Coaching Assessment for the Week

 Overall: Pretty Good

Highlights:

-good programming for the competition team. Came up with a good power endurance workout. Ran 2 good end-of-practice workout. Supported the kids well. 

-did a fun icebreaker activity with the training team. good one-on-one interactions.

-confronted a club kid who was teasing some of the other kids. handled it well

-did a good job being flexible with different club groups and changing the schedule to keep them engaged

Improvements:

-woke up feeling low energy today. had some trouble feeling "on" at practice. If I want to be a great coach I should aim to be more inspired at practice and have something important to share. It wasn't a failure of a day but I didn't find my own programming that fun for club. Feels like I'm still trying to get a handle on a lot of the club groups.

-With the Training Team and Comp Team it feels like I can give more and there's more back-and-forth. Largely because they're older and I've known them for longer and they can do more with their climbing but I really want to make Club as good as possible. They're the future.

-I felt like I had a good streak of fun club practices going and this one was a little below the mark so I'll use that as motivation to make something good for next week.

this fella's name is little exertion

 

Little Exertion is a lion type creature. He's got one good eye and the other is an X. He's got a circular mouth with teeth all the way around it like a certain type of worm or leech. His stats are pretty okay. I don't know what they go to but the 7 seems good, right?

Little Exertion's power is Bite and Being Raspy. They normally roam around in packs. It's unclear if all of his kind are missing an eye or if that's unique to Little Exertion. 

 On the one hand,

to look up at the night sky and wonder...

whoa

wait.

I just looked out the window as I was writing this and the moon is like blood red. This is crazy. Like a deep orange-red waxing crescent.

Now I'm scared.

I was gonna talk about how I think it's a little bit beautiful and a little bit dumb to wonder about life on other planets but then I looked at the moon and got spooked.

I don't think I've ever seen the Moon look like that.

Update: I stood up to get a better look and it turns out the specific window I was looking out has like an insulation leak so it's all foggy and cloudy like and that was making the Moon look red. Out of my good window it's just like a regular yellow moon.

Anyway thank you for going on this journey with me. I hope you got as much out of it as I did. 

here's the sequence

if you can be anything, be the best

if you can't be the best, be tragic

if you can't be tragic, be the change

if you can't be the change, be righteous

if you can't be righteous, be kind

if you can't be kind, be the fool

if you can't be the fool, be quiet

if you can't be quiet, be sincere

if you can't be sincere, be interesting

if you can't be interesting, be aware

if you can't be aware, hope someone comes from you

being of two minds. a continuation of my series thinking about numbers

 Human people sometimes say "I'm of two minds about such and such."

To which I say, why not more?

Why not be of three, fourteen, eighty-one minds about the matter. The more minds the better. 

the more mind cooks in the mind kitchen the deeper the borscht

The type of indecision I can't stand is when someone is trying to choose between two options that will both result in good outcomes and yet the person can't decide because accepting one good outcome means giving up the other.

Greed. Absolute biblical greed.

That you would have one fist clenched around fine spaghetti and the other chocolate eclairs and bemoan your fate for to shove one down your gullet is to deprive your maw of the other.

I'm of two minds about it.

Well then let the minds fight and to the victor go the spoils. Surely the minds are not equal.

I can't decide.

Then you lack will. That's all it is. It's nothing to draw attention to. It's not a topic of conversation. Oh my hands are like plastic grocery bags and everything I try to pick up and hold falls to the ground.

Do you have hands? Then use them. If you don't have hands then grow some hands.

In short, be decisive or be colossally indecisive. A towering monument of air.

 

what're you doin'? watchin' football?

 This is a thing we say in my parent's house and my sister and I say it to each other as well. The proper response to 'what're you doin? watchin football' is, "yep. watchin' football.' regardless of whether or not you're watching football. In fact, the answer is more correct if you aren't watching football. 

The way I remember this call and response coming about was one day I was sitting on the couch where my dad watches TV and he came into the room and saw what was on the TV which was clearly not football and asked, "what're you doing? watchin' football?" and I went along with it and said I was watching football. 

I think there's meaning in the ritual. Maybe there doesn't need to be. Maybe the silliness of it is enough. But one possible meaning is that "watchin' football" refers more to the general state one is in when watching football. That is to say, just sitting there staying at the screen. It's bit like the exchange of "how's it going" and "good". You aren't actually asking how someone is doing. And you aren't actually telling them how you're doing. It's an acknowledgment of someone else's presence and your recognition of them. It's letting both people know that you are both safe people who are abiding by the rules. That's a little bit at play in "what're you doin? watchin' football?"

Another element. And at the risk of reading too much into it. Is that my dad and I have pretty different tastes. I know a little bit about football and I've followed it off-and-on but I've never really been into it. Or into cars. Or other sports like UFC. It would be too far to say that my dad and I don't have any shared interests. There's definitely things we both like. But maybe, and maybe just for the sake of writing something interesting, maybe "what're you doing? watching football? yep. watching football" is a kind of way of bridging the gap. It's saying "what're you doing son of mine? the things I imagined my son might be doing?" even though he knows I'm not doing those things at all. And me saying, "yes Father. I am meeting your expectations." And the joke is we both know it's not true and we don't even laugh at it but we absolve ourselves of these expectations.

I don't know. It's mostly a goof.