Weekend Update

Just to complete the thread of High School Football commentary, the game might have been a bit worse than expected. The victor was about 98% certain before the game started, but 59-0 was disappointing.

The North team was clearly rattled early, giving up 3 easy touchdowns to Warren Central in the first quarter. The first two were after North fumbles. It rattled the offense, and the defense was getting knocked around pretty soundly. Things continued to go badly, and the game was over at halftime, the score 35-0.

Something interesting about such games, where one team is so clearly and obviously superior. WC could probably beat a lot of college teams - not Division I, but quite possibly Division III and below.

Mike Hladik, the quarterback, was suddenly throwing a lot of balls over the heads of his receivers. Sometimes when he was rushed, but mostly it just seemed he just had too much adrenaline. When he was on target, the receivers suddenly developed stone hands. Brandon Butler, the wide receiver who I think has the single-season and possibly career receptions record for Columbus North, dropped nearly every pass. He nearly made some impossibly difficult catches, which you can't fault him for being unable to hang on, but he also dropped balls thrown to him into his hands and in the open.

Even the punter, Conor Koslowski, was shanking the ball out of bounds in the first half. The player who didn't have the lapses of the rest of the offense seemed to be the running back, Alex Turner. He was responsible for the fumble at the beginning of the game, but ran hard and strong for plenty of yards the rest of the way.

I've had the unfortunate experience myself of getting up against a team that's way beyond your own in size, strength, and speed. The psychological impact of that is this: You don't want to be embarrassed, and you tell yourself that you can beat these guys - all you have to do is play to your potential. That's when you start pressing. You think more about what you're doing, try to do more than you've been able to do before, and start trying to make the "big play" to help your team.

Instead, things just get worse. You think your effort is above and beyond anything you've done before, but you're failing miserably. You're out of synch, and all of a sudden you can't even seem to do the simple things right. It's almost as if you've forgotten how to play the game. The frustration mounts, and it seems the harder you try to recover, the worse things get.

That's what I saw with Columbus North. They reached that frustration point when they fell behind, and started pressing. Hladik tried to throw harder and it just resulted in overthrows and balls too strong for the receiver to handle. Butler thought about running with the ball after the catch, so he didn't make sure he had the catch first and the ball just skipped through his hands. The defense overpursued and got pulled out of position so the other team's running backs could run right past them.

I wonder how an athlete could overcome the tendency to press when things aren't going well, and learn to play with intensity but still play within their capabilities? If I were a psychologist and could figure this out, maybe I could earn big bucks as a consultant to professional athletes. Seems like a fun profession as well.

Hmmm.