mrt144":3imaqzvy said:
Nah man, if you hold a mirror up to their impetuous folly, it'll get tiresome for them to explain their thrall-like nature with their phone. If they don't want to explain why it is so important to have this in lieu of practicing football, they always have the option of not utilizing their phone breaks.
What it takes is a coach's will to stick with this regimen to the point that players themselves don't want to make use of it because it comes with a ton of explaining as to why a player really needed to like a meme.
I hear ya, I am a total phone monkey who is constantly checking something - work email, twitter, various news outlets, etc etc. But if I had to explain every single interaction with my phone (and when I am pressed to do so by people around me) I find myself less willing to capitulate to it's hypnotic gaze.
I do a lot of training in my office and despite my nature, I insist on confiscating cell phones during trainings, mine included. I recognize a fault in myself with attention and it helps me stay on track when everyone else is on track. This is hard to impress upon dudes in their 20s when they don't have cognizance of how small things build on one another and lead to big things.
I'm all for having folks have decompression time at the office in the midst of a work day - but this ain't it. I know that a lot of you will laugh, but imagine if they spent that decompression time doing things like...playing a strategy game together, working on a building project like a shed for phone time, collaborate on writing something meaningful to the players, etc etc. There are so many ways to scratch this itch and cell phones are dead ends in holistic productive hierarchy building.
There's a few assumptions here:
1) A person can consistently tell when someone is disinterested/distracted and multiple coaches on your staff can do so while also working on a task like going over game film.
2) If you call someone out for being disinterested/distracted and it's because they want to check their phone, they'll fess up that it's because they want to check their phone. However, if you call someone out and they offer no explanation or a feasible lie for being distracted other than a desire to check their phone, then what?
3) If players can consistently be identified when they're distracted and they do admit it's because they want to check their phones, the positive impact of having a player tire of explaining why it's important to check their phone will outweigh any negative impact on other players/coaches who might tire of halting meetings and drills to make the player explain.
Maybe the Cardinals are overindulging their players and will continue to suck as they field a less disciplined and practiced team. On the other hand, maybe they did the math about how much time and effort it would take to address distractions from smart phones and determined it would take less time and effort to satisfy players' curiosities with more phone access. Ultimately, there's at least some merit to what they're doing. It'll be interesting to see if they have any issues because of this.