A youth sports team provides the unique opportunity to have a group of adolescents sit together—boys, no less—look each other in the eye, and discuss some of life’s most important issues, all from a place of trust. It’s actually quite rare to find such a setting in any walk of life. And there’s an added bonus: this group walks out of the room with the chance to apply these ideas, to live them together, allowing the ideas to manifest through action.
Our water polo team recently completed a grueling, physically taxing pre-season. Referred to as “Hell Week” by many—though, we employ the more PC “Heck Week”—this group of young men repeatedly pushed themselves physically, literally to the point of failure, only to then get up and do it again. The conditioning base we establish during this week is certainly important and directly relevant to our team’s hopeful success, but there’s a mental through-line that runs much deeper. I don’t just mean the mentality of knowing you achieved something together, overcame obstacles, etc., though this is all very important. But, in addition, every year we read a number of non-sports-related articles, differing each year (though I have my favorites) as a way to both broaden our vision and entrench our foundation of trust.
This year we read a recent New York Times Op-Ed, “Love People, Not Pleasure,” which I found a particularly interesting read while I enjoyed the waning weeks of summer vacation preceding Heck Week. The article covered a range of topics, some of which had obvious relevance to a team setting such as the contrast between pursuing goals motivated intrinsically and extrinsically. It also explored other topics not typically related to the sporting endeavor such as the evolutionary hard-wiring of humans framing various paradoxes of the human condition, along with a smattering of historical references (the Buddha, the Bible, the Dalai Lama) and even current-day issues such as the Facebook phenomenon and reality television.
That’s all well and good—thought provoking, as an article opposite-the-editorial page should be. But it wasn’t this particular author’s ideas that were important. And this was not an English classroom with the goal of deconstructing the writing. More importantly, it provided a chance for a group of young men, committed to the singular team goal—“Be Your Best”—to take a step back from the grind of pre-season training and reflect on the foundation upon which all that we do together is built.
With all the players having read the article over the week, we began the hour together in groups of two, discussing the article’s relevance in our lives. We then switched to new partners before reconvening as a team.
The group conversation began with one player, a junior, expressing a concern with the article, suggesting that attempting to capture a universal quest for happiness immediately falls short given individual tastes and predilections. From here began the richness of the conversation. Another player disagreed, respectfully, suggesting that these differences were only such in terms of specifics but not as a general class: that while we do each have different tastes, within this there’s an underlying consensus regarding what leads to happiness.
My aim here is not to provide a transcript of the discussion, but instead, to highlight something much loftier. In sport, one typically learns of a virtue—teamwork, for example—which then applies to non-sporting life. But there’s also the opportunity to flip the causal arrow: to utilize the platform of a trusting team environment as a catalyst for discussing profound non-sporting issues only to then apply them to one’s sporting experience.
So, after our initial back-and-forth about the root of happiness, another player shifted the conversation to the importance of relationships. Music to a coach’s ears, as what I want for this team, maybe more than anything else, is that they develop and nurture their relationships with their teammates. This alone explains why good teams with players who trust each other often beat more skilled all-star teams thrown together yet lacking any sense of interpersonal relationships.
From here, the conversation moved to a focus on life-balance, something numerous players suggested as one of their bigger struggles, especially living in the hypercompetitive Silicon Valley. First, there is the balance of contentment and ambition: how we can truly be content yet also strive for excellence. In addition, how we balance the quest to satiate biologically-rooted base desires—what one player captured by way of his strong desire for Oreo cookie milkshakes—with what we know provides a deeper sense of fulfillment. And, lastly, how we balance the pressures and values imparted by society with our own values and the values held by our families, school, and other institutions.
The mere asking and framing of these questions by the athletes was impressive enough. That they maintained the self-awareness and consciousness of such issues I considered a success. The entire team of 19 student-athletes worked through this together, without much input from me along the way. The lone varsity-level freshman shared with the seasoned senior, and the nationally recruited center shared with the less experienced third-string sophomore. It was a subtle reminder to all of us that we are all in this together, as equals, and as teammates. And they worked beyond the mere sharing of ideas—only the half-witted philosopher asks questions and then walks away, as though his job is done. This is where the real application to our own team’s journey came into play.
As one player recognized, we value a deeper sense of fulfillment over satisfying our more shallow, Oreo-milkshake desires because, in part, anyone can do that. It’s easy to drink milkshakes. Deeper fulfillment requires that we go above and beyond, and do what isn’t only what comes easy.
In addition, as another player offered, while society certainly does push vacuous objectives on us in a convincing manner, we can create our own “little society,” to borrow his term. “Culture,” to reframe it. Our own little society—our team—can celebrate what we know to be virtuous and important and in that way, self-perpetuate, much in the way youth sports advocate Positive Coaching Alliance urges coaches to define their culture, “The way we do things here.”
And so, from this brief little snapshot, you can start to envision the impact this hour had on this group of young men. Following the discussion, I had them re-connect in smaller groups to directly apply all of these big ideas to our team in our upcoming season. Some of the connections are likely obvious, such as developing intrinsically motivated goals which are process-oriented and internally driven. As for the others, I’ll leave this for the reader to imagine.
No doubt, much of what we revere in youth sports are the values imparted to the lives of the athletes. Sport teaches. But sport also puts its participants in a unique position to talk the talk about life’s big topics—and then walk the walk, together.
