Today in Failed Coaching Gimmicks: Rivers in Africa Can Be Quite Dangerous

Coaching gimmicks range from the inane to the quasi-inspirational. Jack Del Rio kept an axe in the Jacksonville locker room to symbolize “chopping wood,” and ended up with a player with an axe wound to the foot. George Allen, according to Marv Levy, once veered off wildly from a motivational speech into a 40-minute tirade about the evils of snow tires. And Dave Wannstedt recently put mouse traps around the football offices at Pitt to remind the team that an upcoming game with Syracuse was a “trap” game. (To be fair, that one worked, as Pitt beat a woeful but spunky Syracuse team.)↵↵If you’re looking for a new low in counterproductive motivational techniques, you have it courtesy of Zimbabwean second division soccer and the Midland Portland Cement team. ↵

↵↵⇥ The Chronicle quoted unnamed sources as saying about 16 players from second division side Midland Portland Cement were told to swim in the Zambezi river in the resort town of Victoria Falls ahead of a soccer match on Sunday. “The technical team told every player to get into the river so that they could be cleansed of bad spirits,” it said.↵⇥↵⇥The paper quoted local police commander Peter Rodzi as saying that after the swim, the other players had noticed that one of the team was missing.↵⇥

↵↵Missing could mean any number of unpleasant things, all of which will kill you: drowning, eaten by a crocodile, or even killed by a hippo, which if you’ll remember is officially the most man-killing-est animal in Africa. So as bad as you boss’ motivational posters may be, as terrible as your coach’s hackneyed, cliched gameday speech was, as awful as the sermon may have been on Sunday, please bear this in mind: none of them actually killed you, so you’ve got that going for you.↵