IM79
Jolly Good Fellow
- Messages
- 434
wrote when Chris Petersen retired back in December. Here's one paragraph about Petersen that sounds awfully familiar to me:
"Boise’s rampaging success was an outlier off the field, too. Petersen never yelled at his players, and emphasized a team togetherness bordering on the hokey. He instituted a system encouraging players to bond off the field, almost universally referred to by players encountering it for the first time as “corny.” That’s the word, “corny,” a dad word indicating an almost pathological sincerity and simplicity at the same time. Petersen did all of the things dads really think they should do: banned phones during team dinners so players would talk to each other, took them on trips to play paintball, and made them quiz each other on personal details about their high schools, their hometowns. His concerns about players extended well past the football field. He didn’t chasten players for being obsessed with social media, or blame them for being millennials. He seemed genuinely worried about it, and about his players’ engagement with the world and issues far away from the football field. At a Washington team meeting, Petersen once asked his players how many of them knew what the Keystone XL pipeline was. (For the record: about half.)
Petersen’s corniness was deep, and like a lot of awkwardly sincere things repeated over time, it worked brilliantly."
"Boise’s rampaging success was an outlier off the field, too. Petersen never yelled at his players, and emphasized a team togetherness bordering on the hokey. He instituted a system encouraging players to bond off the field, almost universally referred to by players encountering it for the first time as “corny.” That’s the word, “corny,” a dad word indicating an almost pathological sincerity and simplicity at the same time. Petersen did all of the things dads really think they should do: banned phones during team dinners so players would talk to each other, took them on trips to play paintball, and made them quiz each other on personal details about their high schools, their hometowns. His concerns about players extended well past the football field. He didn’t chasten players for being obsessed with social media, or blame them for being millennials. He seemed genuinely worried about it, and about his players’ engagement with the world and issues far away from the football field. At a Washington team meeting, Petersen once asked his players how many of them knew what the Keystone XL pipeline was. (For the record: about half.)
Petersen’s corniness was deep, and like a lot of awkwardly sincere things repeated over time, it worked brilliantly."
