Suburban Dad: Yoga in The Dugout to Calm The Coach

I fritter away the better part of my free time coaching Little League and CYO basketball.  By the standards of modern suburban society, this should make me a secular saint. But as I confessed in an earlier column, this saint has a shortcoming. For a long time, I couldn’t stop flapping my gums to umpires and referees about all their bad calls.

They called strikes when they should have been balls, fouls when there should have been none and –well, you get the point and, I can only assume, have an acute sense of sympathy for me. 

 Not quite?  That’s good, because neither did I.  Look: I never yelled at kids.  Instead, I empathize well past the point of reason.  But I’m a competitive guy and that unbearable urge to win has to bubble to the surface somewhere.

Enter the hapless umpire.  My mind state at his first botched call would do a barrel roll from sanity.  I’d shout.  I’d roll my eyes.   I’d stamp.  In one particularly grim scenario, I plopped down in disgust on my basketball team’s bench, which gave way.   

I began to seek peace in the valley of my ref-wracked soul…mostly because my wife threatened to start texting me from the stands mid-tantrum. 

In May, I sought out Jim Thompson. Thompson is essentially the conscience of youth sports— he founded The Positive Coaching Alliance, a well regarded non-profit that works to improve coaching behavior youth sports.  Better yet, Thompson is a self-professed recovering coaching lunatic.

I was speaking to the right man. 

We came up with a two-pronged recovery plan.  First, I was going to talk to my players about my struggles and how I was determined to change.  This would teach my knee-high Derek Jeter’s that you could—and should—seek to improve errant behavior.  But more to the point, it would put me on the spot.  I promised kids.  How could I let them down?

Well, that tugged on my heart…but so did the first bad call in summer travel baseball.  In fact, that almost ripped out my heart clear from my chest. He called that a ball?!  That’s where Plan B came in. 

Thompson said that my struggle with umpires was a common function of a former athlete involved in sports, but adrift without the physical release for rage that actually running and jumping and crashing into people offered.

I needed a physical reaction to calls I didn’t like, Thompson said.

Thompson proscribed pacing or pushups after a bad call—really any kind of physical self-control routine that might sublimate the angry, antsy athletic energy within.

"Just don't make threatening gestures to the umpire," he joked. 

That worked in baseball.  Cloistered in the dugout, I would, in a tableaux possibly as ridiculous as anything in suburban youth sports today, greet a bad call with a regime of conscious Yoga breathing and stretching.  It was dumb, it was embarrassing…but it worked.

I was a perfect, placid soul throughout the summer and fall travel baseball season I coached.  And with more flexible hamstrings, I might add, by the end.

Now, though, a new challenge—one that might pull me back to the dark side. Basketball season has started.  But basketball offers no privacy zone.   There is no dugout, only a sideline that showcases everything and hides nothing.   Can I really do my Yoga routine while on public display?  Moreover, it’s basketball that I played in high school and college, so it means more to me than baseball.  There’s more at stake. 

More at stake indeed.  My wife said the first time that even my nostrils flare she’s going to text me.  If that doesn’t work, she’ll drag me from the court by my ear.  Considering, maybe public Yoga isn’t so bad after all.  Anyhow—either way—I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes. 

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Marek Fuchs is the author of "A Cold-Blooded Business," the true story of a murderer, from Westchester, who almost got away with it. His upcoming book on volunteer firefighting across America, “Local Heroes,” is due out in 2012. He wrote The New York Times'  "County Lines" column about life in Westchester for six years and teaches non-fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville.  He also serves as a volunteer firefighter.  You can contact Marek through his website: www.marekfuchs.com or on Twitter: @MarekFuchs.  

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