If you look the wrong way, you can miss it. The sophomore setter with so much promise that her coach was ready to hand the keys of his program over to this 16 year old only to see her knee buckle playing freshmen basketball and put their plans on hold for months. To see her watching the rest of the team at camp, going through the motions she once did effortlessly and struggling just to move under the ball and set, her eyes knowing she would never take it for granted again. If you look the wrong way, you can miss those moments as the team wrapped her up within them and continued to get better with and without her. They expected nothing less from each other.
If you aren’t looking in the right places, you can shrug off the sophomore outside hitter who breaks down on the first day of camp because she isn’t hitting the ball with the pace she expects of herself. You look at the coaches coddling her and drying her tears and you roll your eyes at this ridiculous display of indulgence because that’s all you see. But if you listen and look past your confined judgments, you hear the story of two best friends getting silly one night and car surfing; one on the hood with the other driving. Only the best friend slipped off the hood and the sophomore ran her over. She clung to life for days with the sophomore mentally liquefying between best friend and the one who killed her. Broken bones, shredded skin and internal injuries were not the cause of the darkest pain. If you aren’t looking in the right places, you can’t see what you need to see; a sophomore that needed the sport to get her life back; redemption between white end lines.
If you don’t look closely enough you can miss the resilliance of the young. How at a weekend camp in Shasta county, California, a young 9 year old with a bright smile and desire to play the sport puts behind her the fact her father was killed in a car accident just two weeks before and a Mom who is determined to get her daughter’s life back on track sooner than later. Or the quiet junior libero with superhero legs of steel that lost a sister to leukemia just two months before. She was less concerned with the school and town having rallied around her sister’s fundraising and Facebook campaigns. She’d lost her sister. But she played as though her tryout was taking place that weekend; focused and determined. Maybe if we didn’t look closely enough, we might not have noticed that resilience. It would be even more noticeable 45 days later when a brush fire started that would blacken over 100,000 acres, destroy 700 homes, take seven lives and put this same California community on edge for months.
If you don’t look past the obvious, you can miss the remarkable. You can miss the junior outside hitter who just a year earlier found her father in the garage, a victim of a self inflicted gunshot wound. Or the quiet senior DS who smiled, worked and encouraged those that were better and most certainly would play in front of her as the season approached. She, the innocent older sister of a family garroted by a father with a weakness that saw him imprisoned after a flourish of justified media attention and innuendo that would cripple the families’ ability to function in their small Midwestern town. Even changing their last names, they were always going to be the wife and kids of THAT guy. Yet she never let on that she knew everyone knew and she kept up a positive outlook and gutted through a tough week of camp, never once letting the outside in. The gym was her respite and she respected it. If we had looked past those girls, we might miss the heartbeat of a team playing for something much more.
If we don’t glance and judge and see these amazing young people for who they actually are, you can take the sport we play and use it for salvation. For the kids that live in rural areas and struggle with parents who are damaged by drug and alcohol addictions. Those kids that struggle with the same addictions, trying to recoup a life that they once deserved and a childhood they have robbed themselves of. If we just glance and judge too quickly, we lose our chance to salvage those that might just need another chance.
If we don’t open our eyes wide enough, we might miss the small details that permeate the journey. The small school on the edge of a 67 mile lake in middle America with such a sense of community pride and patriotism that they celebrate the Fourth of July with costume contests in the middle of their volleyball camp and made plans all week to see the fireworks only to be crushed when the local fireworks manufacturing plant blew up on the night of July 3rd cancelling all the shows in the small towns surrounding the lake. You might miss the line of bark missing off a tree behind your lake house where just a few days before a bolt of lightning stripped it from 60’ up to the forest floor.
You’d miss the interaction of the sophomore setter who has a fun fact for every hour of the day, (hippos sweat red evidently) and her teammate who is a Division I caliber talent but will settle for a lower level to stay close to home. These small details might mean nothing to us as visitors glossing over them like the apps on our phone but can become so engaging and consequential to those young women we coach. Just 18 days after their volleyball camp, that same lake became a tomb for 17 people who drowned in a boating accident in rough weather. Those details are hard to ignore.
If you don’t pay attention long enough, you can miss those opportunities. Like the chance to reach out to the senior outside hitter who took a bottle of pills to admittedly get her father’s attention and just let her talk, or not. The chance to hear the incoming college freshman’s feelings of fear and inadequacy as she leaves the tumult of a violent broken home and puts it back together by herself under the steel roof of a college volleyball program. On a scale no less important, just the chance walk from the gym to the parking lot where the younger sister of a 4 year collegiate rock star who is struggling to find HER identity in the sport she grew up watching can vent and be appreciated by a pair of open eyes and ears. Maybe it’s just the random question during lunch about how a young woman with the deceitful self esteem of teenage life takes what her club coach said about her “never being a setter” and tries to reconcile that with her hopeful path into college ball. The limits that coaches put upon them: “you’re too short, you can’t pass, you can’t jump serve, etc.” come back to haunt them and often times, just a sympathetic ear can help them realize the idiocy of such coaching declarations. If we don’t pay attention long enough, we might miss those opportunities to change the way out athletes think of themselves.
Summer is almost over in most of the country. Volleyball tryouts have begun and summer camps become memories that will dissolve into a slide show at the end of season banquet. But there is so much in the journey to harvest, so much to learn about human nature, the amazing people on the courts and the sidelines that help define us as coaches every remarkable day and the investment it takes to be good at what we do and make these athletes better players and people.
Maybe to do it right, coaches are never on the sidelines.
And maybe then, and only then, we’re home.
If you don’t pay attention long enough, you can miss those opportunities. Like the chance to reach out to the senior outside hitter who took a bottle of pills to admittedly get her father’s attention and just let her talk, or not. The chance to hear the incoming college freshman’s feelings of fear and inadequacy as she leaves the tumult of a violent broken home and puts it back together by herself under the steel roof of a college volleyball program. On a scale no less important, just the chance walk from the gym to the parking lot where the younger sister of a 4 year collegiate rock star who is struggling to find HER identity in the sport she grew up watching can vent and be appreciated by a pair of open eyes and ears. Maybe it’s just the random question during lunch about how a young woman with the deceitful self esteem of teenage life takes what her club coach said about her “never being a setter” and tries to reconcile that with her hopeful path into college ball. The limits that coaches put upon them: “you’re too short, you can’t pass, you can’t jump serve, etc.” come back to haunt them and often times, just a sympathetic ear can help them realize the idiocy of such coaching declarations. If we don’t pay attention long enough, we might miss those opportunities to change the way out athletes think of themselves.
Summer is almost over in most of the country. Volleyball tryouts have begun and summer camps become memories that will dissolve into a slide show at the end of season banquet. But there is so much in the journey to harvest, so much to learn about human nature, the amazing people on the courts and the sidelines that help define us as coaches every remarkable day and the investment it takes to be good at what we do and make these athletes better players and people.
Maybe to do it right, coaches are never on the sidelines.
And maybe then, and only then, we’re home.
