Essay #1
Blue Chips
The movie I chose to write about is a basketball movie from the 90’s called Blue Chips. It is one of my favorite movies of all time about a basketball coach, who has the accolades of winning national championships but his team has been struggling lately. More and more pressure is coming from the boosters and the university to win more games, and the coach is being coerced into cheating. He is being coerced into illegally recruiting big name players for his program for the upcoming season to win more games. The coach who is an honest man really refuses to do this and is unbelievably against it at first. He eventually gives in and cheats but under the pressure of it weighing on his mind the coach while they are winning admits to it in a press conference citing his pure love for the game and coaching as the reason he coaches, and not just being the greatest coach of all time. There are many of the psychological elements which we have learned throughout the whole movie. The first element which we have been learning about that is displayed in the movie is the player to coach dynamic. In one of the first scenes the coach is in the locker room at halftime facing a huge deficit as his team is just being outmatched. The coach is throwing a tantrum trying to get his team fired up. He is trying to motivate his team to play better, to dig deep and play through the losing. At one point he is talking about how he knows the other team is better, that they have better players. What the coach uses is instructional feedback, he is trying to tell them how to execute, and what they need to do to keep it closer and to play to the best of their ability. The next scene is their practice where the coach is seen interacting with the kids in a fatherly way. The scene shows that the kids trust the coach, and that the coach does anything he can for them on and off the court and the true love from player to coach and vice versa. They are shooting free throws and when they miss a certain amount they are forced to run which is an example of positive punishment. Those are some of the examples between coaches and players from the movie. In the movie the coach’s name is Pete Bell. From what the movie shows, coach is probably the greatest example of an A personality man. Pete Bell is a hard driving coach that is always thinking about his team and how to make them better. He is an unbelievable workaholic so much, that his wife left him because he was so focused on it. He is also always on the go, always coaching, thinking about the team and watching game film even when he is supposed to be having down time. His ex-wife is always talking about his heart and how he needs to relax and it shows how he is always moving. Coach Pete Bell is the perfect example of somebody with a type A personality. When the coach is going through the recruiting process of the movie it shows some very different personalities. One of the kids he recruits is named Ricky Roe and is from a farm. When the coach is recruiting him Ricky