Com 11 Journal 2

So I was in basketball practice a couple hours ago, thinking more of what I was gonna write on this blog than playing basketball. My head was completely out of it, I swear. I was so pent up about what to how to connect my life to what I learned in the classroom yesterday. I was thinking I could totally just make something up if worse comes to worse, but that would take too much time and brain power on my part, and to be honest, I was too lazy to make up a really kick-ass story about me rescuing a princess from a 20-story dragon's keep with my trusty talking cat and donkey at my side, and still, somehow connect that to communication. But nonetheless,I tried making something up, and as I was somewhere between whether to make myself a battle-scared knight with a huge sword or a peace-loving paladin with a ginormous hammer and whether to make this princess of mine a brunette, a blond, or a redhead, it hit me. No, I mean it literally hit me, I got hit by the ball while I was not looking.....................

Ok, fine, that was a lie. I actually got slapped by my coach in the head for not paying attention to him while he was giving a rousing speech about, basketball, love, and religion..................

Ok, fine, that was a lie too, but hey, you gotta give me credit for trying to put some spice in this story.

So anyway, what really happened was that while in practice, I came to realize how basketball was a lot like communication itself. Communication, in general, is a social process in which individuals employ symbols to establish and interpret meaning in their environment. This, I have to say, is just a really,really fancy way to say that Communication is basically communication between two people by any means necessary.

In basketball, their are a multitude of ways by how we players communicate. What's so fun about it is that we don't even have to be talking to achieve it. By some divine will of the Basketball gods, communication on the court is based more on reading the play of your teammates, looking at their body language and move or cut based on that. Yeah, team chemistry helps a lot too, but when it comes right down to it, eye-contact & body language and saying "cut to the post", "give me a screen", or "put your knee up when you take it in and give that guy a shot in the balls for me"is pretty much the same when you factor everything in. Another example is that basketball has a sense of Intercultural Communication to it, as well. Think of it this way, team I am with right now did not come from the same high school. Yes, that still technically makes us "of the same culture" because we're Asians and all, but the fact is, the way I, for example, was taught to play and perceive basketball as a whole is very different from the way my teammates understand it. Each and everyone of us were trained by different coaching staffs when we were wee little kids in grade school and high school (ghawd, I feel old. At 19, I swear I feel like I'm pushing 80), ergo our basics and fundamentals are totally different from one another. A player may be told to cut here on certain situations, while another may not. A player may be told to take the shot on this certain kind of opportunity, while player B isn't. The list goes on. And once we get to college-level ball and a new coaching system, somehow all of us are expected to forget some of the things we learned a while back and learn what it means to play Ateneo ball. Our "culture" as a player is what defines us as a singular entity, but our "culture" as a team defines if we will be an outright success or a failure in our own eyes.

Communication and Basketball can be summed up by a favorite quote of mine that I totally know by heart, and did not, repeat, did not look up on the internet. I swear. It says,

Teamwork is the ability to work together for a common goal. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.

Let that sink in for a bit.....

And if that doesn't float your boat, well you can find dozens of other inspiring teamwork quotes by following this link:
http://thinkexist.com/quotations/team_work/