Little Bitty Wins
My first season at Oklahoma was an awkward uphill climb. Our team wasn’t very good, we didn’t understand yet how to work, I was a brand new college head coach, and we were entering a newly formed conference that had juggernauts at every turn. It was evident early that it could be a long, heavy year. When our starting post player quit before the end of the first week of practice, the long, heavy year turned into a boulder we’d ferociously push up the hill only to have it slide back down and flatten us day after day after day. Getting good was going to take a while. About that much, we were sure. So we set our sights on little wins we could cling to along the way.
They were everywhere, these tiny victories, but we had to hunt to find them. It became a sort of game to seek them out and bring them back for show. At the time, I thought it was a survival instinct, a carrot to keep us putting one foot in front of the other until we’d traveled far enough to be able to look back and see a road. After a while, I came to realize that rugged traipsing toward a tiny victory is simply how you get from here to there. In retrospect, once some years and lots of miles had been logged, I could see that the little wins formed a treasure map, complete with all the clues that would be needed to find most any Holy Grail.
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The year 1996 was the inaugural year of the Big 12 conference. While, of course, this behemoth (at the time!) was created for football revenue, it was also a women’s basketball mecca, formed out of the melding of the Big 8 and the Southwest Conference. This mash-up meant our league schedule read like a “who’s who” of the women’s game. It boasted programs like Colorado and Kansas and Texas and Texas Tech—programs that bled tradition and toughness. Programs with Hall of Fame coaches on their sidelines and championship banners on their walls. We carried only the distinction that we’d recently been brought back from the dead.
A lot of craggy land existed between where we were and where we planned to go, and almost all of it was straight uphill.
What I remember most about that first year was a random day in January when we finally practiced well. For two hours we got lost. Players worked without frustration. They competed without taking sides. They endured without succumbing. They listened and they learned.
Our team told each other what they were doing as they did it, playing the game as if they were talking their way, together, through and out of jams. They were so invested in the process that they forgot to worry about how they looked or if they were failing or if they measured up to their teammates or if anybody anywhere was keeping score. They laughed and clapped, and ran to help each other up when someone took a charge. It was full bodied immersion for two hours without repose. Time evaporated. We were so enmeshed in getting better that we’d forgotten to look at the clock.
That day remains my favorite little win.
We won one conference game that season. The work was real and the challenges were tall. But that random day in January of 1997 still glitters in my mind. That day when we figured out how to work—together—for a sturdy period of time, was the early assemblage of the forms into which the concrete foundation would be poured. Such tedious “ordinary” labor that crowds do not gather around to watch is triumphant the first time it happens because it signals a transformation. A bridge from here to there. Our very private victory that day no doubt paved the way for all the public ones that were to come.
Every big win has them, those little bittys that they stand on so their heads poke out above the crowd.
Any new parent can tell you when their infant first slept through the night or didn’t cry in the bath or made it through church without screaming at the top of her lungs. They can stack the baby wins like Jenga blocks. It’s how they get on down the road. That’s also how runners train for marathons and people lose weight and grievers continue to live after someone they love has died. One little win at a time that the world wouldn’t even notice. Itty bitty conquers that give sea legs for a day.
And they add up. On a graph, a bunch of little wins would look like stairsteps that lead to the sky. A way up and out and on…to wherever it is you want or have to go.
We had in our office complex a subtle reminder of that. The letters on the wall read:
“Success leaves footprints. Find them and follow them.”
Underneath that quote, we had action photos of some of the players in our program who’d done the getting better thing exceptionally well. Our goal was for young dreamers in the making to unpack the All-Stars’ journeys and follow their little wins. Because that’s how you get to any place worth going--one little bitty hurrah at a time.