Clapping School
Every year it would happen. Every year. Without fail. We’d gather as teams do at center court to ceremoniously begin a practice and it would happen. Everybody would be clapping—players, coaches, maybe even managers-- but only 3 or 4 will actually be making sound come out. It was like some sort of limp hand disease. People’s palms connect (though sometimes in severe cases only their fingers!), but it didn’t make a pop. There was no force of air being smacked out of the middle. The sound, or lack thereof, being more like two clouds bumping into one another making the air go ‘shhhh’.
Thank you, but, no thank you. Non-clappers can’t imagine that anybody noticed or that it matters in the least. The attentive know nothing ever mattered more.
People always say you can hear a healthy church. Noisy auditoriums that the preacher has to quell before the service begins are the ones you want to be a part of. You can hear the blood running through the veins.
Practice gyms aren’t entirely different. You can feel and hear the thriving ones. They literally pulse with life. And while clapping doesn’t ensure anything, not clapping while clapping almost always does.
Practice gyms aren’t entirely different. You can feel and hear the thriving ones. They literally pulse with life.
That’s why Clapping School became a thing.
Here’s how it works. The curriculum is simple and easy to employ. Everybody in the circle gets to clap by themselves. They go one at a time and they clap. Just them. They just clap. Coaches don’t really have to do anything other than say ‘thank you’ to the one that finished and “go” to the one next in line. In the same sort of way a hot stove teaches you not to touch it, the experience does the rest.
When called upon to go, some players’ skin gets blotchy. Some bite their lower lip and go at it hard like they’re trying to split a board in half with the force of their hands. (Their turns finish, predictably, with stinging red palms that they rub self-consciously on the sides of their shorts and crazy nervous feet that act as if the floor is as hot as their hands). Many giggle, tucking their chins to their collarbones as they finish, just glad and grateful that their turn has passed, relieved that everybody in the circle will turn their concentration to someone else. Rare is the one who simply stands and claps, making the rat a tat sound of intentional effort. Such confidence is required. The point of it all being painfully clear.
The whole exercise takes about one minute and some change. To those in the circle, that minute hangs like a suspended ball sitting on the peg of a pinball machine. Most people hate clapping school. It’s like walking naked through the gym without the chance to apply a filter.
Going through the motions is a slippery slope to nowhere anybody ever wants to be, but while that is the most obvious of reasons for the short course on how to do such a common thing well, it’s just the symptom of the problem. The root of the problem is what coaches have to stab at. And as non-clapping goes, all sorts of causes can be under the ground.
Sometimes non-clapping represents a distracted mind. It’s the ‘distracted by what’ that leaders have to dig for. Are players worried about what’s coming in practice? Are they anxious about how they’ll do? Are they comparing themselves to their teammates?
Or are they simply hungry? Or cold? Or uncomfortable with how their shorts fit? Or thinking about their significant other or the test they think that they just bombed? It could be a hundred different things. Getting them present and undistracted is part of clapping’s job.
The other part houses the gnarly roots all tangled up below the dirt, the stuff players are either hiding or hiding from, the line of demarcation between the two being deceptively thin and quite possibly irrelevant, unless of course you’re really trying to unwind the knots.
Sometimes what clapping school reveals is how comfortable players are in their own skin ,or what they value and how they view themselves as a part of the whole. It will show you who expects to be carried, who’s willing to do the carrying, who views the grunt work as being important but, more importantly, being somebody else’s job. It can show you who looks at effort as an all the time thing, and who looks at effort as a thing to be saved for the quantifiable stuff. It’s a pretty quick and easy gauge for some of the necessary glue that binds the best together.
“What if everybody clapped like you?” is the follow up question to the quick and easy exercise, “What would it sound like in our gym? For those who want to get to the sacred space of team, the lesson quickly serves its purpose and others takes stage before self. Such can be the benefits of a curriculum whose arrow is sharp and whose bow is tight. Clapping School delivers. Usually on a dime.
What players most often fail to recognize before the course—a truth that burns itself into their vulnerable souls during the painful naked moment in the center circle--is the opportunity that is lost when they fail to give their energy away. Clapping is easy. It’s something everybody can do well. People do it at ballgames and concerts and parades-- and for babies who do most anything for the first time-- every day. The act of clapping sends juice out in every direction, and it collates heartbeats. Who hasn’t been in an arena or a stadium and felt the unity of thousands of hearts –and hands--beating as one? The ability to give energy to others is one of the all- time most underrated skills of living regardless of one’s chosen lane of life. If that’s all Clapping School accomplishes, it’s worth the time it takes to get it in.
Who hasn’t been in an arena or a stadium and felt the unity of thousands of hearts –and hands--beating as one? The ability to give energy to others is one of the all- time most underrated skills of living regardless of one’s chosen lane of life.
At its very least, Clapping School makes the start of basketball practice better. At its best, it makes the world better for all the human boomerangs it builds. All that in one minute and some change.
Sherri Coale