Week 136: The value of having a rival
[Short one this week. I spent the weekend trying to get everyone to a wedding and back, and while I have lots of ideas which emerged after driving while everyone slept, I didn’t get a chance to actually write anything down since coming back.]
As much value as you get from having friends as fellow coaches on the circuit, you also can take value from having a rival. The one thing rivalry requires is meeting them multiple times throughout the careers of your players. That implies multiple competitions, and multiple events in a year, so this is a multi-event, multi-year process, that can’t be addressed in the small match count of television.
A little rivalry is valuable, because it gives you a concrete side goal during a competition. You are unlikely to win a tournament the first time you play, but you can always have an achievable goal of beating a rival, or advancing farther in the playoffs, or having a better overall record. Having a goal to shoot for motivates your team, and that motivation does help push the team forward in ways that help sustain them through losses. When the rival is first defeated, there’s a rush that is better than your first tournament win, more easily achievable, and repeatable with every rematch.
Your first-ever loss creates a rival in the team that defeated you. From that point until you meet them again and defeat them, that match will mean something to you. And it can help focus your team on a very specific goal. The next school over becomes a natural geographic rival as soon as you realize they have a team, and the teams your school already have as sports conference rivals are always candidates.
I'm not asking to collect a set of vendettas, you can and should be on friendly terms with all your opponents. I'm stating that rivals are how we measure our own performance. If we lose to a team that we later defeat, it feels like we have made progress, even if it’s because the opponent has graduated their best player. If iron sharpens iron in your own practices, iron can sharpen iron with a team that you are competing against.
View your rival coaches not with animosity but with an eye to emulate the behavior that makes their teams successful. What this book is showing you are the techniques that can be adapted by you; look to successful coaches to extend and expand those tactics. When you see something they do, that you don't, evaluate what they are doing, why they are doing that, and whether that tactic could help your team down the road. This also applies to team knowledge, if you see something that consistently gives your rival an advantage over your team, take action to correct the imbalance.
An explanation of how rivalries worked for me:
My first college tournament was at Boston University. In that tournament you had teams from most of the New England powers at the time. Harvard, Dartmouth, Williams, MIT, Penn, Princeton, Worcester Polytechnic, and Brandeis. We did well enough during the day, finishing 5-5 in the prelims. While we had close losses and close wins, we took three losses where we absolutely got crushed. Harvard became my team's main rival because during the course of the day we lost to Harvard's three teams, A and C in our division, and B in the playoffs.
Our team then played them in a tournament a month later, and lost to B and C in the preliminaries and lost to A in the playoffs. We were getting better, but they were getting stronger too. This was a one-sided rivalry for three years, during which time Cornell teams were 0-17 against Harvard teams. Finally we slipped past their D team at a tournament at Williams, and won one game against B in the playoffs. After that, we managed to win every playoff match against them for five tournaments. We only won two of those tournaments, but we had pushed ourselves to win all matches, because we wanted to win the ones that were against our rival.
As we played against Harvard and took our lumps, we watched how they were beating us. We quickly learned they knew literature and we did not. And if literature questions are 1/4 to 1/5 of the distribution, and you don’t know even basic guesses, you lose. So we attacked that problem, using the Masterplots series we referred to in week 133, and got to a passable level in literature. In itself it wasn’t enough to beat Harvard A, but it certainly helped us against Harvard B, and all the other teams we would play in tournaments.
This is one point about rivals, if you design your study to catch up to a specific strength of a rival, you are accidentally strengthening your team against every team weaker than your rival in that field. At that point, did Harvard have probably the two or three of the top ten literature players in the country? Yes. Was it worth pushing us to not concede points to them every time? Yes. Did we catch up to them on literature? Hell, no. Did we get to the point where we could put up a fight? Yes. And did we then use that to put up more than a fight against a bunch of teams? Oh yes.
You should always consider your rivalry with the entire school’s teams. Because as certainly as your team is developing thanks to you having overrecruited, and all your teams improving by playing each other in practice, all of their teams are getting better with practice.
Their best players are not going to be evenly distributed to their teams and split strength, unless they’re trying to train. So for any sufficiently frequent category their best couple of players will likely be on their A team. Past the B team of any program, it’s not an organized long tail of strength. Their C team will have holes in their knowledge, and their D team will have a different set of holes, and so on. Those differences mean that their E team could be actually more formidable against what you know than their B team. It’s not that the second teams aren’t worthy opponents, it’s that they are in development as teams, just as yours is. Your team may be at a point where you have studied something they haven’t gotten to yet.
This is another point: punch up, try to pick rivals bigger than your team. This continues the underdog motif that you’ve gone through with television matches, and that gives you the ability to have stages of your goal of thwarting your rival. First you just want one win, then you want to beat all their teams below the A team, and then you want to take down the big game, and then your B team starts getting in on the act. It’s many more small stepping stone goals that mark your team’s development.
I do need you to notice one important thing about this, having a rival is not a path to improvement. A rival is a path to motivating your team to improve, a set of intermediate victories that come from a strategy that leads to strength. You should never prepare your team to best just one opponent, if you’re going for a single goal it should be to prepare for a match format or for the writer of the event. But you can use that rival opponent to lay out a set of goals that will help defeat many opponents. The later defeat of the rival is the residue of your team’s preparation to defeat them.
As your team wins matches, you are going to become other teams' rival. That’s fine, take it for what it is, a sign of progress. There will come a time, if they are as diligent as you are, that they upset your team. When that happens, watch how excited they are to finally beat your team, and remember how excited your team was to defeat their rival.
And then add those jagoffs to your list.