What Can You Learn from Football?

If you live in Canada, you are likely aware that this past weekend was the annual Grey Cup game in Calgary, the championship game of football for the Canadian Football League. And if you live in Saskatchewan, or are one of the many fans of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, you will be painfully aware of their near-victory, and the stunning loss with no time on the clock.

The painful story of the loss is that Saskatchewan took a dumb penalty on a last-second field goal attempt, which the opposition team had missed. The "too many men on the field" penalty allowed the team to re-kick, and they scored, putting them ahead by one point, and giving them the Grey Cup Championship. Across media of every type, fans and commentators are moaning about or rejoicing those last few seconds of the game. I think that the game was lost much earlier.

In piping and pipe band competitions, it is common knowledge that if you leave the door open in some way [note error, missed attack, saggy D, over-blown F/G, missed break] a fellow competitor—or maybe a judge—will walk through it, and you will lose. It doesn't always happen, but you approach the massed bands thinking it's quite likely.

So, when the Riders missed that field goal in the first quarter of play, I wondered if those missed three points would come back to bite them. And, after Montreal's last touchdown, and the missed two-point conversion, all the Riders needed was to move the ball for a couple of first downs, and they'd have won. They didn't. With the game in hand, they failed to get the yards they needed, and really [it has to be said]: Montreal deserved a shot at a last-minute field goal.

And even after all that, the Riders had the chance to win because the Montreal kicker shanked the ball [again] and missed, giving the Riders the last-minute win...until the penalty was called. My point is: that game could have been won by the Roughriders at several points before the last-second kick, and had they executed fully, Montreal would not have had the chance for that kick, or if they had, it would not have been enough points to win.

Contests, be they football or bagpipes, are about controlling all the things you can, as well as you can. When you make mistakes, you shouldn't expect to win. Don't blame this one on the 13th man, the game had slipped out of the Riders' grasp already.

This has two important "take aways" for piping. First, prepare for competition by focussing on all the things in your control, and not thinking about the things you can't control. And second, when things go wrong, think about the things that you could have done differently, rather than all the other stuff that might have affected the outcome.

Tough stuff. At the end of the day, the "near wins" are the hardest losses to take.

Lessons Learned in Time
Back when this photo was taken [April 1993] this was an excellent turnout at a band practice. This was actually the band's first competition performance. We took five pipers and played four [as the rules stated we should for a mini band event], and we played all the drummers we had. In those days, we were elated to be able to field a band, and over the years, we gradually built on that, adding players, real uniforms, better instuments, etc.

The band had quite a few years of relative stability, especially in the pipe section, and we could often count on a good turnout at band. When there wasn't one, we tended to not really practice, go for beer, or just twiddle the time away.

When the band fell on hard times a couple of years ago in terms of player numbers and experience, it would have been easy to walk away from routinely dismal practices, where the numbers were low, and the energy even lower.

Last winter, I made the decision to use every practice to play hard with the people who were there, and mostly we have stuck to that. Today, we had a number of regular people away on other things: provincial volleyball, family meeting, daughter's violin recital, etc. and it's always tempting to give in to the "oh whatever," and instead we played hard. An hour of detail work on chanters [with a few jokes and stories] and then an hour or two of piping: setting chanters, working with reeds and pipes, and finally playing through all the contest music with the small number of drummers.

The cool part was: it was a really good practice, and we had some very good sound, and made progress on several fronts. Too bad that there weren't more there, but today's practice is going to make a difference. And in the end, that's why we go in the first place. Well, and for the jokes and stories too.

Part of the excitement for me are recent changes we have made to the music. Can hardly wait to get the whole team playing it at Brandon.

Change of Seasons, Change of Bands
If you are a reader of online news for piping, drumming and pipe bands, you will be aware of the many changes that are happening in some of Canada's best-known pipe bands. This trend is also prevalent in Scotland, and last year as a member of ScottishPower, I was amazed at how much chatter there was about who was going where on the weekend of the Cowal Games. It was in the lead-up practices to Cowal, and in Dunoon, that people started broadly discussing changes to bands such as Shotts.

And of course, we have been there, too. Just last year at this time, we were facing the prospect of losses...members going to other bands, taking a break and of course some "not going to other bands" who really were, and even when asked outright, still chose to make excuses about work and money rather than just say they had other plans. Wow. Talk about burning your bridges. There's even a theme song for that story! ; )

But, a spring and early summer of hard work, gain some members, develop some players, and possibly the best band trip yet—results notwithstanding—and here we are in the fall, with a stable membership, a little money in the bank, and quite a bit of work and fun ahead of us.

The first band practice was Sunday, and we had a solid turnout, played some potential new material, and worked on some MSR details, and also talked about plans for the 2008-09 season. At this point we have one US trip on the books, some local performances, some spring contests, and we are developing plans for some exciting travel in 2009.

We capped it with a beer on the deck of O'Hanlon's Pub, on perhaps the last truly warm Sunday afternoon of the near-to-last day of summer. It was a great way to start. Having been through lots of uncertainty with the band, I can only wish "best of luck" to all those bands and players experiencing changes and uncertainty for the coming season. It's never easy getting a large group of people all focussed on the same things and going in the same direction. It's tough.

However, we seem to be in the fortunate position of having a semi-stable starting point, for the first time in three years. Feels pretty good.