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Keeping Your Foot on the Gas Pedal
Don’t Ever Stop Doing What has Made You Successful
Growing up, I played a lot of sports. My two favorites were baseball and basketball. And my biggest fan and advisor was my father. Dad would take me out between team practices to have me practice even more. He literally ran my butt off until the things I did were a second nature reflex.
In addition to doing physical practice, we also talked strategy, such as in what situation would I attempt to make what play.
He told me that there were two types of mistakes you could make.
The first was an error of commission, a physical mistake. That would be something like dropping a fly ball or making an errant pass to a teammate.
The second was an error of omission. That was a mental gaffe, like throwing to the wrong base or staying in the foul lane for too long and getting called for a three second violation.
He also stressed to me that games always have a momentum to them. When you get on a roll, like not missing a shot, or throwing strike after strike. You want to maintain that big mo. Once you deviate from what you are doing, the momentum can change, both quickly and dramatically. And regaining it can be hard if not impossible to do.
He was all for good sportsmanship, but he stressed that beating an opponent by a large margin was not a terrible thing. He said that once there was no doubt the other team couldn’t come back, that was then the time to slow down or as he put it, “Take your foot off the gas pedal”.
Too often I saw coaches and teams that slowed down too soon.
I still see it today. A team that seemed certain to win winds up losing. They took their foot off the gas, too soon and the other team caught and passed them.
In one basketball game, my team was losing by 20 points with about 12 minutes to go in the game. The other team, our chief rivals slowed things down. They stopped shooting and tried to freeze the ball. At that time there was no shot clock, so you could hold the ball forever without attempting to shoot.
