Listen

One of the most important, but easily overlooked qualities that enables us to be most effective is to listen well. In an evaluation meeting with our university men’s basketball head coach, among many other questions, I asked him what the players most valued from my time with them that season. He said, “You listened to them. You let them talk.” While that seems very simple it was also very important to me. As I thought about this later I gained greater understanding about the value of listening to sportspeople.

 

In the world of sport, the coaches do lots of talking and very little listening. In collegiate sport, the NCAA places a limit of twenty hours per week for the coaches to work with their players. The coaches work countless hours each in evaluating video, developing scouting reports on upcoming opponents, brainstorming game plans, meeting together to strategize and when they finally get with the players they want to communicate and to download all this information to them. They’re trying to squeezed hundreds of hours of information into twenty hours of video review, training and practice. Lots of talking, very little listening by the coaches.

 

It daily becomes increasingly clearer how important the skill of listening well is to my role as a sport chaplain or character coach. The players simply need to process some of what they’ve been learning, their frustrations, their concerns and more. I can be the listener for them. Simply repeating their questions, restating their thoughts, asking follow up questions, sharing a related life story or simply looking them in the eye enables them to communicate their hearts and to perceive that they’ve been heard, their opinions valued and their ideas respected.

 

Yesterday’s Team Building session was emblematic of how such listening helps the development of the players’ relationships with each other and with me. We were discussing the fifth of six sessions on Coach John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. In particular we were discussing the traits of: ambition, adaptability, resourcefulness, fight and faith. I asked one discussion question about each one and welcomed their thoughts in dialogue. Right out of the blocks while discussing ambition, the players whose pre-season ambitions were playing in the NBA or in Europe were suddenly said to be graduation, finishing the season well and playing their best basketball in the post-season tournament. The team’s record of seven wins and sixteen losses certainly has changed their ambitions. Another player commented during our discussion of adaptability, that he had to adapt from being a starter playing twenty-two minutes per game and getting lots of shots, to being a reserve, averaging six minutes and very few shots.

 

As we discussed faith, I asked, “When does basketball require faith of you?” Several said, “Right now.” In the midst of a disappointing season, some find it hard to go to practice. Others find the travel, training, practice and more to be a terrible grind. One of the seniors, the unquestioned leader and most enthusiastic player on the team, confessed that for the first time in his life his passion for the game was drying up. He was losing the joy of playing basketball and was almost looking forward to the end. This shocked his teammates and me. We followed up with a question about how faith can help restore the joy of sport and concluded our discussion with a challenge to continue to prepare well, to play these last games as part of the process of improvement and to be in position to play the team’s best games during the post-season tournament.

 

We left the locker room after our twenty minute discussion with open hearts and enthused voices. I am sure that was primarily the result of listening to them and encouraging them to be their best. It surely helped to have Coach Wooden’s Pyramid to frame our discussion. Please take the time to listen to your players and coaches. Work to improve your listening skills. Don’t simply wait for a pause so that you can start talking. You’ll open hearts and enlighten minds more effectively if you just listen.