C's Story
The Struggle in the Age of Specialization
Sports: My Anti-Bully
The Struggle in the Age of Specialization
Sports: My Anti-Bully
As coach of our travel softball team, AO1, my daily routine to get to practice involved picking up four 13 year old girls and driving them an hour, one way. When I tell people that, I get a lot of "bless your heart" or "you poor guy." To be honest, this drive has been one of the best things I have in my life. It's become a bit of a ministry for me where we discuss a lot of life. Obviously, I haven't seen it all, but I've seen a lot and I have a lot of life experience and I try to give some of that away.
One of the harder conversations that I've had is one that I have been harboring deep inside for a very long time despite being their coach who wants them not only to exceed but to excel. It was a pretty simple one and one that a vast majority of people would see as common sense to the point of being superfluous.
Do not let sports define who you are. Be a well-rounded individual.
Most people certainly understand this because they aren't playing sports, anymore or sports were never their focus. Some of you are going to say that this is counter-intuitive to say to girls who want to play sports at the highest level. Some of you may say that this is actually counter-productive to helping them harness that obsessive need to meet those goals.
We live in a society that does not believe in mediocrity and we obsessively celebrate those that reach greatness. Of course, the problem is that 99.99% of us live in mediocrity and that mediocrity isn't a bad thing. For the most part, we see the greatness in what these people do and achieve but we do not understand the risks or prices they paid to achieve them. Most people won't accept those risks or put in the work, but for the rest it's simply a matter of life situations being in conflicting paths with our desires OR not understanding where our greatness lies.
It is easy for most of us to see the path of greatness for some of our greatest athletes but the story of greatness and the prices paid for the greatest minds of our time are the very same. Whether it is Steve Jobs or Tom Brady, everything aligned just perfectly and yet there are still hefty prices to be paid that, frankly, 99.99% of people aren't will to pay. And, understand that we are discussing people who were gifted great minds and great abilities to begin with. Face it, most of us get neither.
The hardest thing to tell these girls is that one day, sooner rather than later, they WILL play their last softball game and that's where life REALLY begins. Will they be prepared for it or will softball have defined them to the point that they don't know who they are outside of the diamond?
I can speak from experience on this subject, which is why it mattered so much to me. For every Tom Brady, there are thousands, if not millions of Best5Zachs. Somewhere along the line, I chose my obsession to be sports. That's where I would make my mark of greatness. I didn't think of it in those terms, of course. But certainly being a college football player was a goal I had early in high school. My path, largely, had zero chance because of things out of my control, specifically my genetics, which decided before I was even born that I would never be taller than five-foot-three.
That didn't stop me. I had made this decision because I allowed sports to define me, but not because of what happened on the field, but how I reacted to things off the field. We humans take the path of least resistance most of the time. So, two weeks into my freshman year in Spanish I, when I completed reading a paragraph in Spanish (very poorly), a girl in the back of the room yelled "NERD!" and caused everyone to laugh at me, I decided that I would not be a nerd. I would push myself as far from being a nerd as possible. If people didn't like nerds, they had to love an athlete.
I gave up music. I gave up trying to be a good student. I never pursued Honor Society or any other clubs. For the most part, I gave up relationships outside of sports, entirely. For the better part of the next four years, I spent a quarter of my school day (that would be one of the four periods) working out in PE. The rest of the time, I kept my head down, looking forward to practice. I played three sports in high school, so my afternoons and even weekends were dominated by sports. The rest of the time was just filler.
The only real relationships outside of sports I had for most of high school came from my youth group at Church. I was basically the only kid that didn't attend the local private school, which made me a bit of an outsider, but I still fit in with them really well despite going to another school and being younger than all of them. Sunday was the only day I wasn't doing sports, typically, so it was the only time I had to make relationships. And, frankly, I wasn't very good at that because sports was the only thing I really knew anything about and the only real thing of value I possessed.
Two things happened when I became an upperclassman. One, the kids in my youth group graduated and went to college. For the most part, I never had any relationship with any of them afterwards, something that still bothers me to my core and I've only recently opened up about to people other than my wife. For a very long time, I harbored a grudge for the feeling of abandonment. I felt like I had put effort into relationships, forsaking those at school, for people that didn't appreciate it. I realize now that they were not entirely to blame for this. I had cornered myself.
The second thing that happened was that when I attempted to build relationships at school, I was appalled to how many people didn't care that I was a three-sport athlete. Most of these kids already had groups of friends, with whom they had been hanging out with during the week and weekends and, try as I might, I couldn't identify with them.
One day in May of 2001, I played my last game. Now what? I was unprepared for college, both educationally and emotionally because I had focused my energy for four years into something almost obsessively.
Now, I don't want people thinking this is some emotionally-charged post about poor me. Everything was ok. I did have friends and a lot of fun. Truth be told, it wasn't until I was an adult that I even knew this had happened to me. Would I have given up sports if I had known it would never take me anywhere? Absolutely not. What I would have changed was my focus on things off the field. School wouldn't have been a means to an ends. I would have been more interactive and involved. I'd have done a much better job and making friends outside of sports. I would have made myself a more well-rounded person. After all, these are the things that mattered for the next 20 years.
As I am telling this to these girls, there are a couple of stipulations. Yes, I ended up getting a great education and a terrific job. It's hard to complain about being a NASA engineer. But, I point out that a lot of this happened because of the pieces of the path laid out before me by factors I didn't control and while I am lucky and happy to be here, what would have happened if I had focused more on education and less on sports? I gave up three years of my life in college to struggling to pass classes because I had no work ethic in studying because I had built such a work ethic in sports and only on the field.
When sports were done, I filled that void with what I had been missing: having fun and making friends. I lost a free ride scholarship. I had a terrible relationship with my parents because of my college grades. I nearly gave up and dropped out multiple times. In the end, I had the work ethic to be great at something, but instead of choosing to be a great student and become an elite engineer, I had chosen sports. That choice to focus on a single thing, the wrong thing, set me back years and likely cost me the ability to be a great engineer, which I was far more destined to be rather than an elite athlete.
Kids need clubs. They need jobs. They need a lot of life experiences, especially in high school, to prepare them for the rest of their lives. Sports alone don't do that. Everyone has some sort of greatness in them but so few ever find what that is. Without life experiences, how will you ever know. Playing sports wasn't what I was meant to be great out. Engineering probably isn't either. Parenting? I hope so. Secretly, I've wondered if it's coaching. I won't know unless I keep trying things with the focus on being great.
Is that a tough sell to a car full of girls who love the game? Was it what they expected to hear from the guy they only see on the field, who pushes them to excel? Almost certainly. But it is something they need to hear and not only from me, but from their parents. I am not saying not to push them or support them to be their very best. I am simply saying that so few of us find that path and that preparing them for life outside of sports, to be well-rounded, will serve them well in their life. Eventually we all play that last game and what happens next is what defines us.
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