Son of a Coach

Wisdom from a lifetime listening to what it takes to win

It’s said that to be a parent is to understand unconditional love. I’ve always thought that says something too simplistic about parenting. It’s half right. And not about the love part. Whatever it is we’re about, as people, is imparted on our children. That’s the unconditional part. We may change. And in that, what we are to our children can change. But you can’t fake it. What’s in you is what’s in your relationship with them, unconditionally. A life of having parents and being a parent has led me to that perspective.

I’m the son of a coach. When I say coach I don’t mean in a notional sense. I mean coaching rowing was how my dad paid the bills. My parents bought the house I grew up in because they could see the boathouse from the back window. He coached crew for 24 years at the Naval Academy and a long list of schools and clubs before that. He was a member of the 1988 U.S. Olympic team as the rowing team manager. He was my coach in college; a coach down to his bones. And as a father that’s what he was, unconditionally, to me. He only knew one way. He passed away last week. What came from my relationship with him is a sort of wisdom I thought I’d share in honor of his memory.

These are the things I heard my whole life. The way some fathers pass down faith or politics or tradecraft, I heard the philosophy of competition and how to get the best out of yourself. And this is how it sounded:

Excuses are bad. Really bad. Like the worst thing in the world bad. My dad almost never got angry with me. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. But the few times he did was when I made excuses for myself or tried to blame something or someone else for a poor performance. It was like a pastor’s kid using the Lord’s name in vain. He couldn’t live with it. The wind was bad in your lane…? Or did you not handle the wind well. I was sick or hurt? Or was I not fast enough to win when I wasn’t 100%. If it sounds cruel or harsh it wasn’t. The point wasn’t to beat me to death with a failure. It was to teach me that letting yourself off the hook for the hard stuff is a habit. A fatally bad one.

If you can only be one thing, be positive. You have to say stuff before you believe it. And you have to believe things before you do them. As it is in sport it is in life, you rarely exceed your expectations. So if you don’t start talking and acting (this means doing the work) like a winner, you aren’t going to accidentally win.

Sometimes you just need to pull harder. I was an accomplished high school rower at an elite rowing school. But there were a couple of teams that were the elite of the elite we struggled to beat. He told me something that stuck with me after a third place finish in which I felt we really raced well and should have fared better. It was simple.

“Those guys pull harder than you. And you’re not going to beat them until they don’t.”

It didn’t matter how good the race plan was or how well we executed or how pretty we looked while doing it. We didn’t row as hard as they did. And not much else mattered. The good news is he provided me with a simple solution. The bad news was that getting stronger and more conditioned was going to hurt…and I wasn’t sure I was up to it. Oftentimes the thing that matters most is the hardest thing. And we spend a lot of time doing everything else to avoid the painful truth. A coach doesn’t let you.

Sometimes you just have to get mean. One of my dad’s favorite movies was The Outlaw Josey Wales. He got a lot of mileage out of Wale’s most famous quote.

Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you're not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up, then you neither live nor win. That's just the way it is.

If you don’t have that in you, then maybe hard things like winning aren’t for you.

Tough meant something specific. The best thing the old coach could say about a rower or a crew was that they were tough. And by tough he meant something specific; that they weren’t ever going to quit or beat themselves. You were going to have to beat them. And it was going to hurt. Just like excuses, quitting was a habit. The more you did it the easier it got. And some people just never did. Those were the tough ones.

1-Don’t sweat the small stuff. 2-It’s all small stuff. If I wander into one of his old rowers somewhere that’s the thing they’re most likely to tell me that he taught them. It’s a line he stole from the title of a book by Richard Carlson that I’m not sure the old coach ever really read. He got all he needed from the title. What he meant wasn’t to ignore the details or commit to all that it took to win. Excellence is in the details. What he meant was to shrink the world of distracting problems to zero. And all that’s left over is you and the race. And that’s all that matters.

If I spent a thousand words telling you what my dad was as a man or a father, I couldn’t tell you anything different than what he was as a coach. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He gave me what he could; the wisdom of lifetime teaching young men and women how to win. And I’m better for it…not by a little.

Rest in Peace Coach. What a gift.