the trampoline
I was lying around tonight when a memory surfaced out of nowhere. An old friend's trampoline, back when I was a kid. It was rectangular, not round like the ones everybody has now, which is probably why the memory is so specific. I could still picture exactly where it sat in his yard.
I started tracing that memory back to figure out why he and I were even friends in the first place. Basketball. We were the same age, we played together, and that is a main reason our lives ever intersected.
Once I started pulling that thread, I could not stop. Another set of friends from middle and high school, church basketball, guys I still went on my senior trip with. Another set from high school hoops specifically. A group from football at Memphis. A smaller circle from my season in Miami. Others from my days playing adult league slow-pitch softball and basketball.
Sport built my entire network. Not just friendships either. Steve Zito, a parent of kids in my basketball league back in Tennessee, and at the time senior vice president of facilities and events for the Memphis Grizzlies and FedExForum, who was always appreciative of the work I did and later opened doors for me. I also volunteered for Conference USA tournaments through Eddie Cantler, the football trainer at Memphis when I worked there and later an assistant athletic director. Eddie has since passed away, but he was a real part of building that network for me. It was through Steve and Eddie together, while the three of us helped plan an NCAA tournament regional at FedExForum, that I met Byron Hatch, now the COO of the College Football Playoff. Small world, considering Steve was the one running the building the whole time. Ryan Ivey, Ziggy Seigfried, and Matt Wilson all came from my years at Memphis football. Matt and I worked side by side as equipment managers. He is now Indiana football's assistant athletic director for player personnel, essentially their general manager, and was just named the country's top personnel executive in his field. Ryan was a kicker at Memphis and Ziggy was a student trainer. We all spent several years together at Memphis and I am proud to see how sport has paved their paths. Ryan and Ziggy worked their way in the athletic director office in Division 1 college athletics. Every one of those relationships traces back to a ball, a field, or a locker room. Those relationships developed through sport carve a path through life. Even in my adult life, this holds. Even now, our closest friends, Collin and Dawn, were met through sport in Memphis, who we later followed to Florida.
A Force Multiplier
I do not think my story is unique. I think that is exactly the point. Most people who grew up playing sports could trace their own map the same way I just traced mine. A spouse met through a rec league. A best friend from a summer team. A network of coworkers who first knew you as teammates. We even see relationships developed as fans of sport.
Sport is a force multiplier for relationships. A good experience multiplies outward for the rest of a person's life, the way mine has. A bad one can run the other direction. Sometimes a person grows from that instead, but it is not guaranteed. That is exactly why the adult standing in the middle of it, the coach, matters as much as it does. A coach is shaping which direction the multiplier runs for every kid on that roster.
That is why we have to invest in the one constant in a young athlete's experience, which is the coach. We need to make their jobs easier. They need to feel supported. They need feedback. We pour into them so they can keep pouring into the kids. We check in on them. We give them a real pathway to get better, and we push them toward it, because we do not win by staying stagnant, and we should not expect our athletes to keep improving if the people leading them have stopped trying to.
What I Grew Up Believing
I was raised to believe you do not make excuses. You do what has to be done. You make mistakes, you move on. But there comes a point where simply getting by is not good enough anymore, and you have to find a way to get better. Life is a never-ending learning journey, and I think kids who grow up in sports actually want that from the adults leading them. They want a coach who teaches them how to live, not just how to win, and they learn to win the same way anyone learns anything, by making an honest attempt to improve every single day. That takes intention. It takes noticing when you have gone stagnant, and refusing to stay there.
Days can be stagnant right now, and if I am honest, part of that is the job itself. A lot of coaches get into education because it is the avenue to coaching, not because teaching alone was ever the dream. Strip the coaching away, and what is left is just a job, one I am good at, but not one that fills me up the same way being out on a field does.
I am infatuated with sport, and I think sport can be a tremendous distraction when it needs to be, in the best sense of that word. A coach counts down the days until practice and the start of a season. Players do the same thing. The offseason can be relaxing, but really it is a reset, a preparation for the next one. My television viewing between April and September is a little less exciting than the rest of the year for exactly that reason. College and pro football through college basketball is my favorite stretch of the calendar, and this summer's World Cup made the in-between months a lot better.
The Coaches We Are Losing
There is a generational shift happening that I do not think enough people are paying attention to. Veteran coaches are retiring, and the coaches replacing them do not carry the same accumulated knowledge, often through no fault of their own. Parents are far more involved, costs have risen, fundraising eats into actual coaching time, and year-round sports raise the stakes on everyone, and that doesn't even include what NIL could potentially add to the mix. Add a full-time job that has to get done before the coaching day even starts, and it becomes very easy to burn a good coach out.
When we lose a good coach, the student-athlete absorbs another transition on top of everything else. We have to find ways to keep the coaches who did it the right way, pushing them to keep learning instead of letting them plateau. Some will argue we do not have enough good coaches in the pipeline. Maybe so, but the better question might be what we are doing to help the average coaches become good coaches.
A middle school program and a high school program in the same sport can shape thirty kids a year between two coaching staffs. Over a four year stretch, that is well over a hundred kids passing through the hands of just two adults, in one sport, for one gender. Multiply that across every sport a school offers, and the number of lives running through a small handful of coaches gets very large, very fast.
We owe those kids everything we have. Relationships. Real support. A learning community instead of a silo. If you removed sports from my life entirely, I do not think I would recognize the person left standing there. We survive on connection, and few things manufacture connection as reliably and as widely as sport does. We owe it to these kids to give them every ounce we have, and when we notice ourselves running low, we owe it to the coaches carrying that weight to notice it too, and to show up for them the way we are asking them to show up for the kids.
These moments are flying by faster than any of us realize. I miss my high school basketball days. I miss the University of Memphis football days. I miss summer camp, the road trips, the camaraderie of a locker room, all of it tied directly to sport. Those days are gone for me now, but they are still ahead of every kid currently sitting in a locker room somewhere.
What are we, as the leaders standing in front of them, doing to build those same kinds of memories for the next generation?
— Kevin
