Don’t these rings look incredible? Maybe you have one. Maybe you’ve got a few. Maybe you
don’t, but you wish you did. I’ve been fortunate enough to be around two state title winning teams, once as an assistant coach in 2001, and in 2007 in an admin/support role. Anyhow, I’ve got two rings. It would have been awesome to have a chance to have been a champion as an athlete, but those days are long gone. Way gone.
A few weeks back, a Coach sent me a link to this video. The clip is an 18 minute speech from Coach John Wooden, 99 years old, arguably the greatest winner in the history of coaching. He’s saying crazy things like, “you can outscore an opponent and lose”, “you can be outscored and win”, and things like that. If you watch the video you’ll see what I mean. He also spoke of the definition of success that he formulated early in his career. It reads like this:
Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.
What Coach Wooden is talking about is something that I have been chasing for a long time. Peace of mind. Self-satisfaction. Who wouldn’t want those things? And if we have those things as a result of the way we go about our lives, I have a feeling that there’s really very little that we would ever lack. When I was a brand new Coach, I had a mentor who impressed upon our staff that we would not judge ourselves by the scoreboard. That football was a tool for developing godly men. I bought into that…for the most part. Because in December of 2001, when the clock hit zero and the scoreboard said 21-17 and we were the 5A state champions, I was definitely judging myself and our team by that scoreboard. Why not, right? We had achieved the ultimate. We were the state champions. You can’t do better than that.
Or can you? There was a quote in the paper the next day from our Head Coach. Bill was quoted as saying something about how he would need to go back and look at the film to try and see why we had been shut out in the second half. (We’d been up 21-3 at half time and held on to win.) Most of us gave him a lot of grief for that. To me, he was being an over-obsessive perfectionist who was struggling to enjoy this ultimate accomplishment.
Eight years later, I finally get it. Bill’s goal for himself and for our team was to get better every day. To give our best effort and become the best we could be. He was thrilled to win a championship along the way, but strange as it sounds, that was not the ultimate. It’s a pretty good measuring stick to be sure. It’s a whole lot of fun. But it is not the ultimate. The ultimate success is found in doing our best to become the best we are capable of becoming.
Some will read this and say that kind of talk is soft. Whatever. I would love to hear how we can be more likely to win games and titles than by becoming the best we’re capable of becoming. There’s no way.