Coach Zorn Explains The Bowling Thing
Posted by Matt Terl on June 9, 2009 – 2:06 pm
So instead of an OTA today, Coach Zorn arranged for a team building exercise.
When I heard that this was happening, I had wild visions of Mike Williams doing trust leans onto a nervous group of teammates and Clinton Portis on a ropes course and other similarly stereotypical team-building events. This was not to be, which is probably for the best.
Instead, the team was issued matching white collared Redskins logo shirts, marched onto buses, and escorted to a nearby bowling alley for twenty frames of raucous team building. I figured Coach Zorn had a reason why bowling had been selected instead of, say, golf or paintball, and he did not disappoint.
“This is something where everybody could be in close proximity, we can see what everybody else is doing,” he said.
And does he believe that things like this work to improve camaraderie?“I think this absolutely helps with team unity,” Zorn said. “We’ve done it in different places, and it certainly is a team building gathering.” He looked over at two of the other members of his foursome, sitting near the scoring computer as they waited for the lanes to go live. “Even right now, Chris Cooley is asking Jaison Williams, a young player and a rookie, he’s asking him … ‘Who are you?’
“The thinking is,” he continued, “to get everybody to get with different guys. When we had our [bowling] captains — we had so many defensive captains and so many offensive captains — the first choice they had to make in the draft was the opposite side of the ball. So we could get, really, everybody together: different positions, different sides of the ball, get to know each other a little bit better.”
So how did you wind up on Cooley’s team? “I was picked by Chris Cooley. I’m not the captain, Chris Cooley’s our captain. We’ve got Jaison Williams and Hunter Smith, so that’s our group here.”
Choosing the head coach seemed like a savvy choice, and I said so.
“We’ll see,” Zorn said, and turned to go bowl.
As the games were wrapping up, I had a chance to ask Cooley about the wisdom of picking one’s head coach as one’s bowling partner.
“The way we picked the draft,” he said, “we had lottery picks. So there were 25 teams in the draft, and I was the 25th pick. It was set up that if you were offense you had to pick defense or a specialist in the first round — you couldn’t pick offense — so I took Hunter with the 25th pick. But then we turned around like a fantasy football draft, so I picked first in the second. And you had to take a coach in the second round, so why would you not take Z as your first pick in the draft?”
“Plus,” Cooley noted, “he’s pretty good. He bowled a 135 in the first game, he’s gonna bowl about a 150 here, and that’s solid.”
Still seemed like a strong tacticial decision to me.
UPDATE: Much, much more from Cooley on this on his blog.
Tags: bowling, Chris Cooley, ChrisCooley, Coach Zorn, CoachZorn
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