The Death of a paradigm — Why coaches should study History

“Mutanda, you haven’t done your homework!” yelled the head coach, Dwight, as he surveyed our group’s rondo (keep away) exercise just as I made an error and passed the ball out of bounds. In the moment, I remember feeling a bit annoyed, embarrassed, and puzzled all at the same time. Of course I hated losing the ball and I was also trying to figure out what coach was saying to me. My homework? I thought to myself. What does he mean?

“Hey,” my teammate Paul broke my brief reflection, “Be calm, look before you get the ball. You’re too frantic, calm.” With the utterance of that last word he made a gesture using both of his hands with palms facing down as if he were pushing on a waist-high, kitchen counter. Such was my education in the game of football (soccer) — or perhaps lack thereof — that it wasn’t until I was 25 and playing professionally in Canada that I learned some foundational concepts that are still with me today.

With FC Edmonton, and our cohort of Dutch internationals which included the coaching staff at the time, I was thrust into a different paradigm as far as what it meant to play the sport at a high level. All it took was someone to point out something that previously had rarely been emphasized in the environments I had played in before, at least not with the same consistency or force. It was like I was learning to play a different game, truly. In my role as a coach now, when I reflect back on that time as a player I certainly have 1 or 2 regrets — tied mostly to choices I made away from the field that impacted my performances on it — but for the most part I’m extremely grateful for how much I grew as a man in that period. I experienced a kind of personal renaissance even though I didn’t play nearly as much as I would have liked. Renaissance, what a loaded concept. How do deeply rooted ideas and behaviors change? Can they? What does this process require?

Perhaps it was experiencing the pain of heartbreak in a romantic relationship, or the humbling nature of not playing — whether through injury or just preferred team selection — but when I lived in Edmonton I had to come face to face with certain truths about change and self-examination. What I started to reflect on consistently was that in order to be re-born, resurrected, and rejuvenated, something or someone (even just a piece of someone) essentially has to fall away, expire, pass on. In a word, death. As morbid as it might sound, deep, transformative, and lasting change requires a death of some kind. At minimum it must be a death of the old idea or habit (which deeply involves one’s ego), and of course the highest price in a social sense is the death of the body if and when someone is consumed by operating in the old oppressive order. This last example is an especially heavy concept, and almost entirely taboo within the national lines of an imperial power that thinks racial “progress” is possible in a colony founded on the paradigm that black and brown lives in fact do not matter. But what history shows us very clearly — take for example the origins of the Republic of Haiti, formerly known as Saint-Domingue — is that governing paradigms don’t alter themselves, and what might appear to be progress is often nothing more than a concession if the roots of a thing (the essence of a particular model) are not accurately assessed and dealt with intentionally and courageously.

In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the enslaved Africans ended the societal model the only way possible, with violence. The central paradigm governing their lives was that of a clear distinction between black and white, between master and servant, and that order was established with ruthless force and consistent barbarism. In that context, and there are many others throughout history, the oppressed are forced to reckon with and discover for themselves a new relationship to the idea of death itself. Rather than something to be feared, the warriors of Saint-Domingue (who had the audacity to want to live free from the whip and chains of another) looked upon death as the ultimate liberation for their efforts to change their reality. Not only were they prepared to meet their end, they often welcomed it and, especially in the case of the Maroons, they crafted identities and communities wholly divested from the established world order. In our current lives, this divestment first requires a re-training and re-wiring of all our senses. Like the process of playing football, decolonization requires us to scan and perceive differently, to intentionally un-learn colonial vision, in order to see the world clearly from the eyes of the dispossessed.

Regarding how we educate young people both on and off the field, one must question what underpins the model with which many of us go about guiding players’ experience in this global game. Or, put another way, those of us who work with kids and adults alike must reflect on what the essence of our teaching is all about. Do our messages translate beyond the field? Does our instruction include exploring what it means to move through the world with dignity and purpose? Is there room in our pedagogy for dealing with the realities of dispossession and exploitation as the main tenants of colonization? If this reflection sounds too serious for a youth sports program, consider that the vast disparities between the haves and have nots in our society extends to who is given the opportunity to play, the freedom to explore, and the right to be an expressive young person.

Children mostly take part in athletics to have fun and make friends. And yet, the specifics of the exercises and training games we craft for them is not where we ought to start when thinking about their holistic development. First, we need to reflect on our WHY. We need to examine our governing paradigms, and if they aren’t sufficient to nurture and empower our athletes with AIR (Awareness, Intentionality, and Responsibility), then we should plot and prepare for the demise of our shaky premise. Afterwards, we might then be in a better place to create environments that serve the needs of our children. Throughout the process, coaches, officials, administrators, and parents alike ought to be prepared to refer back to the receipts of history for guidance, especially those of us in charge of some aspect of child development. Our challenge is chiefly one of letting go, specifically of that part of our ego binding us to systems and ideologies that can no longer bear the weight of reality. This requires a humility, determination, and courage to examine the forces that have produced our world as well as the ramifications of the language we use to justify it. Let’s learn to reframe and recognize the death of unsatisfactory and unjust ideas as the natural precursor to a glorious dawn.