Emma Carmichael Columnist

Picture this. It’s six in the morning on a Monday and you’ve already been up for an hour.

You woke up at five, hit the snooze button a few times and consequently woke up both of your snoring roommates, struggled into sweatpants and grabbed a stale granola bar for the road. Then, you trudged across the deserted campus, kicking through piles of snow and ignoring the fact that not even scavenging squirrels are out at this hour. You arrive at the gym and enter the locker room, managing only halfhearted nods at your fellow teammates as you change and head out to the gym floor. Time for basketball practice.

But no! Your coach, after greeting you with a caffeine-laced smile and an unnervingly enthusiastic good morning, sends you all back into the locker room. Still exhausted to the point of hallucination, you dazedly head back in the direction you came from.

As you settle down on the bench your coach instructs you to close your eyes. A half a second before you doze off drooling on your point guard’s shoulder, music suddenly fills the room. You sit up, suddenly alert and immediately recognizing the opening bars of R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly.” As your coach directs the team to “listen to the music and get energy from it,” you disbelievingly pinch your arm amidst jumbled thoughts of Sylvester, Cathy and a Beretta pistol all trapped in a closet, but this is no nightmare. This is basketball practice. And this actually happened to my team last season.

When it comes to the myriad inspirational methods used in athletics, I find I’m unusually jaded. Sometime over the course of the 14 years or so that I’ve played organized sports, I all but gave up on the emotional pregame speeches and meditative practices that seem to inspire and prepare so many athletes. I’m not one for superstitions, like the former major league pitcher Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, who would actually talk to the baseball between pitches, or Michael Jordan, who wore the same pair of University of North Carolina shorts under his Bulls jersey in every professional game he played in. And maybe it’s just me, but I’m really not one for R. Kelly’s crooning at six in the morning.

The same coach who attempted to inspire our team with “I Believe I Can Fly” also used what she called a “visualization” technique before games. She would sit us down in the locker room and have us close our eyes while she spoke softly about the game we were about to play, walking us through the opening tip and willing us to imagine swishing our free throws and blocking our opponents’ shots: “You catch the ball on the block…look over your shoulder to check your defender…fake baseline, turn to the middle and loft a hook shot…bank it in. Back on defense, you’re staying low…calling out screens left and right…”
My mind tended to wander during these visualization sessions, often in the same mellow narratives our coach would employ: I wonder what that song was on their warm-up CD…it kind of sounded like Outkast…is Outkast touring this summer?...if so, I will get tickets…and I will go…and it will be good…

The visualization coach has since left Vassar and is coaching elsewhere, but I thought of her this past week when I read an article in The New York Times about the Fordham University women’s basketball team, which hasn’t won a game since Feb. 4 of 2007. This season they are 0-20 under first-year coach Cathy Andruzzi, who has just three returning players on her roster. The Times article reports that in the face of such difficulty, Andruzzi has resorted to unorthodox approaches to inspire her team and eke out some wins. She opened the season with a “spiritual retreat” and reportedly uses yoga, meditation, metaphysics teachings, and self-help books such as The Master Key System.

For some reason, I just can’t buy into this kind of methodology. Surely, I find emotion in athletics—I struggle through continuous losses and delight in victory, and I am ashamed to admit that I actually started bawling when I watched the movie Miracle—but really, I think preparation and inspiration can’t go much further beyond the actual act of playing.
Countless basketball coaches have tried to help me with my abysmal free throw shooting by suggesting that I imagine the basketball arching through the net before shooting. One coach actually suggested that before I fall asleep at night, I visualize myself taking and making 10 consecutive free throws. He claimed it would help build my confidence for when I stepped to the line come game time. I actually tried it for a few games. I’m still consistently a 60 percent free throw shooter.

At the risk of sounding too cynical, I do think that techniques such as meditation and visualization can certainly help some athletes prepare for competition. But I also think that when it comes down to it, the essence of sports and the reason I love to play is because a game is real. A game is tangible, and it cannot be faked. When you play you exert raw physical energy into a measurable and definite end, and the outcome is almost unfailingly satisfying simply in its existence. Leading up to a game, all you can really do to prepare is to play, and once the game starts, I promise that metaphysics will not apply.

Perhaps Fordham should consider a new attitude for their remaining scheduled games: No matter what you recite, imagine or visualize, 20 straight losses is real. Instead of focusing on the mental planning, maybe Andruzzi should simply instruct her team to go out and play some basketball. And if all else fails, try some R. Kelly.

— Emma Carmichael ’10 is an urban studies major and a member of the Vassar women’s basketball team. This semester she is editorializing on issues in all divisions of college-level athletics.