One of the toughest, and most intense aspects of postseason play is the finality of it all when we come out on the losing end. We usually aren’t ready for our season, or even our career as a player to be over. And then it’s over. Boy, is it over.
I’ve been part of some brutally tough losses that ended seasons too soon for my liking. You probably have too. For me, it was 1992 in the first round of the high school football playoffs against Tampa Jesuit. Or the district final baseball game against Naples High, when my flyout to left field ended the game. Probably the hardest one was the 2004 first round football game against Sarasota Riverview, which ended up being the last high school football game I ever helped coach.
Each of those losses hit hard, and for different reasons. Each of those post-game gatherings was emotional. And there were plenty of tears. When we spend years practicing to play a game, and then we know we’ll never play it again, it hurts. When we work so hard to come together as a team, and then that team as we know it is done, it hurts. And it’s OK that it hurts. It’s good that we care. It’s important to get back to reality eventually and to realize that there are a lot bigger problems in the world, but for a while, yeah, go ahead and be sad. And coaches, allow your players to be sad. Be sad with them. It’s OK. You’ve got a lot invested there too.
All that was going through my mind yesterday when I saw Pittsburgh senior guard Tray Woodall at the post-game press conference after his team was knocked out of the NCAA tournament by Wichita State. It was an 8/9 game, but most people were expecting the Panthers to advance. And they didn’t. In fact they got blown out. They weren’t competitive at all. So when Tray Woodall, the team’s leading scorer, was at the podium and began crying, I wasn’t surprised. This young man was a senior who had invested years of his life into this program and the lives of his teammates. He’d played poorly in his final game, the numbers clearly don’t lie, and his career was over. So I thought, “Good for Tray Woodall. This is a man who cares deeply.”
Then I got curious about why he might care so deeply. Beyond being a very good player who had played a bad game in the NCAA tourament in his senior year, was there any more to this story? And it didn’t take long to find this article in the New York Post about how Tray had grown up in Brooklyn and then New Jersey with little parental involvement. He was selling drugs at age 12, living in a world of crime and violence, his life heading in a terrible direction before a mentor took him under his wing at age 13. That guidance coupled with considerable talent and hard work provided a way for Tray to “make it out”, and to graduate from college. Perhaps he could have done that without basketball, but for him, basketball was certainly a huge part of the equation. And now his college career was over. After all he’s been through, I can imagine how it feels to have it end the way it did. On national TV no less.
Every athlete we watch on TV has a story. Every young person we coach has a story. Those stories might not be as dramatic or intense as Tray Woodall’s, but the stories matter because the people are valuable. So when I see a kid crying after a ballgame, whether he’s 8 years old or 22, I can appreciate that there is probably an important story behind those tears.