Movies are awash with tales of the underdog. But Friday Night Lights deals with a very different theme: the pressure of expectation.
Set in the tiny Texas town of Odessa, that pressure is heaped upon the Permian Panthers High School football team. Here, football is a religion, and the boys are celebrities: posing for pictures, receiving free meals from local restaurants, interviewed by scores of local reporters.
But with celebrity comes a huge weight of expectation. College scouts scrutinise each player’s performance, even in training. Winning the State Championship is the only indicator of a successful season.
And for some, football success is the only outlet from a dreary life. “This is the only thing you’re ever gonna have,” former Permian star Charles Billingsley tells his son Don. “It carries you forever. You’ve got one year to make some memories son.”
The man charged with delivering those expectations is Coach Gary Gaines, played by Billy Bob Thornton. And like his players, Gaines is under intense pressure: his job depends on success, and the locals have no qualms about walking into his office and giving him advice.
But Gaines has some useful tricks up his sleeve when it comes to focusing his players…
Meeting expectations head on
Gaines understands the town’s expectations and meets them head on. “The expectations couldn’t be any higher,” he tells the media at the start of the season. “We will win State. We will win State.”
The one-word pitch
In the brilliant To Sell is Human, Dan Pink proposes six modern-day successors to the elevator pitch. These include the one-word pitch: a single word that encapsulates the direction of everything you’re trying to achieve (such as Barack Obama’s use of ‘Forward’ in his 2012 re-election campaign).
Gaines’s one-word pitch is ‘Perfect’. He uses it constantly throughout the season to focus his players’ minds on what they’re trying to achieve in everything they do.
Instilling a growth mindset
With a long season ahead, Gaines needs his team to improve rapidly and deal positively with setbacks. This becomes even more important when they lose star player Booby Miles to injury in the first game and, unable to recover their confidence, are thrashed in the second.
Gaines encourages a growth mindset, focusing his team on their performance and how they can improve, rather than on their results.
And his one-word pitch supports this. He could have chosen ‘success’, for example: but success is only an output of great performance, and is sometimes outside of your control.
In the scene below, he explains: “Being perfect is not about the scoreboard. It’s about being honest.”
Individual mentoring
Some individuals need extra help in dealing with high expectations. The pressure weighs particularly heavy on quarterback Mike Winchell, who’s torn between pursuing his own goals and looking after his sick mother.
In the scene below, Gaines pays Winchell a visit to help him focus. “People have to look after themselves, including you,” Gaines tells him. “If you decide to accept that, you’ll seriously fly son…”
The Founder tells the story of McDonalds: its origins as an innovative Californian fast-food restaurant and its transformation to global Read more
Even great leaders have very human failings. In Darkest Hour, Gary Oldman's Winston Churchill is irascible, insensitive and stubborn. But cometh the hour, Read more
It's hard to imagine two groups less likely to unite in the UK in the mid-1980s. On one hand the miners of Read more
We all have people in our organisations who don't receive the recognition they may deserve. The ones who work away in Read more
"I've been kicked off every team before I even got a chance to prove myself," laments Eddie Edwards in Eddie the Read more