Postcards From Berlin #28: The Gaming Coach

By Jeff Allers
April 13, 2008

German Word of the Month: Lernspiel (learning game)

It had been a tough season with very few wins to be excited about, but there we were, down to the wire with one of the better basketball teams in our league, a German version of March Madness. Behind by one point but ready to inbound the ball with enough seconds to get off a good shot, I took our final timeout and hurriedly diagrammed the screens and passes that could give me my “Jimmy V.” moment. As the team took the floor, my mind replayed scenes from “Hoosiers,” and I called out once more in my best Gene Hackman voice. The referee handed over the ball, blew the whistle, and one of my players passed the ball to our best shooter, who launched a shot at the buzzer that seemingly hung in the air for hours until…

…it clanged off the rim and fell to the ground, without the sweet sound of contact with the net. We’d lost the game. Again.

I must confess, this was hardly the German championship. It was only a youth club team (although one of the other teams in our club did, indeed, win the German championship). And even though we lost more games than we won that season, coaching a teenage boys’ basketball team was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

I didn’t always want to coach, however. I first got involved in a basketball club in Berlin because I wanted to play, and even in a city this size, you can’t just go down to the local YMCA to get into a pick-up game. They don’t even have real school teams – at least not like in the USA with leagues and mascots and bleachers full of parents and friends and pep bands. As with most organized activities in the Fatherland, if you are serious about it, you join a club team.

The clubs operate the same for all sports in Germany. There are a series of leagues stacked one above the other, pancake-like. By winning a league, a team has the opportunity to jump up to the next, more difficult and prestigious league. If a team kept winning, it could eventually wind up in the Bundesliga, where the top pros play. By finishing at the bottom, however, that team is forced to drop down a league. Can you imagine the pressure on professional sports in the States if the worst team in the NBA would drop down to the CBA next season? Or a Major League Baseball team would be relegated to the minor leagues? Or an NFL team would be forced to play Canadian football next year?

The national sport here is still Fussball, or Soccer, just as it is pretty much the world over with the exception of my home country. But there are plenty of other sports the Germans take seriously, too. Handball, for instance, is a very popular combination of basketball and soccer, and very physical, as it seems you’re allowed to grab your opponent just about anywhere when he has the ball. I once tried to play basketball against a handball player and he literally wrestled me to the ground, his sweaty arms wrapped around me in a big bear hug. The Germans won the Handball World Cup recently, though, so I suppose they are all very good at giving opponents bear hugs.

Another peculiarity I’ve noticed is the large number of badminton courts in German fitness centers. To be honest, I’d never seen an indoor court for badminton, and I never really considered it much of a sport, with players swatting at some strange shape called a “birdie.” Growing up in America, I’d only ever seen it set up at family picnics in the park, the type of game you could play without spilling the cold beverage you had in your other hand. Big German weightlifters, however, are serious about this sport, and they can knock that birdie senseless with their high-tech rackets. The footwork required for the game when played at that level rivals some of Germany’s top tennis talent, and I imagine Steffi Graf and Boris Becker could have very well started out playing badminton.

The modern history of sports in Germany, as with everything else, is a divided one, and East Germany has a particularly dark past. My good friend and neighbor Rico was a hockey goalie back then. He attended a special “sports high school,” where promising young athletes were sent to be trained by the best coaches so that they could eventually perform well on the world stage and show up the fascist capitalists, or something like that. There were strict training schedules with little focus on academics, but the most horrifying thing was the regular injections they were given. “They told us they were vitamins,” Rico shared with me one day while we played badminton. Back then, East Germans lacked the variety of fresh fruits and vegetables available in the west, so the young, impressionable athletes had no reason to question their coaches. Now, however, the truth is too frightening to think about. “I don’t want to know what was really in them,” Rico said, as he looked away.

After a career-ending injury, Rico got involved with go-cart racing and has been one of the main organizers in eastern Germany ever since. In a country were Michael Schumacher and Formula 1 racing is almost as popular as soccer, go-cart racing is often the training ground for future drivers. Rico told me that investing in young people is one of the most enjoyable things he does.

I suppose there is a point in a person’s life when he realizes that he isn’t the center of the universe. For an athlete, that’s the point where he stops obsessing about creating moments for himself and starts making moments for others, especially younger people. One realizes the thing that so many irresponsible professional athletes repeatedly deny, that every person is – whether he or she likes it or not – a role model for somebody else.

I was never one of the star athletes or the popular people, so it took me awhile to think anyone would ever look up to me, but it happened one summer after a year of college. I was riding with a team on a bicycle tour across Iowa – 15,000 cyclists riding 500 miles in one week across the prairie, camping each night in a different village that suddenly became a tent town, and sampling all sorts of Midwestern hospitality and entertainment along the way. There were live bands and parties every night, and a guy befriended me who I thought was “cool” because he could actually talk to attractive girls without repelling them. So I felt cool to be able to hang out with him, and we did cool things together, like bring cases of beer to the beach volleyball courts loaded onto our bicycles’ aero-handlebars and play 2-on-2 “Top Gun"-style to impress the lady onlookers. One night, though, when we were goofing off at camp, I noticed the young son of a single mom who was part of our team, and he was looking at me. Worse, he was imitating me, and in that shameful moment, I realized that I’d been acting like a jerk. Needless to say, I dropped the posing with Mr. Cool and spent more time with the boy – and I never forgot that I had more influence on other people than I thought I did.

