Will’s World Underdogs

By Will Carlin

My opponent was simply better.

That’s why I was down 1-0 in the finals of the then-called MSRA (now NY Squash) Boys 18 & Under division. I had lost the first game 15-8, but, to be honest, it hadn’t been that close.

During the break, my pro at the Heights Casino, Baird Haney, leaned in very close and said: “I am going to ask you a serious question, and I want you to think before you answer.” I nodded, and he asked me, “How badly do you want to win?”

“Well,” I began, “I want to win but he is really go…”

“Yes, he is,” interrupted Baird. “But you can beat him if you do exactly what I say. It won’t be easy. So, how badly do you want it?”

Before the match, in the locker room, I had been tying my shoes and talking to a friend of mine, when my opponent walked in. I was behind a row of lockers so he didn’t see me when my buddy asked him how he was feeling before the match.

“I never heard of this guy,” he said, referring to me. “I am thinking I might be able to 45-zip him.”

He was saying that with games played to fifteen and three games to win the match…well, you can do the math.

To be fair, he was ranked number three in the country, and I was a relative newcomer to the game and was not ranked; there was no reason he should have heard of me. But the comment rankled nonetheless.

“I want it,” I said. “Really bad.”

In his new book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Vivek Ranadivé, a man who volunteered to coach his 12-year-old daughter’s afterschool basketball team. New both to the U.S. and to basketball, Vivek had grown up a soccer fan, and when he first saw a basketball game, he was struck by how nonsensical it seemed.

In soccer, the majority of play takes place in the midfield as teams rapidly win and lose control of the ball. Every possession is challenged. In basketball, however, Vivek noticed that, after scoring, a team quickly runs back to their side of the court and waits for the other team to advance the ball; on a ninety- four-foot court, therefore, each team voluntarily relinquishes the first sixty feet or so to the other team.

Vivek instinctively realized that this meant that the team better at shooting and running offensive plays was much more likely to win. If, on the other hand, an inferior team could prevent the better one from having possession near the basket, its chances of winning increased significantly.

This was important to Vivek because his team of young girls all were new to basketball.

He convinced his team to play full-court press (defending the entire court) for the whole game, every game. They challenged every inbound pass (where a team has only five seconds to get the ball into play) by wildly waving their hands in front of the girl trying to pass, and if that girl was able to find a teammate, they would surround the girl with the ball, and try to prevent her from dribbling or passing.

The result? Opposing teams rarely got the ball past mid-court, and Vivek’s team made it all the way to the national finals.

The full-court press is rarely used in higher-level play. Not because it isn’t effective—it is—but because it requires an incredible degree of fitness and per- severance. It’s hard.

In fact, there is only one coach at the college or pro level who has consistently used the full-court press: Rick Pitino. He has won national championships at two different universities (Louisville and Kentucky), and he took a woeful Knicks team to its first division title in nearly twenty years by being the only professional team to consistently use the full-court press.

On ESPN’s Olbermann show, Pitino was asked what kind of athletes he looks for: “The thing I look for is low ego. Ego to me, right now, is edging greatness out. [Many athletes] think they have arrived— they don’t have to put in the extra work. An ego to me is a killer of potential. Confidence comes from putting in the work. You get confident because you know you have paid the price, but you haven’t arrived.”

Pitino has said that most people think that talent is the hard thing—the rare thing—and that effort is easy, but they are wrong; it’s the opposite. Lots of people have talent, but great effort is rare: “While most people say they want to win, most people really don’t want to put in the effort that it takes.”

I was relatively new to squash, but I already was obsessed. For the past year, I had been up at 4:45am to run and to do drills before school. On weekends, I did six-to-eight hours of solo drills. Mostly, I hit rails over and over and over. My technique wasn’t great, but I was consistent. And fit.

So, when Baird told me that he wanted me to hit nothing but lobs and soft rails, I knew I could try. “He is going to hit winners. That’s okay, just keep lobbing. And run as hard as you can.”