Can winning outshoot devotion?

Eleven women quit the Yeowomen basketball team because of coach Ann Gilbert's coaching style. That seems kind of hard to swallow, but let's assume it's true. Coaches, like regular people, are often stuck between two imaginary polars, winning/success or loyalty/humanity. When all but one of your players quit, it seems to outsiders that obviously the loyalty and humanity part of coaching was absent. Hopefully, humanity and loyalty are parts of the winning/success process, but maybe not. Then again, was Gilbert hired to solely shower her young ballplayers with wet loyalty or dense humanity? Should she be a humanitarian? Win a couple of games? Don't do a lot of recruiting because that would mean pushing some possible returning players off the team? Explain everything she did? Never lie to her players? ... and lose. End up like the football team, and have hordes of geeked-out alums and now-students write the Review every week about how women's basketball should be done away with. Forget that. Gilbert was hired to coach and win and win and win. There had to have been some sort of method to Gilbert's obvious madness ... and according to her ex-players, mad as hell, she was. Her biggest gripe last year was her team's inability to make shots and their dedication to the game. Making shots takes, among other things, refined talent ... something that the Yeowomen, compared to other teams, were very short on. Dedication to the game? Hmmm. All but one player quit. Can a coach make a player quit something they love? Should they have even been dedicated to a perceived coach-gone-mad?

Oh well. This year's Yeowomen team, compared to last year's, will win a whole lot of games. They dress six off-da-hook first-years, one transfer and one persistent senior who wadded her way through a year of Gilbert's craziness. It seems that Ann might have learned from her mistakes. She and her players now seem tight. They've got a definite swagger, an edge that seems synonymous with confidence, winning and loyalty to each other. But, the chickens will indeed come home to roost. They dress only eight players. How do you scrimmage? What about injuries? While it's probable that Ann treated her ex-players as she did because she knew they weren't going to win games and/or she knew she had six or seven "talented" first-years coming and/or she knew she wouldn't treat those six or seven "talented" players badly, Gilbert also had to assume that more than one of the possible returning players would actually return. She was wrong. Only one came back, and the team is weaker because of it. We hope that X-Women find success and enjoyment in intramurals. We hope that the Ann Gilbert doesn't neglect her humanity or loyalty this year. And most of all, we hope there won't be two X-Women teams in intramurals next year. That, more than anything, would be way too much for Jeff White to handle.