Coaches Corner: Balancing Team Sacrifice with Individual Freedoms
The Kyrie Irving vaccination situation is a reminder of the delicate navigation of team and individual values
Legendary Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz gained a reputation for being a great motivator of young men during his successful run with the Fighting Irish. An old coach of mine — a championship coach who will be a Hall of Famer someday — used to parrot the advice of Holtz in our preseason meetings. During every tryout period, just before cuts are made and rosters finalized, he’d set up a meeting with every player on the team and ask them three questions that Holtz used to:
Are you committed?
Do you care about others?
Can we trust you?
To Holtz, these were questions that every leader needed to be able to answer. To our staff, it wasn’t just for leaders, but followers and all members of the group. As coaches, our goal is to oversee the entirety of the team, make decisions on what’s best for the whole and lead others to buy into that course we set. The answers to these three questions — being committed to the group and vision, caring about those within the group and being trusted to fulfill your obligation to the group — are the very baseline for success. We’d call them non-negotiables.
With the contentious, often politicized nature of vaccinations, individual freedoms have often been cited as a reason not to get the shot, or at least why it shouldn’t be required. For leaders, there’s a supremely fine line to walk. Require the vaccination and risk trampling on an individual’s right to choose. Excuse it and you weaken the non-negotiables present in your organization.
No team has been stretched thinner as of now than the Brooklyn Nets in this regard. One of their star players, Kyrie Irving, has taken a stance in opposition to receiving the vaccine, once again citing personal reasons for his rationale. For a long period of time, we all wondered how the Nets would navigate these murky waters.
On Tuesday afternoon, Nets general manager Sean Marks came out with the statement that sealed Irving’s fate: stay away from the team entirely until you’re willing to do what is necessary to show your commitment to the group:
“Given the evolving nature of the situation and after thorough deliberation, we have decided Kyrie Irving will not play or practice with the team until he is eligible to be a full participant. Kyrie has made a personal choice, and we respect his individual right to choose. Currently the choice restricts his ability to be a full-time member of the team, and we will not permit any member of our team to participate with part-time availability. It is imperative that we continue to build chemistry as a team and remain true to our long-established values of togetherness and sacrifice. Our championship goals for the season have not changed, and to achieve these goals each member of our organization must pull in the same direction.”
-Brooklyn Nets general manager Sean Marks
A pretty clear but blunt statement from the Nets: you’re either all in or all out until you can change to sacrifice for the team. The carefully crafted statement is meant to soften the blow on Kyrie while laying the accountability squarely at his feet. There’s respect for his decision while listing what will happen as a result.
We want to make one distinction clear, though, one which is lost generally on all parties, even the Nets. There’s a difference between a personal choice and a choice an individual makes that impacts others. A personal choice is deciding to get your ears pierced, get a tattoo, go vegetarian, which church you attend on a Sunday, boycotting Nike because of their child labor usage, whatever it may be. Any individual can take those steps and very few receive pushback because, frankly, the choices don’t alter much for those within their surroundings.
That’s much different than a choice that can only be made by an individual but that impacts those around them intimately. Vaccination falls into this category, as does driving drunk or not showing up to work for a week. The consequences for those decisions have wide-ranging ripple effects. What gets lost in this discussion, particularly by the vocal minority who are opposed to vaccines (or at least vaccine mandates) is that consequences cannot be avoided. If you decide not to show up to work for a week without telling anyone, you typically will get fired, and at least change the productivity of your organization. If you get caught driving while intoxicated, you face legal penalties and potentially inflict harm on others. When others become involved, the decision is no longer solely a personal one. And in a team sport setting or framework, where sacrifice and selflessness are demanded, the consequences of individualism can be severe.
The NBA and NPBA deserve applause for how clearly they have articulated to all the players what those consequences will be: lack of access to games and practices in some areas, forfeiture of game checks and more stringent quarantine or restrictive travel measures on the road.
As we’re finding out with the Brooklyn Nets, teams may not stop at just those league or government-imposed levels. At its core, the decision not to make a decision that has the betterment of the team in mind goes against the culture sacred to team sports. Now I’m not this gung-ho, ‘team or you’re selfish’ type of coach who thinks any individual expression is negative. But at the heart of this issue is that a player is willing to sacrifice their availability to the team.
There’s an old parable (or joke, to be honest) about the difference between being involved and committed. The parable relates to breakfast in the morning with bacon and eggs: the chicken was involved, the pig was committed.
On a team level, involvement simply doesn’t do enough. Chasing a championship, the endless hours on the road and with your team, the bumps and bruises that require constant attention to heal. The countless support staff, coaches, equipment folks, travel coordinators, trainers and team personnel who work long hours nonstop while sacrificing their family time: they are committed. To allow one player, or even one member of the organization at any level, to be less than committed is a blatant sign of disrespect to all those who are committed.
That’s the team element in this, and one we believe the Nets nailed appropriately. Kyrie Irving has every right to make his decision. That decision comes with consequences, and because the Nets have to be concerned with the commitment level of the group as a whole and protect their unified mission, there simply cannot be room to cater to Irving in this regard.
We want to be very clear: in no way are the Nets telling Kyrie Irving what to believe. No team, or leader, should ask that of its players or force one set of spiritual or personal beliefs upon its members. What they are saying is that, when those beliefs conflict with the mission of the group as a whole, the group will win out. It has to.
The more contentious the issue, the higher the stakes get raised and the more emotion goes into a decision. Having respect to give players the autonomy to make their own choices is laudable, and we’d argue the Nets have done a strong job of making sure Irving has such space. But this is also a masterclass in organizational leadership; not letting one person’s beliefs derail the mission of the group as a whole.
Well done, Sean Marks and company.