The end of my freshman year of high school, I had my first real heart break. Like real crying and sobbing about something I knew would be insignificant to anyone else, but that had felt like all of the air had been taking out of me. 

There was this rule in high school basketball, back then (not sure what it is now) where it was stated that it was impossible to score a basket with under .03 seconds on the clock without it being a “tip.” This meant you can’t catch the ball and shoot. Easy?

Heartbreak came during the divisional championship game when our team scored two full throws to put us ahead by 2 with .03 seconds left in the game. All we had to do was NOT foul. 

Who knew my coach had us practicing emergent strategy and liberation on the basketball court?

We didn’t. No one touched the opposing player. 
Want to know what did happen in .03 seconds? 
She caught the ball. Pivoted towards the basket. And took a shot. 
In .03 seconds.

The game didn’t end there. The game went into overtime, but we were too crushed. Even our bench, where I was, was a row of deflated girls in matching uniforms.

On the ride home we listened to Tupac’s Changes. We cried to it. Collectively sobbing and sniffling on the van ride. It was even more sad than the funerals I had been to before then. Humans are prepared for death. A high school girls’ basketball team isn’t prepared for when someone breaks the rules, then a power upholds the rules, and you’ve got to live with the shitty outcome.

That's just the way it is
Things will never be the same
That's just the way it is

Aww yeah

ADAPT.

I hate that Tupac song. I hated it that day as I rapped along to the lyrics and sang along to that corny ass hook. But it’s not lost on me now that that was the song we listened to on the way home. It was requested by one of my teammates. 

Anyway, changes.

The next year, my coach gave us one word for the year, ADAPT. We had to memorize what it meant. Every practice was focused on one aspect of that word. 

Attack. Don’t be passive. Respond to the ball. Go after it. 
Deny. Don’t let anyone take what is yours. This is an active stance. Hands up. Arms out. Deny with every part of you. 
Adjust. Don’t get caught up on what just happened, respond. Shift. Move. 
Protect. Save what is yours. No one gets close to our basket. 
Team. Together Everyone Achieves More. It’s what every coach says, but we practiced this through our actions. We named the impact when someone was falling behind. If someone didn’t understand something. It was everyone’s responsibility to bring the weak link on board.

As a teenager I pretended to be annoyed with his stories and his sermons during practice, I believe that the church of Brian Harris (my coach) is the place where I learned how to walk the walk of interdependence and resilience. 

Looking back, through an organizational development lens, I can see what they were doing. They* could have approached our heartbreak in a couple of ways as leaders, here are some possible ways a coach could go into the next season after losing a game through a technicality and bad officiating:

A.) You let the team have a chip on their shoulder. We use the anger from that loss to throw more elbows, hit more shots and give more eff you’s to the system.
B.) You pretend like it never happened. You lost the game on a technicality. On any other day, another referee would have made the right call. Not your fault. Keep it moving. Keep the same strategy.
C.) You throw out the entire playbook and you start from the beginning. A fresh start will help everyone forget the past and just move on. 
D.) All of the above

All of the above meant naming that the reason why we lost is because we stopped playing when a hard decision came our way. We didn’t know how to play through it, coaches included. Their hearts got broken when that shot went in and the referees let the call stand. We got a fresh start by naming how hard it was and watching the game again together. Identifying that if we had made a couple more free throws in that one game, we would have won. And, our anger. Our anger was put away, it was transformed into T-shirts that we wore during warm-ups with the .03 rule on the back. 

With that middle finger to the referees on our backs, we spent the year practicing adaptation. Each of us had individual goals to improve our skills (muscle memory, fractal) and then key strategic adjustments to our offense and defense (collective). 

We did emotional work. Physical work. Team work. 

We learned that situations were going to be thrown our way in the game, but if we could remember our core value ADAPT, then we could win. We could ride through each game taking what came our way because we knew there would be up’s and down’s. Down by 13? adapt. Bad foul call? Adapt your style of play for the referee. Can’t make a shot? Fake, adapt, drive to the basket. Injury on the team? Adapt and shift everyone to new positions.

It’s hard to remember that year. It was too easy. I remember getting on the court for a game and feeling like we had already played the team before. We had been on that court before. We had managed those dilemmas before. I knew the answers in my body. 

I am wondering now in the midst of COVID 19, what would it feel like to be on a team that decided to strategize around adaptation. How could those principles live now?  After this heartbreak, how will we adapt?