What is the solution

I realized tonight that we are missing something, and I am not sure what it is. There is something that we are not doing right. The team lacks a certain intensity. It is my fault as the Head Coach.

We do our best to keep the kids motivated, we do our best to constantly keep them moving at practice, we instill systems that we believe will give them the best chance to succeed, but outside of 6-on-6 at practice, we just lack that "it."

I realized two things tonight:
1) the guys on our team, again outside of 6-on-6, treat each other as friends. That is great and all, but when we are dealing with drills and competition, those friends are the ones that you are competing against. Any time that you compete, no matter who it is, you need to play with a certain level of emotion.
2) I realized tonight that we are playing too many guys. For now........We ideally want to play between 20-22 guys. But just because that is what we want to do, that doesn't mean that we can. We have aspirations and goals to be a Top 12 team this year. Therefore, at the risk of being cliche, the guys who will get the majority of the time need to be playing at a Top 12 level. However if we only have 14 guys playing at a high level, they we are rolling with 14 guys.

I mentioned before that we need everybody to get better. It just seems that everyone is so satisfied at just being okay. How do you only think about lacrosse during practice? When I was in college, whether it was right or wrong, I think that the "image" that I mostly identified myself as was being a "lacrosse player." Everything I did was about the game.

Although I am a bit concerned with where we are as a team, it is however a long season; one that actually hasn't started yet. I don't need us playing our best in 2 weeks, I just need us ready to beat Chapman. The smart play is to have us playing almost at our best when division play starts, and then we need to be completely on point when play-offs start.

Like I said, I blame myself as the Head Coach. I have often thought of the art of coaching as an equation. Each year requiring a different set of calculations to get to the correct answer. I know the equation for this year, I hope that we are starting to use the right proofs to find the answer. We certainly will find out soon.

All glory and thanks to God and to his Son, the Christ