I can see why UK basketball coach is a 10 year job.
When you watch the pregame and especially the postgame, you see how much effort and emotion Pope (and Cal early on) puts into explaining and describing the players and what's going on in the game. And he's accounting for any or every player who played minutes.
It's a lot of words. And there are only so many words in the English language to describe something. For example, a basketball player, or a game. And players come and go, and many of them have most of the same skills and games follow the same patterns.
Over a 35 game season, talking about players and games for 10-15 minutes, it's exhausting to come up with NEW ways to describe the same old things that happen. Multiply that by 10 years. That's 3500-5200 minutes. Now imagine that over a 25 year career. Eventually a coach will run out of words and start repeating himself, whether he means to or not. I can see why some coaches would be like "blah blah blah" after a while.
It makes sense why coaches often get accused of "coach speak." Not saying it doesn't happen. But a certain level of repetition is inevitable. It's probably a good idea to expect that and to guard against being overly critical. This is not to give Cal a pass. Clearly he had gone past his 'expiration date.' But that is also sort of the point. Coaches should guard against this too, because media access is part of the job and part of the salary expectation.
When you watch the pregame and especially the postgame, you see how much effort and emotion Pope (and Cal early on) puts into explaining and describing the players and what's going on in the game. And he's accounting for any or every player who played minutes.
It's a lot of words. And there are only so many words in the English language to describe something. For example, a basketball player, or a game. And players come and go, and many of them have most of the same skills and games follow the same patterns.
Over a 35 game season, talking about players and games for 10-15 minutes, it's exhausting to come up with NEW ways to describe the same old things that happen. Multiply that by 10 years. That's 3500-5200 minutes. Now imagine that over a 25 year career. Eventually a coach will run out of words and start repeating himself, whether he means to or not. I can see why some coaches would be like "blah blah blah" after a while.
It makes sense why coaches often get accused of "coach speak." Not saying it doesn't happen. But a certain level of repetition is inevitable. It's probably a good idea to expect that and to guard against being overly critical. This is not to give Cal a pass. Clearly he had gone past his 'expiration date.' But that is also sort of the point. Coaches should guard against this too, because media access is part of the job and part of the salary expectation.
