coach x Mary Poppins
Hair ties. Pre-wrap. Band-Aids. A whistle.
A sports bra. Socks. Electrolytes. Protein bars. Ziploc bags, all sizes. Smarties.
A flathead screwdriver.
A pinecone. (Yes, a pinecone.)
A good coach, the kind of coach I want to be, strives to be able to answer "yes" to any question that begins, "Coach, do you have ...?"
Do you have a hair tie — a silver one? Do you have a band-aid? Scissors? Do you have an extra jersey? I left mine at home. Do you have a screwdriver? My head is loose. Do you have a second? Do you have a minute? Do you have any suggestions for what I can do to get better?
Yes, I want to be able to say. Yes, I do. I have all those things. I am large. I contain multitudes.
High school coaches are the Mary Poppins of the athletic world: assigned the task of molding youth into wiser, more fully-realized versions of themselves over a finite time horizon — and with the assistance of a ludicrously capacious bag. Mine is a basic canvas tote: oversized, extra-long handles, no interior pockets, no zip top. It's simple. Utilitarian. Accessible. Like me.
What I pack in the bag varies from year to year because I vary from year to year. There's barely any overlap between what I packed in my inaugural lacrosse season's coaching bag 25 years ago and what I'll pack in this season's bag. This year's pinecone is a first. I'd give five pinecones, plus my season's supply of 72 giant Smarties rolls, to see what Dawn Staley has in her bag. Or Emma Hayes. Or Pat Summitt, who famously kept her bag in the trunk of her car, along with a half-dozen autographed basketballs that came in handy when she got pulled over for speeding, which she frequently did.
South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley cuts down the net after defeating Duke to advance to the Final Four in the Elite Eight of the NCAA college basketball tournament, Sunday, March 30, 2025, in Birmingham, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)
Coaches offer student-athletes the sum total of what we know to be true. And what we know — about ourselves, our team and our sport — evolves. We, too, evolve, as do today's teenagers and the world in which they are operating. Let's not kid ourselves, no adult over the age of 30 has a first-hand experience of what it's like to grow up immersed in the non-stop churn of social media. Today's players are different than the generation before; and yesterday's coaching tools would be as out of place at tomorrow's practice as one of those old wooden lacrosse sticks.
Much of what we do as coaches today — with these savvy student-athletes who are wise to questions of presence, preparation and mental health in ways their predecessors simply were not — is to ground our players: to help them find their feet on the turf in real time among their living, breathing, embodied teammates. No phones, no cameras, no earbuds are allowed on the practice field. For two hours a day, 10 weeks a year, we are a small island of two dozen players and coaches. We encounter challenges and we problem-solve as a group with whatever we have at our disposal — in our mental toolkits, in our aggregated lived experience, and yes, in the coach's bag.
Sometimes the fixes are easy: a band-aid for a blister, a quick sideline chat, a retooling of the on-field X’s and O’s. And sometimes the way forward is less obvious.
Once, when a rift was opening between the starters and the substitutes, I reached into my bag for a marker and pantomimed a Sharpie as a mustache. Then I passed the marker to my left and asked each player in the huddle to turn the object into something unexpected and wholly of their choosing — a telephone, a banana, a magic wand — to illustrate how each of us plays a unique role on the team, as varied and distinctive as the Sharpie gesture they'd just performed. I wanted them to understand that in many ways, their playing time was the least of what they contributed and that the only limitation on what they could bring to the team was their imagination.
I've pulled Bingo cards from my bag at a game so cold and damp our opponents offered up their concession stand for us to shelter in during our halftime talk. Perched on wide and wobbly stainless steel tables amongst boxes of hot dog rolls and Gatorade, I told the team, "You're either going to love these or you're going to think I'm crazy.”
The Bingo cards featured squares for assisted goals, successful double teams, goalie saves, acts of sportsmanship and uplifting words spoken to teammates on the field. We used the cards, which evolved from game to game depending on what we'd been working on in practice, to make sure we were recognizing our small victories even if they weren't showing up in the box scores at the end of the day. By the end of that season the Bingo cards had become so popular that we brought extras for spectators, and it was not unusual to hear the whole sideline erupt in a victorious cheer of "BINGO!" even if the scoreboard told a different story. We knew the assignment, and the assignment was to seek unceasing improvement. And we did.
This year's pinecone is a prophylactic prop. I don't know if I'll need it — and I hope I won’t — but I'm ready to deploy it if I have to. The idea to include it in this year's bag occurred to me after a friend offhandedly told me about serotinous cones: pinecones that need the heat of a fire to melt their exterior resin and release the seeds within. There's something tragic and true about burning a structure to the ground so that it can grow anew. If our team gets smoked by an opponent this year, you can bet I'll be reaching into my bag for that pinecone, an object lesson for our team in how to launch into our phoenix era.
The coach's bag is the coach made manifest. It's the sum total of what I have to offer: a mobile med kit, a strategist's briefcase, a magician's bag of tricks. The bag is the cauldron in which brews a bottomless reservoir of patience, humor, wisdom, humility, confidence and affection, to which every athlete has equal access and from which each person, over the course of the season, can feel empowered to take what they need when they need it. What is in the bag is the least of what I have to offer. It is also everything I have to offer. Just as, for me, coaching is all about the sport of lacrosse. And it is also not about lacrosse at all.
Years from now, it will not matter to me very much if my players can still run a mile in under eight minutes or execute a split dodge or see the cross-crease slide. It will matter to me immensely that they'll understand that they are never more at home than when they are standing shoulder to shoulder with a group of similarly smart, ambitious, powerful women. If they pack their own bags to share with future teammates, neighbors and co-workers, I hope they put that in first.
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published April 24, 2025
on WBUR’s Cognoscenti