Every autumn, an announcement is published in the community newspaper and a photocopied version is pinned up on the local high school bulletin boards. “Durham Eclipse Girls Under 18 Rep basketball team tryouts, Monday, October 1 at 6 pm, other dates to be announced. Eastdale CVI Oshawa. All players welcome.”

This terse invitation is both the kick start to a new basketball season and the activation of a roller coaster of emotions. Tryouts are a seething bundle of anticipation, physical exertion, excitement and fear that takes on a distinct existence until the team is selected. The tryout is part American Idol, part entrance exam, and expectation and disappointment are its colours. Stress and nervous energy are the tryout rocket fuel.

In theory, a tryout is a clean slate for both the athletes and the coaches of the prospective team. Any frustrations or disappointments that lingered from the season past are intended to be shed like snakeskin on the rough rocks of the new selection process. In the tryout environment, there is said to be a pure distillation of talent – or so the theory goes.

Tryouts are in fact as flawed as any other human endeavor as coaches seek to pick their team for the next six or seven months of competition on the basis of a subjective assessments of jump shots, footwork and personalities. The stress of the event distorts the true appearance of our rep team contenders, temporarily altering their images like the funhouse mirrors on a carnival midway. No matter how tough minded or determined, no matter how often they might remind themselves of the athlete mantra, ‘be yourself, play your game,’ the player feels a compulsion to seek to please the coaches and not be themselves.

We have tryouts in sport, it seems, because no one will do things differently. In every day life, when must a person know the answer to a question at a particular instant, as one does in an equally artificial final examination, or in a job interview? In a real sporting environment, when must an athlete perform to a series of barked sideline instructions, instead of play within the flow of competition?

I hate tryouts.

The players at a tryout neatly separate into strata like cream from milk to form five distinct groups:

The Veteran

She knows that the tryout is a contrivance. She is wonderfully perceptive because she knows her place in both her coaches’ eyes and the complex social and athletic hierarchy that is a girls’ basketball team. She plays along with the tryout concept, works hard and invariably makes the team year after year. Stress does not unduly trouble the Veteran; it is a part of her landscape.

The Waverer

This is a player who is unsure of their basketball future. She likes the game well enough but lacks great commitment because she is pulled in a number of directions - school, a part-time job, boys, and the all-embracing social life. Such players are difficult to assess in the tryout format.

The Rookie

These are players who are previously unknown to the coaches, as they have answered the tryout advertisement. These players approach the tryout with a potent and often volatile mixture of intensity and trepidation; these players feel significant stress to perform. The toughest task for a coach in assessing these players is determining if their high energy is a constant or whether it is artificially stimulated by the tryout environment.

The Cheerfuls

This type of player tries out because they are not afraid to fail. They may have been passed over in other years, and they know where they stand on the collective talent scale. They are honest about themselves, as they have modest expectations, hoping to catch a break. Theirs is usually a maximum effort that fronts marginal talent; they do all they are asked with a smile on their faces. These are my favorite tryout players; stress is something they know and that they accept.

The Entitled

This is a very small group, who presume their place on the team and who are often very bitterly disappointed when the final roster is announced. They possess a belief in their abilities that is not always supported by their physical skills. These players are often closely tied to a parent who is persistent and hovers as distracting as a helicopter over the player’s every move. The stress of the tryout for this player is actually the stress imposed upon them through parental expectation. If this player is passed over, the parent takes the decision as a personal affront; the player feels that they have failed the parent, not themselves. This group is the foundation of the coaching belief that a dream team would be one recruited from an orphanage.

Basketball tryouts are never as objective or as predictable as a chemical equation, nor can they be. My late father believed that benevolent despotism was the best form of government because that is how every successful athletic team is run – he was right. We coaches do not select the best players – we select the best team to create what we perceive to be the best fit of players and coaches. Teams ultimately must get along together, whether they are formed from 16 year old girls in Ontario or in an NBA locker room.

The team selected from a tryout is born out of tension, angst and exhilaration. After the final workout and the coaches have made their selections, everyone moves forward. There are tears of both relief and disappointment at age 16. The selected players embark upon their season and its challenges, while those not chosen will regroup – except for the parents of the Entitled, such cuts rarely leave a permanent scar.

Stress in Life and Sport

Is the stress of this process worth it to the young women who participate? I do not subscribe to the theories of good stress / bad stress – stress is, and it can and should never be avoided. Stress will be encountered at every age and in every place. It must be accepted and incorporated into everything we do.

‘A leading Western Canadian manufacturer seeks a bright, personable coordinator to assist in the establishment of an Ontario marketing presence for our company. The ideal candidate will have relevant post secondary education and three years experience in a similar environment. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we offer an attractive compensation and benefits package to the successful applicant. Please send your expression of interest and c.v. to…’

This is the corporate tryout notice – it places precisely the same pressures on a prospective job applicant as do the Durham Eclipse upon their aspiring Under 18 basketball players. Job applications and the resulting interview process are as contrived and as stressful as any competition to make an athletic team, with one distinction – in sports, you can see your rivals.

Frequent readers of this ACQYR Life and Sport column know my bedrock principle – sport is not a proving ground or a practice facility for life lessons, sport is life. The same interchangeable themes work themselves through every circumstance, athletic and academic, employment and personal. The stress created by competition is one of the most profound and the most emphatic of these life elements. A job interview is as artificial a tool to determine employability as the sports tryout is a mechanism to select a team – but it is what we have to work with, warts and all. The lessons learned on the hardwood about the all pervasive existence of stress are no different than those from the boardroom. Stress is as natural and as important as breathing.