Flat Stanley
You can study about the Sistine Chapel. You can look at pictures, stare at replica’s, read about Michelangelo’s process and genius, but it’s not the same as standing under the canopy. Once you’re in, the pictures and the rhetoric have a form. They take a shape. A shape you didn’t even know you didn’t understand until you stood there. Looking at a thing is not the same as looking from a thing. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know the difference until you stand inside.
Every year, a coach’s job is to build a team. You start with a rendering, the bare bones tenants on which your program stands and the way you believe the game should be played. Then the scope and the lay-out are determined by players’ skill sets and ability levels. At last, it progresses to the color design board-- the way you hope it will look and feel to be a part of it. But the architectural plans only set the stage. The life is breathed into the design by the people in the space.
Coaches get way too much credit when teams succeed and probably, likewise, a bit too much blame when they fail. It’s not that coaches are irrelevant, it’s just that their jobs are external, to a certain extent. As close as coaches are to the heartbeat, even they aren’t inside the veins. It is, simultaneously, a glorious and terrifying concept to grasp. We like to think we have so much control.
That’s why the team is sacred. It’s born in a place no one else can get to. It’s fashioned by the players who live inside the lines.
That’s why the team is sacred. It’s born in a place no one else can get to. It’s fashioned by the players who live inside the lines.
For those on the outside, all dimension is lost. Those who watch teams play are like airplane passengers. From 40,000 feet, the farmland appears perfectly parceled out into rowed and sliced Monopoly squares. Blue dots mark the back yards of expensive neighborhoods, and slinky lines reveal where a creek cuts through the land. But from that window seat on row nine, the naked eye can’t make out the sizes of the rocks, or the shapes of the leaves. It’s impossible to see how high the tree grows or how deep the river runs. From high in the sky there is no proportion. The world looks flat from the seat you are allowed to buy.
But everybody wants to know what it’s like to be inside. We are drawn to that sacred space in the middle. We want to be in on the dogpile on the pitcher’s mound, do the choreographed touchdown dance in the endzone, huddle up with our arms intertwined just outside the free throw line. We want to know what it’s like to be in. And though we yearn to ride the bike through the tape with our fists clenched in the air above our heads, what we really want to know is what it’s like to do that bound up with other humans without whom we aren’t quite ourselves. So we read about it and watch it and chase it with our thumbs, all in a sloppy attempt to get as close to the rawness of dimension as we can. We want in because we sense that what goes on in there is a different kind of alive.
And it is.
Sports lure us, in part, because we’re inspired by expertise. Prowess is magnetic. But we also get drawn in because we ache for the messy connection of imperfect people laced together in an attempt to move and live as one--the dynamics that both choke you and open up the sky. When coaches step away from their craft, they are often heard to say, “For the first time in my life I won’t be a part of a team.” And that pain is real. For those who’ve lived so close to the pulsing center, the void is deep and it is wide. But even then, coaches are stepping away from the membrane, not the blood it wraps.
Players are the life source. The magic that is created always belongs to them. Who they are, how they share, what they’re willing to do for the good of the group…that’s the stuff that fills the depth and breadth of a team. Who people become together inside of a thing is what gives it its shape. And things with dimension are alluring. People yearn for things that are not flat.
Every year while coaching at Oklahoma, I’d get a Flat Stanley in my mail. Some elementary school teacher would assign her class the Flat Stanley Project--a letter writing endeavor designed to teach reading and writing skills through the adventures of a crayon colored paper doll named Stanley-- and I’d get one who would like to travel with our team to a competition or two.
I took the responsibility very seriously.
Stanley went with us to Ames, Iowa, where our players made him a coat out of cotton as he was woefully underdressed. He joined us at a tournament in the Bahamas where we colored on suntan lines and sent him home with a flower in his hat. One year he went with us on a bus trip to Oklahoma State and we all felt so badly about the lack of adventure that we made up a comeback story and gave him credit for the free throws at the end. The Flat Stanley Project, the brainchild of a third grade teacher from Ontario, Canada, is as fun as it is educational—for the sender and the sendee.
Sending Flat Stanley forward meant letting him live as fully as he could before he had to go. We did the best we could to give him an “in-the-belly” experience, to make him feel as if he’d been there, wherever it was we would go. Unfortunately, there’s only so much a figure that’s flat can hold.
We did the best we could to give him an “in-the-belly” experience, to make him feel as if he’d been there, wherever it was we would go. Unfortunately, there’s only so much a figure that’s flat can hold.
That’s why standing on Mars Hill makes Acts 17 have a shape that it never had until you stood there. It’s why jumping into the Aegean sea makes you never forget the water’s name, or its particular shade of blue. It’s also why the storyline of a season is always written by the people wearing the jerseys. They’re the only ones who are privy to dimension. The arc of the journey always belongs to them.
Sherri Coale
P.S. What makes a team…