RUNNING THE FLOOR: IU must see through the losing

Back in my tender high school years, I played football, the proud second-generation Riverwood Raider that I was. My sophomore year, we went completely winless, 0-10, only pulling one victory when it was discovered that an opponent plied the use of an ineligible substitute.

It was a rough year to be sure, but we hired a new coach the next March, Harris Rainbow (seriously), a young, energetic soul with real vision for the program. Old coach Rainbow, all of 25, set about trying to instill a sense of pride and toughness into our listless program. He did a good job in the preseason.

Then crunch time came around: The season started again, and so did the losses.
But coach Rainbow pressed on, assuring us over and over again that if we worked hard, did our jobs, executed, etc., our day would soon come. He even promised to run wind sprints the night we finally broke through.

Problem was that our early schedule was too tough, we weren’t nearly deep enough and a glitch in the system had us playing up a classification all season. We were getting killed every time we walked off the bus – and in those first few games, we should have been.

Coach Rainbow kept on keeping on, giving us all the motivation he could think of to go along with the day-to-day coaching. We heard it all: speeches, highlight videos, inspirational stories, etc.

The losses piled up. We went down every way possible – big, small, thin, wide, red, green and some others I’ve forgotten. Point is, we weren’t winning.

After a time, those early beatings, tied with our inexperience with winning and the aforementioned lack of depth, with our fragile, 16-year-old psyches took its toll, and wonder of wonders, we began tuning the good coach out.

We did this not purposely or maybe even consciously. But when you keep trying your hardest, improving in small increments and frankly working your butt off, and the losses just keep coming, it’s hard to find comfort or inspiration in anything, especially when defeat is all you’ve known.

These Hoosiers are starting to remind me of that team.

They try hard, they improve in small increments and by all accounts, they listen to what their coaches have to say. But the losses keep coming.

Tuesday’s loss makes it seven in a row with the same result, and they’ve come in so many different ways: blowouts, close losses, blown leads, home games, away games – you see the point.

The comparisons continue. This team has flaws, 3-point defense lately prominent among them.

What’s important is that these Hoosiers don’t turn into those Raiders – beaten before the game even starts, ready to slide face first down the slope toward subconsciously throwing in the towel.

The only good that can realistically come from this season, at this point, is the steeling and molding of many of these young Hoosiers into leaders before their time.
Nick Williams, Tom Pritchard and Verdell Jones need to be ready to step up as hardened veterans when next year’s heralded recruiting class hits campus.

That doesn’t happen purely with winning; it happens with being able to see the victories. I’m not talking about moral victories – such things do not exist. I’m talking about seeing through losses, that are now a reality, to see the improvements, however small, earned through the hard work the Hoosiers displayed.

What happened to those Raiders is that we never learned how to see anything but the losing. That can’t happen here.

Anyway, that’s just a story about my high school football team.

See you Friday.