Winning is a meat grinder into which many college basketball coaches feed their players. That sounds terrible but I get it. For a long time, winning was my drug of choice. As a player I’d gladly sacrifice myself for a W – until the sacrifices became too real and too sad. Although I’ve won a lot of games and a few championships, 20 years after playing Division I basketball, the biggest lesson I learned comes from loss.
I learned it from Kathy Delaney-Smith, the coach who doesn’t like to be called “coach”, because she thinks too many people have negative associations (see: meat grinder). This March Madness will be her last, as she’s retiring after 40 years of fighting for equity, upending Ivory Tower norms, and yes – winning.
A blue-collar kid whose mom didn’t want her to interview for the Harvard job, Kathy became the winningest coach in the Ivy League, for any sport (men’s or women’s), and clinched one of the greatest upsets in NCAA history. Yet, winning misses the measure of the woman. She taught me:
You don’t really know a person until you let them down.
By this calculus, I’m uniquely qualified to tell you who Kathy is, because I’ve done nothing but let her down. Other coaches would regard me as a spectacular failure, a blight upon their records. Not Kathy. My relationship with her is strong not in spite of, but because of the ways in which I’ve let her down, which have taught me more about character and leadership than anything I learned from my philosophy degree.
At 6ft 4in tall and a New York state champion, I was a heavily recruited high-school student and valedictorian, and a shy, socially immature kid who had never tasted alcohol and was years away from my first kiss. Basketball was my life. I could have wallpapered my bedroom with hand-written letters from schools that had started writing to me in eighth grade. Coaches around the country devoted dozens of hours to me – wooing me over the phone, flying to my home in Syracuse to meet my parents, and rolling out the red carpet for official visits where they made me feel like queen of the campus for 48 hours.
The excitement and pressure built to fever pitch the spring of my junior year – until finally I picked up my landline and told Kathy no, I would not be coming to Cambridge to play for her. Harvard had narrowly lost to my first choice, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
When I broke this news to other professional adults who had sworn their devotion to me moments before, many of them blew up. One by one they removed their masks – swearing, screaming, and hanging up on me. I instantly became their enemy; that’s how the “with us or against us” mindset of many coaches works. But sports are not war. While I could appreciate the frustration of staking one’s career on the predilections of teenagers, I immediately knew I’d made the right choice not playing for these people. Every insult corroborated my decision – until Kathy.
“I see you having a great life, even if I’m not a part of it,” she said. A warm, queasy feeling flooded my heart. No one else had spoken to me like this. The plastic receiver slipped in my sweaty palm. She wished me well on the road ahead and I believed she meant it. “Just tell me you’re not going to play for Princeton!” she said, and we both laughed – grateful we wouldn’t have to play against one another.
As fate would have it, we would square off in the NCAA tournament at the end of my freshman year at UNC – and we crushed Kathy and her team 78-53. Yet I never forgot the way Kathy had made me feel that moment on the phone. By the end of my sophomore year I’d won two Atlantic Coast Conference championships and made it to the Elite Eight, but I was miserable.
After an embarrassing loss on national television, our coach shuttled us back to campus and straight onto the practice court at midnight as an assistant coach screamed, “This is not a democracy, this is a dictatorship!” I also remember standing in line as my coach doled out our vitamins, but she never asked about my personal life. (Years later she’d retire amidst allegations of pushing injured players back on the court too soon and threatening her mostly Black team with “nooses” for poor performance.)
Watching Kathy defeat Stanford in the NCAA tournament, the first time a No 16 seed had ever toppled a No 1 seed, convinced me – I gave up my full scholarship and traveled north.
Despite my best intentions to bring home a championship, I failed to give Kathy what she wanted from me yet again. After coaching me throughout my red-shirt season (an NCAA requirement to deter wanton transfers), giving me the same attention as other players in team practices, individual sessions and the weight room – when I was finally allowed to play I tore my ACL nine games into the season. I’d fight through a grueling recovery, but would never make good on the precious time and resources she’d invested in developing me.
Many players fade from their coaches’ eyes once sidelined with injury. It’s not cruel; there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for all the demands of the job – teaching the other players, scouting opponents, traveling to away games, negotiating university politics, and mollifying parents. Not Kathy. Throughout my surgeries and rehabilitation we’d meet regularly in her office. She read my philosophy papers and we debated how constraints upon a system are necessary to foster creativity – whether it be the form of a sonnet or the rules of the hardwood.
When my father died in June, smack in the middle of Kathy’s busy recruiting season, I walked out of the church and saw her standing in the back row. We locked eyes but didn’t speak a word. She didn’t want to pull focus, but let me know she was there.
After graduation, I returned to campus to make No Look Pass, a documentary about Kathy’s current star, a Burmese-American struggling to reconcile her sexuality and professional dreams with her immigrant parents’ expectations. As a first-time director footing the bill with my life’s savings and credit cards, I never could have navigated Harvard’s draconian media policies without Kathy’s support. I shot in the athletic facilities, the dorm and traveled with the team to away games. (My composer, whose girlfriend was working on The Social Network at the time, called my access “a miracle”.)
Yet how did I repay this kindness? In a close game at Cornell, Kathy forgot she was mic’d up and lost it on her team in the half-time locker room. She erupted like a volcano, calling them “horrible” and saying “I’d gladly get the fuck on the bus right now and take you with me.” Most coaches, control freaks by nature, would never allow such an unflattering moment captured in the sanctuary of a locker room see the light of day. Not Kathy.
I showed her the scene in her office before I locked picture. With stomach clenched, I readied myself to explain that while it was important to the story, if it would damage our relationship, I’d take it out. Never before or since have I given veto power to a subject in one of my films, but I owed her this.
Kathy winced as she watched the footage. I held my breath, braced for impact. Of course she’d wanted me to depict her well. Of course I’d let her down again.
“Keep it,” she said. “You’re an artist, you have to keep it.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yep,” she said. “I’m just never going to swear again.” We both burst out laughing. Since then Kathy has supported my films and writing with a ferocity that makes me blush.
The Ivy League attracts perfectionists; and perfectionism is a cage that, sooner or later, breeds fragile creatures warped to fit the expectations of the external world (after it “helps” them get through admissions). These students – I’d argue particularly female students – are experts at meeting the expectations of adults, no matter whether such expectations serve them. Yet Kathy always cared about me beyond what I could do for her. “I hate it when players just want to please me,” she confided over beers after No Look Pass sold to Showtime. What a strange and wonderful thing for a coach to say.
You don’t really know a person until you let them down.
I’m disappointed that she’s retiring. At 72 years old she has won 11 Ivy League titles and more than 600 games, the most of any head coach (men’s or women’s) in the league’s history – and she’s the second longest tenured coach in Division I basketball. But the selfish child in me wants her to stay there forever – not changing, calling our plays – a mantel from my youth I can visit and lay my hand upon. I want to hold her in place because as long as she’s there, I can imagine I’m still there with her.
What remains after the portal closes?
I’m old enough now to realize the measure of an education lies not in a degree earned or games won, but rather how the lessons carve the shape of a life, and that the greatest tribute you can give a teacher is to pass their lessons on.
So, heartache be damned, I must cheer her along the road ahead, even if she’s letting me down – because Kathy, I see you having a great life, even if I’m not a part of it.