Sports analogy

Five dads had young daughters who wanted to play soccer. For lack of volunteers, their wives volun-told them to coach their daughters.

One father had played soccer in high school. He played defense. He taught all the players to collapse in defense when the other team crossed the mid-field line. His team did not score a single goal all season. They did not win any games but they did not lose very many, either.

Another father had played "striker" which is similar to a forward in basketball. He had all of his player push up-field into positions to support the strikers. They won one game but tied or lost all the others by embarrassingly lop-sided scores.

Another father had been a mid-fielder in high school. He had also played basketball. He was sure the path to success was to have every player pursue the ball the entire length of the field (or pitch) every time possession changed feet. His girls stopped showing up to games because they ran out of gas, got sweaty and their hair did not look good.

The fourth father read a book by a famous college coach. The one line he remembered was "Too much coaching spoils players. The game itself will teach the players everything they need to know". He decided the best coaching was no coaching at all. The girls were still arguing when the other team started play and they were still arguing with each other when the game ended.

The last father talked with coaches with older players to learn what 7 year-old girls were capable of. He researched information on the internet and visited several sites with different philosophies. He watched his players and noted their strengths and weaknesses and developed line-ups where weaker players were backstopped by stronger players. He learned something each game and the girls worked on that new skill in practice during the week.

That team won every game but the one they tied with the first father's team.

A critical difference between the last coach and the earlier coaches is that each player had specific responsibilities. They had well defined roles to play. The defenders played defense. The strikers/forwards loitered in the kill-zone and the mid-fielders "carried" the ball from the defending end of the field to the scoring end. Players rotated out of mid-field (a very aerobic position) to less positions where they could recover.

The team had pre-determined "plays" for throw-ins, corner-kicks and penalty kicks.

The next year, all of the coaches' teams were more like the last father's team.

The dissolution of traditional roles

I look at the dissolution of traditional gender roles and I have to wonder how many kids will get sucked into the traps the first four coaches stumbled into, especially the fourth coach.

Back in the old days of IBM Time-Sharing-Option systems there was a mode called "thrashing". That is where the system was devoting exceptional quantities of resources swapping jobs in-and-out of core/CPU and very little actually working on the jobs.

It will eventually sort itself out but it will not be pretty.