Pitchin with Pritch: Get the wins in when they really count
This last Saturday I spent almost the entire day at PCS at the SPVA Volleyball tournament. I had a couple of reasons to do that. First was the fact that I wanted to watch the PCS compete and the second reason was I wanted to visit with some of the people that I had made friends with during my coaching career and I got to do both of those things so it was a pretty good Saturday. The leaves in my yard could lay there a while longer and I won’t lose any sleep over that, so I actually accomplished two of the three goals I had for the day.
One of the things that I enjoyed most when I was coaching was meeting and getting to know the administrators, coaches, players and in a lot of cases some of the fans from other schools. I spent 38 years in education and 37 of those in the SPVA.
It was an enjoyable day, but I can’t believe how many people came up and spoke to me and I couldn’t put a name with them.
It was still fun talking about the various things they were reminded by seeing me. Some of them had boys that played against our teams and some of them had grandsons that played against our teams.
All of that is a lot of fun because there were a lot of good times, and a lot of great contests that were played here.
A lot of the stories brought back pleasant memories from things that had happened when I was at Imperial and here in Grant.
The topics that were the most nerve racking were the ones that reminded me it was 40 years ago when I coached at Imperial. I have said a number of times that it has all gone by in a blink of an eye.
There were moments when I was teaching and coaching that questioned why I ever chose that profession, but through all the highs and lows, there were many more good times than bad times. I would do it all again!
SPVA Volleyball
It isn’t any secret that our volleyball team at the high school has struggled this year but I really think that they have improved during this season.
Saturday they played hard, they were competitive and wound up winning a match and were in both of the other matches that were played. It is a young group of players and I think that it is possible, with continued improvement, that they will be very competitive in the coming years.
The more they improve, the confident they should get and then those close losses should turn into a number of wins. There is a lot of difference in “Playing not to lose” vs “Playing to win.” I can remember well when I was in high school back in Kansas and my sophomore year we played a stretch of five or six basketball games and three of them were overtime games and we lost all three.
Our Coach didn’t like to lose but he kept telling us that those games would help us down the road in the season and I really think they did.
We didn’t have any more overtime games, but we had a bunch of close games and we won most of them. There is a lot to be said for thinking you can do something and being able to get done when the time comes.
The district volleyball tournament is getting very close and this would be a great time for the Plainsmen gals to put it all together and get some wins when they count the most.