The Underdogs

This article from The New Yorker was shared with me by Jim Hendricks of Macris, Hendricks and Glascock, P.A. It’s a great article about how underdogs can come from behind and pull off the win. Check out the excerpt below:

“When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

Although it starts off with this story about basketball, the article also includes a really interesting breakdown of various “David and Goliath” situations, such as wars between unevenly matched opponents, and the strategies the “Davids” used to topple the “Goliaths”.