David vs Goliath

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“IT WAS REALLY RANDOM. I MEAN, MY FATHER HAD NEVER PLAYED BASKETBALL BEFORE.”


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-yearolds, 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 he would persuade the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans play basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would pass the ball in from the sidelines and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself.

A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. 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 had come 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.”




Vivek Ranadivé’s basketball team played in the National Junior Basketball seventh-and-eighth-grade division representing Redwood City. The girls practiced at Paye’s Place, a gym in nearby San Carlos. Because Ranadivé had never played basketball, he recruited a couple of experts to help him. The first was Roger Craig, a former professional athlete who worked for Ranadivé’s software company.* After Craig signed on, he recruited his daughter Rometra, who had played basketball in college. Rometra was the kind of person you assigned to guard your opponent’s best player in order to render her useless. The girls on the team loved Rometra. “She has always been like my big sister,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “It was so awesome to have her along.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the time allotted for the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out-of-bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually that’s not an issue, because teams don’t hang around to defend against the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not do that. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding in order to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played a more aggressive, highrisk strategy. They positioned themselves in front of their opponents to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t have anyone guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player.

“Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or else the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline in basketball requires a team to advance the ball across midcourt into its opponent’s end within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline and were able to make the inbounds pass in time, the girls would turn their attention to the second deadline. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle.

“When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot
better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

The Redwood City players would jump ahead 4–0, 6–0, 8–0, 12–0. One time they led 25–0. Because they typically got the ball underneath their opponent’s basket, they rarely had to attempt the low-percentage, long-range shots that require skill and practice. They shot layups. In one of the few games that Redwood City lost that year, only four of the team’s players showed up. They pressed anyway. Why not? They lost by only 3 points.

“What that defense did for us is that we could hide our weaknesses,” Rometra Craig said. “We could hide the fact that we didn’t have good outside shooters. We could hide the fact that we didn’t have the tallest lineup. Because as long as we played hard on defense, we were getting steals and getting easy layups. I was honest with the girls. I told them, ‘We’re not the best basketball team out there.’ But they understood their roles.” A twelve-year-old girl would go to war for Rometra. “They were awesome,” she said.

Lawrence attacked the Turks where they were weak—along the farthest, most deserted outposts of the railroad—and not where they were strong. Redwood City attacked the inbounds pass, the point in a game where a great team is as vulnerable as a weak one. David refused to engage Goliath in close quarters, where he would surely lose. He stood well back, using the full valley as his battlefield. The girls of Redwood City used the same tactic. They defended all ninety-four feet of the basketball court. The full-court press is legs, not arms. It supplants ability with effort. It is basketball for those who, like Lawrence’s Bedouin, are “quite unused to formal warfare, whose assets [are] movement, endurance, individual intelligence…courage.”

“It’s an exhausting strategy,” Roger Craig said. He and Ranadivé were in a conference room at Ranadivé’s software company, reminiscing about their dream season. Ranadivé was at the whiteboard, diagramming the intricacies of the Redwood City press. Craig was sitting at the table.

“My girls had to be more fit than the others,” Ranadivé said.

 “He used to make them run!” Craig said, nodding.

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.”

Ranadivé said “tired” with a note of approval in his voice. His father was a pilot who was jailed by the Indian government because he wouldn’t stop challenging the safety of the country’s planes. Ranadivé went to MIT after he saw a documentary on the school and decided that it was perfect for him. This was in the 1970s, when going abroad for undergraduate study required the Indian government to authorize the release of foreign currency, and Ranadivé camped outside the office of the governor of the Reserve Bank of India until he got his money. Ranadivé is slender and fine-boned, with a languorous walk and an air of imperturbability. But none of that should be mistaken for nonchalance. The Ranadivés are relentless.

He turned to Craig. “What was our cheer again?”

The two men thought for a moment, then shouted out happily, in unison: “One, two, three, attitude!”

The whole Redwood City philosophy was based on a willingness to try harder than anyone else.

“One time, some new girls joined the team,” Ranadivé said, “and so in the first practice I had, I was telling them, ‘Look, this is what we’re going to do,’ and I showed them. I said, ‘It’s all about attitude.’ And there was this one new girl on the team, and I was worried that she wouldn’t get the whole attitude thing. Then we did the cheer and she said, ‘No, no, it’s not one, two, three, attitude. It’s one, two, three, attitude, hah!’ ”—at which point Ranadivé and Craig burst out laughing.