College Basketball, Yale vs Goliath

I'm interested in the Yale/UConn game that's on tonight. Not from the perspective of how thoroughly the preseason number one ranked UConn Huskies will munch on the little Elis from the tiny basketball outpost that is the Ivy League, but from the perspective of how the Yale coach might have prepared his team for not only what they face tonight, but how what they face tonight will ready them (or not ready them) for the season (especially the Ivy season) ahead.

Why schedule UConn? Well, if the Eli perform well, that is, stay in the game for at least fifteen minutes of the first half and show some second half mettle, then they can (might) use that for the necessary self-confidence they'll need later in the schedule. (Though the Ivy is tough enough that it takes a lot more than some confidence built in November can provide.) If they don't perform well, meaning every offensive possession has little chance of success - they can't connect on passes (the defensive pressure's too much), every shot is a bad shot - the coaching staff may well use it as a learning tool. Every play, every screen, every move a lesson the staff can use to build a smarter team. Or a bad loss, say by forty, can demoralize a team, make them realize they stink (relative to what they dreamed they could be), have no right playing a powerhouse (the alumni calls ring like steel hammers in the morning), take weeks, take a new schedule, to recover from.

One year when I was an assistant at Harvard, our first game was a loss to Duke at Duke by 76. That is not a typo. It was the year Hurley was a freshman. We decided we were going to be a pressing team. No backing down. Oh well, we were a young staff, okay? We played them in Durham. North Carolina. Our next game was in Durham also. New Hampshire. My boss, our head coach, Pete Roby (who had no fear of losing - good thing, as it turns out because we did a lot of it), said at the press conference (that's another reason to schedule powerhouses, you get to be interviewed at press conferences after the game), "look for us in the lefthand column next Tuesday." That being the column that would list the winner when we were to play the University of New Hampshire, the school in Durham, NH. The press laughed, not so much because they thought it funny, but because they could not imagine a team either being so bad that we could beat them or that any team that just lost by 76 could recover enough confidence to slide over from the righthand column so quickly. We won. Poor New Hampshire. I think they imagined us a powerhouse.

I was thinking today about coaching this Yale team tonight and how I would have told them last March to start thinking about this game. How they needed to prepare themselves everyday for it. UConn does not make or break Yale's season, but it could provide one super sweet night that could flavor the year. Lift so that you have the physical strength that you'll need when leaning on these Huskies, I'd a told them. When practicing alone, practice with the sort of intensity and effort and fear that will envelope your entire experience on a night like this. Seek out the absolute best players to challenge you day in and day out. Play with pros. Make the pros respect you. Show them something. Show them something, Elis.