not done on purpose.

This is not the place to discuss in detail, but mistakes can sometimes occur because of negligence. More often, however, people make mistakes because they misread or misdiagnose a situation. A person may see the situation unfolding but miss a critical point and diagnose it wrongly. Or a person might simple respond a little too quickly too slowly after the diagnosis. Sometimes people just go blank, the mind paralyzes and no obvious pattern or meaning occurs to them. They react rather than initiate action. I could go with the myriad ways we as well intentioned people may make mistakes such as when facing surprise they were not trained for. People might react to planned deception and not see through it. All of these actions do not involve intended harm or collapse of a plan.

The language matters deeply here because patterns of language create patterns of expectations and norms. Coaches, players, and leaders who rely on the passive voice teach the wrong lesson about not accepting and claiming responsibility for actions. Claiming responsibility involves the motivation to get better and learn from mistakes.

I can understand a coach, player or leader trying to avoid calling out a colleague in a public setting. The coach I heard may know damn well who made the mistake. Often coaches know more because as spectators we only see the person who looks like he or she made the mistake, The expert, however, knows that the perceived “goat” is actually merely the player left in the lurch when others failed to follow through on a scheme or misread a pattern. The person who appears to make a mistake in fact represents the end game of a cascade of mistakes from the whole team.

So mistakes were made might be used to protect a team/player in public, but it would be much easier to use a collective “we” made mistakes or “our team” made mistakes. Leaders emphasize and isolate the collective endeavor and remind everyone, coaches included, that the team’s decisions and actions made this possible.

When my kids were growing up we had a song we loved to sing called “Mr. Nobody.” The key refrain was that whenever something bad happened and a parent would ask, “who did this?” The answer, “Mr. Nobody  did it.

Mistakes were made suggests a habit of thought that veers from accepting, isolating and speaking in private and public about common accountability and responsibility.

Speech habits can shape expectations and shape our very thoughts. If we speak one way enough, then we actually start to think that way. Worse, if we hold responsibility, then those for whom we set expectations start to internalize them

Good leaders, good coaches, good players avoid the passive voice; they do not hide, deny or duck responsibility. Even if they have not yet figured out who is responsible or what went wrong, they know it went wrong. A good leader ensures people accetp responsibly and work to make sure everyone learns from their mistakes.

Sports Ethics: Winning Ugly

A win is a win. This is a fundamental maxim of competitive sport. But a second level of discussion always occurs around how a team wins. Teams can win well; games can be well fought and competitive; teams can give up; games can be one sided, you get the picture. Games won by cheating carry a particular moral stigma and if discovered are discounted; but I have always been fascinated one kind of win—winning ugly. This weekend I witnessed several ugly wins and got a sense of what it means.

The UW football team managed to beat the California football team but not for lack of trying to lose. UW “won ugly” by the assessment of its coaches, players and fans. I recall one sequence where four turnovers occurred in eleven plays and another play where four simultaneous penalties cancelled each other out. The team won but it was an ugly win.

Now ugly is one of those interesting words with a cavernous etymology. It emerges from references to the frightening and horrible and fearful in life. Later versions add a moral meaning of profoundly morally offensive and wrong. By the 15^th. Century it had taken on its reference to appearance as something “frightful or horrible” in appearance which set such events apart from the normal run of things that appear unpleasant or unattractive. To be ugly means something really has to be frightful or horrible.

These links bring an ugly win back to its roots in dread and fright. An ugly win despoils the line and form and smooth technique of a sport that provide the aesthetic and performance core. This violation of the internal logic of the sport is reinforced by the external appearance that lacks the smooth crisp precision and power of watching a well-played game.

Remember despite all this the team wins. This accounts for the interesting nature of the word. The team wins but players leave relieved and worn out rather than exhilarated. Many are disgusted or angry at their play, but they still won. This is the type of game coaches breath a sigh of release and at best say, “we can learn a lot from this game.”

Winning ugly means that the quality of play was low by the standards of the sport. The team may “win” but it did not demonstrate fine skill or excellent form. To be blunt, they played badly. Their technical execution was sloppy and not crisp. This lack of execution permeates their fine individual skills as well as messy coordination on schemes and play. I have talked about this moment for an individual when I discussed what it means to have to “grind it out” when a player does not possess his or her best stuff. People have to step up even when they do not have their best skills at hand.

The counterpoint here is when we know a player or team is at the top of their game. We can see the smooth flow and crisp execution and admire and enjoy the sheer virtuosity and skill unfolding before us on the field. Coaches, players and fans have an idea in the back of their mind of what great or perfect form looks like. Sometimes one team will hits their stride or at rare times both teams will be competing at their highest emotional, physical and intellectual level. Those games we remember for their sheer force and beauty.

I believe ugly play moves beyond the failure of execution and the inability of players to discover and deploy excellent form in their assignments. As my example from the Washington game suggests, ugly wins are also riven with mistakes. Teams and players are literally beating themselves in ugly wins.

Ugly wins are larded with an excessive number of penalties, fouls, turnovers, and saturated with errors of the mental and physical varieties. These errors and penalties further disrupt the flow and smooth performance of the game. They take away accomplishments like runs or points scored or give the other team advantages like a penalty kick or an extra man on the field or free throws or loss of a down. The point is that a team starts to beat itself by cumulative errors. The self inflicted errors like off sides in football or steps in basketball or double faults in tennis add up, each one undercutting smooth execution, giving the other side an unearned advantage and denying the team a chance to gain an advantage.

These add up to a form of sloppiness that can be contagious. It can play out as frustration that leads players to try too hard which in turns undermines smooth flowing execution. Errors and mistakes generate anger or frustration with each other, and players can turn on themselves rather than focus upon the other team. The internal cooperative schema can be thrown off, and this lack of synchronicity leads plays to start to not trust each other which in turn leads to more sloppiness as players try to do too much or jump too quickly or mistake hurrying for quickness.

Yet amid this disorganization and mistakes and failures, a team can pull it together just enough to win, and they came to win. Winning when you are playing ugly draws upon its own particular strength and trust that grinding it out also requires. Jim McLaughlin the coach of UW VB team had a similar straggling match this weekend that his team pulled out despite its errors and lack of cohesion. As he put it, “sometimes you've got to just kick, bite, and do whatever you have to do to find a way to win, and we did. Utah played well and we faced some adversity and didn't back down, so that's the good part."

Ugly games possess neither beauty of form nor execution. People labor and stumble and willfully grind out their assignments. Nothing comes easy or flows. It is not pleasant to watch the sport of such a game. Fans and players alike are just glad to get off the field with a win. Their relief comes from an exhaustion that can only come battling incessant mistakes, crumpled confidence and fixing them on the fly. Ugly wins are born usually of desperation and drawing deep. The team hangs on to win, but it does win.