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Losing games is never easy, but losing 13-straight games would have anyone, athlete or coach, plumbing the depths of professional despair.
Turning up week after week and throwing everything at your opponent, only to lose and suffer the disappointment of teammates, staff and fans is a torture some teams are bound to suffer.
The Canberra Capitals found themselves in exactly that miserable position last year, and it was hard to see how anything was going to shift.
But fast-forward 12 months, and they are the newly-crowned WNBL champions — finishing a dominant season with a 20-point victory over the Adelaide Lightning in the championship decider.
But how can a team that could barely win a game turn things around so dramatically, so quickly?
Canberra Capitals coach Paul Goriss said it started with some painful introspection.
"I actually sat back and thought of things that I could have done better to help the team," he said.
"You reflect and review your own performance and what needs to be done better.
"We wanted to make sure that didn't happen again, and we put things in place."
Those things worked sensationally well.
They turned a 13-game losing streak last season into a 12-game winning streak just one season later — denied a 14-game winning streak only by their controversial loss to the Lightning in the championship series.
The Capitals finished the season indisputably the best team in the WNBL, with a roster filled with some of the top talent in the country.
To get titles, recruit players who know how to win
As the Capitals' awful 2017-18 season dwindled to an end, Goriss' mind turned to what was most urgently missing in the side he was putting on the court.
It was big-game experience, more than anything else.
Goriss had a relatively empty roster to fill, and he set his sights on one player in particular — Opals superstar Kelsey Griffin.
Griffin knows big-game pressure — she has been named most valuable player now in three grand finals, and has three WNBL titles to her name.
"We made Kelsey Griffin our number one priority in free agency, to go after somebody that was a winner, that had been a championship player and was going to come in and provide the spark we needed to get the Canberra Capitals back to the top echelon of teams," he said.
"Kelsey Griffin was the start of the rebuild of our team."
He promised Griffin she would be the centrepiece of a strong squad, but that squad was still largely a figment of his imagination at the time.
"We were selling Kelsey on putting together a good team to build around her — and there were some days where we were going 'are we going to get a team together, who's going to sign?'"
But Goriss got the names he wanted — Griffin signed for the 2018-19 season, along with other big name players like Kelly Wilson, Marianna Tolo and Leilani Mitchell.
Wilson was partly lured to the side by the signing of Griffin, and said it was a decision she was very pleased she made.
"This is one of the hardest, most together teams I've been a part of," she said.
"I need to probably thank Kelsey Griffin and Paul Goriss for this, because they really convinced me to make that move to Canberra."
The team had been rebuilt from the ground up, with promising talent from earlier seasons suddenly playing under some of the biggest names in Australian women's basketball.
It was not all easy — many were battling long-running injury challenges, and fitness posed a serious risk heading into the new season.
But Goriss said the potential was clear.
"We really started to think this could be a championship team. This could be a championship-calibre team," he said.
Talent is one thing, but winning is another
Goriss put enormous faith in that core group of senior players, not just to turn up and play well on the court, but to lead the side.
And that meant adjusting his role accordingly.
"We had more veteran leadership, and a lot of players with championship experience," he said.
"So I had to make sure I listened, and let them have a voice as to how the process was going, how we were going to play, what our style of play was going to be."
That included everything from how they trained, when they trained, when they went to the gym and how they recovered each week.
They sat down at the start of the season and drew up their key goals for the year to come. Last season's disappointments were hardly a consideration.
"This team wanted to win a WNBL championship, there was nothing else other than that was the main goal we wanted to achieve," he said.
A significant focus was placed on the character and mental strength of the side, its ability to hold itself under pressure, identify its flaws and tackle them together.
It paid dividends, as what were narrow defeats a season earlier became close-run wins.
Goriss said they worked hard to build a team culture that would deliver the primary goal they had in mind.
"If we are going to be a team, we've got to be able to get along," he said.
"There's going to be people with different personalities, but if we get to know each other, and we care about it each other and there's a genuine care for each other, then when things get tough or things are great, we're all going to be in it together.
"It's not a very talented basketball team, it's people with great characters who have genuine care for each other on and off the court."
Topics: basketball, sport, sports-organisations, wnbl, canberra-2600, australia, act
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