The sport would be there

That loss is common would not make
My own less bitter, rather more:
Too common! Never morning wore
To evening, but some heart did break.

                                                                -Tennyson

The late spring is littered with college lacrosse seniors whose journeys ended before Memorial Day Monday, whose last college game was a bitter defeat. And if that game was the last competitive one they’ll play, the question of how to apply the lessons learned from a life of athletics to life after athletics remains.

As a player, as a coach, now a parent, I’ve always seen sports as a metaphor, as a training ground for life. But there are distinct differences. New athletic seasons always came as the calendar rolled on. Even if you got injured or if you faced disappointment, there was another chance coming. Sure, you had to choose to put in the work (or not), to train (or not), to get better (or not), but the season was coming regardless. The sport would be there.

And in your choosing to hit the wall, run those hills, do work in the weight room, you got to play. In high school, in college, you got to have a calling beyond the classroom; you got to define yourself as a student-athlete. But now, perhaps, for all intents and purposes, it’s over. Instead of being part of that team next season, you’re on your own pal. So what lessons do you take from that metaphor that is sports?

Some may bring a win at all costs attitude to the work place, and will thrive on the competition to be better, make more money, close more deals than the next guy. As my bank account will attest, I’ve never been that type.

My application of the sport metaphor to real life centers on wisdom and morality. The Headmaster at the school where I once taught, once opened a speech saying:

I have always admired an essay by Robert Frost that introduces his 1939 volume of poems. "The figure of a poem," he writes, "must begin in delight and end in wisdom. The same is true for love."
Let's borrow that sentence and try it out for education. "Education must begin in delight and end in wisdom."

I’ll borrow further for sports (though I view teaching and coaching as one; sports is education).

For a child, as winter melts into muddy spring, there is such joy just to pick up a stick and play.  As you grow in the game, you have the opportunity to grow mentally in its ins and outs, schemes, and theories. You learn basic tenets: keep a high crease when the ball is behind, low when up top; attack the seams of a zone; change planes on your shot. As you become wiser, you are even allowed to challenge those firmly held, passed down beliefs. When is it okay to feed the crease from up top? What if we set a pick where we’ve always known not to? And then you are not just learning the game, but analyzing it, perhaps innovating it. The opportunity for wisdom comes once you know and master all the “rules”, once you’ve studied the precedents of past players and the tendencies of present opponents.

The process of finding wisdom is the first thing to take from sports and apply elsewhere. Before you were wise enough and skilled enough to, on a righty dodge down the alley, shoot not off the goalie’s hip, but stick it in the top corner over his near-side shoulder, you logged hours and hours on the wall and on the goal. The delight that only got more intense as you got better can be found in mastering other skills beyond lacrosse.

In a future post, I’ll address the morality athletics can give. 

www.jimfenzel.com

*Quote from Vance Wilson, Headmaster, St. Albans School, DC