REFLECTION
My daughter, Vivi, had a big travel volleyball tournament recently. She’s 13 years old. It’s that tricky age where kids start becoming mini-adults and sports stops being something you sign up for to fill their activities calendar. The competition is real. The games matter.
Thirteen year olds are curious and smart. The ones who’ve been playing a long time have accumulated a lot of knowledge about their sport, and they know what they’re most confident doing and where they feel most advanced. As a consequence, they have a strong sense for how they fit into the greater team picture.
The tricky part comes when their vision of themselves doesn’t fit with where their team is at the moment, and the coaches ask them to do something outside their comfort zone. Then, when a game or a tournament doesn’t turn out the way they thought it would, it can produce a lot of big emotions: frustration, doubt, self-pity.
This volleyball tournament didn’t go the way Vivi saw it going in her mind, and I could see it affecting her in real time and then on the car ride home. I recognized the seeds of the kind of self-destructive habits I had at Michigan: negative self-talk, blame-shifting, excuse-making, that kind of thing.
Vivi’s not like that, by nature. She’s a badass and a fierce competitor. But she’s also 13, not yet in high school, and like that young kid in the video, it can be easy to get derailed when things aren’t going the way you envisioned. You start thinking too much about the opportunities you’re not getting or the decisions you didn’t like. Sometimes, you become so preoccupied with negative things beyond your control, that you find yourself physically, mentally, and emotionally unprepared right at the moment an opportunity to perform finally arrives. And that’s the worst feeling.
LESSON
My dad always used to tell me, “all you can do is the best you can do with the opportunities that are presented before you.” I’ve tried to share that message with all my kids and reinforce it with the lessons Greg Harden taught me at Michigan thirty years ago: don’t worry about the things you can’t control, don’t complain about the things you didn’t get. Instead, make the most out of the opportunities you do get. Even if it’s one inning, or three practice reps, or a healthy scratch.
This lesson is incredibly important, for kids in particular, because for the vast majority of us, the gratification and satisfaction we seek from sports won’t come from external sources like the scoreboard or the stat sheet or our bank balance.
You’re not always going to win. Nor should you always win. It’s fair and necessary that the other team wins. That’s life. You’re not always going to play well, that’s not the reality of sports. And you’re probably not gonna go pro, that’s reality for 99.9% of young athletes. So you have to find the joy of sports internally and make the most of the lessons that sports teaches you—from the growth that comes through effort, to the resilience that develops with commitment, to the camaraderie that emerges from shared experiences with teammates.
Like I mentioned in my commencement speech at Georgetown a couple weeks ago, when I got drafted nobody expected great things from me. The same was true at Michigan in the beginning. The first 2+ years there was no expectation from anybody that I would even see the field. If I wanted to ensure that I found fulfillment from my experience as a member of the New England Patriots or the Michigan Wolverines, it was going to be by maximizing the reps I did get and by being a great teammate—bringing enthusiasm, effort and leadership to all the other moments on the sideline and off the field that fill out a season of football.
All of this is easier said than done. Especially for our kids, who are growing up in a me-driven social media culture where the main questions being asked are:
“How does this make me look?”
“How do I get as many people as possible to pay attention to me?”
“How is this good for me?”
Then on top of all that, there are the helicopter moms and the snow-plow dads who hover and clear away obstacles (like accountability and responsibility) to protect their kids from the realities of the world. When they lose, or don’t get to play as much as they wanted, we tell our kids it’s not their fault, it’s the coach’s fault, it’s the other parents’ fault. It’s a total blame game.
The problem is, when we do this, it compounds our kids’ lack of preparedness for when their number is called, because instead of being focused on what they can do or how they can best contribute to the team, they’re fixated on what everyone else has been doing to or against them. They’re externally “me”-focused instead of internally “me”-focused.
APPLICATION
Here’s the thing: what do you gain by being a hater? Where is the pathway to personal growth in the denigration of someone else? What do we really think our kids are going to get from talking bad about other people or complaining about situations that are out of their control? Ask yourself, especially if you’ve been known to make people feel small in order to make yourself feel big: what actual benefit am I receiving from this kind of behavior? As they say in recovery, it’s like drinking poison and expecting the other person to get sick.
The last thing I want for Vivi is to step onto the court and be thinking about her coach’s decisions, or the girl playing a position she was hoping to play. I want her to be focused on her job, on the next play. I want her to be prepared to lift her teammates up if they make a mistake, and to take responsibility if she’s the one who makes a mistake, but then to brush it off and lock in with the intention of executing to the best of her ability.
I want this for her and her teammates, not just because it’s the right way to play, but because it’s an amazing feeling to be locked in with your teammates. Persevering together through small failures and executing on the things you’ve learned from those failures is how you develop confidence—in yourself and each other. It’s something you can carry with you through high school, college, all the way into the workforce.
But first you need to ask yourself: am I a good teammate? Do I support others when they do well, or is it all about me? Gandhi believed that if we could change ourselves, the world could also change, because we mirror the world. If you want people to cheer for you, be the kind of person who cheers for other people. If you want them to care about you, you should care about them. If you want to win and have your victories celebrated, you must do the same for others even when their victory comes at your expense.
This is how you build a winning team, in all aspects of life. By putting the unit ahead of yourself. By doing the best you can with whatever opportunities you get to contribute to the team. You might think you can do more, or that you’re better than someone else, or that you’d do better in a different capacity—and you might be right! But the chance to show that is less likely to come if you’re not prepared to do what’s asked of you right now because you’re thinking about yourself.
When you make the most of your opportunities, you are making the kind of contributions that define a winning attitude and produce winning teams. My main motivation playing sports was to gain the respect of my teammates and coaches. There was no better way to do that than bringing an optimistic, energetic, supportive attitude to the locker room every day. I found a tremendous amount of satisfaction and gratification in that.
Think about the great, impactful teammates you’ve had in life. The ones who made your experience a joy in the moment and a positive memory in the years after. I bet you’re not thinking about the guy with the most talent. Or the girl who scored the most goals. It’s not the kid who the coaches always seemed to be focused on. No, I bet it’s a person who was always there, bringing everybody up in the tough times, keeping everybody humble through the winning times. It’s a person who did their job, who took advantage of whatever opportunities were presented to them, even if it was as a late inning replacement with a chance to flash the leather.
I really hope the young kid in that video I mentioned at the beginning listens to his mom. I hope he takes the lessons she’s teaching him, not just into the dugout with him for the next game, but into school, into his career, and into his relationships for the rest of his life. It will make him a better player, a better teammate, and a better man.
Great job, Mom!
