How David Beats Goliath
I think it's pretty safe to say that if I like a long article to read it all the way through, it's probably a pretty darn good article. The New Yorker's latest article on being an underdog is a great read. takes a lot of different stories: a 12 year old girls basketball team, to Lawrence of Arabia (the person, not the movie), and a naval battle war game and ties it all together.
The article begins with a basketball coach who has never coached basketball with a team of mostly unskilled girls in which a majority of them had never played on a team.
The article begins with a basketball coach who has never coached basketball with a team of mostly unskilled girls in which a majority of them had never played on a team.
We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”And so in the end it's an interesting article about people taking things in which the odds are stacked against them and using their unconventional tactics to succeed.
The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time, they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to take low-percentage, long-range shots that required skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by three points.