Years later, I jumped at the chance to coach a boys’ basketball team at the club where I played. It was exhilarating to pass on all the things I had learned from the good coaches I’d had in the U.S. and Germany, and to develop my own coaching style. I enjoyed teaching the fundamentals, introducing new exercises and drills, devising strategies for games against opponents, challenging the players, and especially, encouraging them to have fun.

A few years ago, though, I had to give it up due to other time commitments, and I stopped playing regularly when my body started to take more than a day to recover from each practice. The timing, however, coincided perfectly with my introduction into German board games. And now, thanks to my work with German youth, I’ve become a gaming coach.

This doesn’t mean that I’ll be bringing a team from Berlin to the World Board Game Championships anytime soon. Rather, I’m thinking more about parallels to coaches who are all about teaching their players life lessons through their training and competitions. After all, sports and games are pretty worthless if you don’t ever learn anything about yourself or about life through the process. And just about anything that requires some thought and interaction with others is going to provide that.

It’s interesting to note that the parents from my former basketball players and the parents of the members in my gaming group have all thanked me for the same thing: prying their kids away from their solitary computer games for a little social interaction with other members of their species. And social etiquette is one of the first lessons they have to learn when becoming a board gamer. After all, an A.I. opponent won’t raise an eyebrow when a young computer geek throws a tantrum because things aren’t going his way. Circle the table with living opponents, however, and you multiply the number of people’s feelings that could be affected by each player’s move (and influenced by any number of random events that could have happened to those players during the week).

As the “coach” of my group, I try to be sensitive to the things each person is going through outside of our gaming time, and it’s important for me to choose games that play to the different strengths of everyone in the group. I also encourage interaction about subjects other than games, so that they feel more comfortable with each other. A basketball coach would label this as “building team chemistry.” I intentionally avoided negotiation games like Rette Sich Wer Kann (Lifeboats), for example, or others involving more direct conflict until the group had developed some chemistry and camaraderie.

After that starts to form, the next concern is getting the players to a level where they can learn and play the games well so that it’s more fun to play them. In basketball terms, it’s called “learning the fundamentals,” which ultimately increases your enjoyment in playing the sport.

With that foundation, it’s time for the coach to increase the difficulty in increments challenging enough to avoid boredom, but not to the extent that it would be overwhelming. Especially in these times, when so many other entertainment forms promise instant gratification, it’s much better to start with games that are quick and provide all new players with the opportunity to experience success. I recently had a talk with a friend who built small boats together with his sons as they were growing up. He explained how important it was to start out with a simple plywood boat so that the young boys could see quick results and experience sailing in their creation after only a small amount of work. They gradually worked their way up to building more challenging boats that would hold more passengers, sail better, and also take much more time and patience to build. But they had already been exposed to the joy of building a complete boat and sailing in it, so their patience was greater in building the next one.

Patience itself can be one of the main lessons in playing board games. After all, ancient ancestors like Chess and Go require an enormous amount of patience. Donald Miller writes in his book “To Own a Dragon” about a Philadelphia middle school teacher who uses Chess to teach inner city kids how to be successful in life. One of the main lessons is learning how to remain steady without reacting to every unexpected frustration or disappointment. A great Eurogame-teacher for this is Galaxy Trucker. In fact, one of the boys in my group was just about ready to leave the table after a small asteroid severed his starship in two, but a little encouragement from the group persuaded him to stay and play another round, which he actually won. The following week, he requested the game again.

Another lesson that Donald Miller mentioned was the benefit of forming long-term strategies. It seems more tempting than ever to wander this world rather aimlessly, but most Eurogames won’t let a player get away with that kind of thinking – and they encourage the patience needed to stick to a good strategy even when unexpected challenges arise.

Ultimately, the best lesson we learn from the Euros, and the one that separates these games we play from their roll-and-move forerunners, is that we are always presented with a wide variety of choices, upon which only we can decide. There may be more than one good option, but there are always bad ones, and learning to distinguish and evaluate between them can be one of the most valuable things a coach can pass on to his players.

Becoming a coach was certainly one of the best decisions I’ve made.

© 2008 Jeff Allers

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Comments:

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Great article.  I like how you tied it back to boardgaming, and even if it didn’t, I still very much enjoyed reading it. Personally I think the US professional sports would benefit from the Germany league-style of operation.  Certainly woule make the competition more meaningful and justify the player’s salary.  Although I’m not a sports fan by any means, but even to a casual viewer like me it seems that “professional sports” is more about the entertainment and less about the game. Posted by Jason Cheng on Apr 14, 2008 at 07:51 AM | #

Thanks, Jason.  I’m agree that professional sports has become all about the entertainment, although I don’t think any of their antics on and off the court/field justify their salaries. And I hope that all of the Canadian gamers who I deeply respect (many of whom introduced me to Eurogames through their blogs and article years ago) forgive me--I feel like I know you and I couldn’t resist a little joke… Posted by Jeff Allers on Apr 24, 2008 at 02:50 PM | #

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