Wicki Icky

I work with many young men who are ill prepared for college level work. It's very common for me to get guys who don't know where to place a period in a sentence, for example. Their reading levels are equally alarming. I often wonder how so many of them could have graduated from high school.

Thankfully this isn't true of every guy I have coached here. The range of academic aptitude and ability has been broad. The only common denominator between the ones who struggle most has been  (un)diagnosed learning issues--most notably Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and a range of cognitive issues. The ADHD guys are pretty easy to identify (whether it's diagnosed or not), but I have yet to really grasp the other learning issues.

Along the lines of these learning difficulties, it took several years for me to figure out how to teach guys offensive "sets" (i.e. plays). I never understood how I'd go over a particular play repeatedly only to see a player look totally lost weeks later. In some cases it was as if I had never covered the concepts at all. Eventually I learned not to teach more than two plays, and to use film as much as possible to reinforce certain aspects of the offense.

Some people chalk it up to stupidity. I just think some of these guys have never learned how to learn. They treat every new thing like a rubix cube because they have no sense of where to start, or how to grasp a concept. One guy, in particular, "Wiki" had a really hard time with plays and a rather choppy history here academically. I always suspected there was a learning challenge but never quite knew how to bring that up in conversation without offending him. Six years after enrolling here Wicki still didn't have enough credits to graduate. This is supposed to be a two-year school.

Wicki was a really bad student before joining the basketball team. In the three years prior to playing, he had taken ten classes and failed or received an "X" in five of them. After he started playing, however, Wicki only failed or withdrew from two out of fourteen classes. While his grades improved drastically, he was still on shaky ground academically. Five full-time semesters after enrolling, he still had yet to satisfy the English requirement to graduate. As a matter of fact during one of our last academic check-ins his academic deficiencies were brought to light again.

Wicki: I got a problem, Coach. You got a few minutes to talk?
Me: What's up?
Wicki: Man, my ex got me in trouble. I don't even know what's going to happen.
Me: How'd she get you in trouble?
Wicki: So, recently I had a six page paper for one of my classes and I asked her to help me with it.
Me: Did she not help you?
Wicki: She did, but I didn't realize she copied and pasted the whole paper from Wickipedia. I sent it to my Professor without proofreading it.