Thank You, Coach

Coach:

I think I have been composing this letter to you for most of my adult life. I’m sorry that I couldn’t get the words together soon enough for you to read them. Now, you have been gone from this earth for longer than my kids have been alive. But your gifts, instilled through hundreds of hours of training, practice and repetition, continue to unfold in unexpected ways. I have always been grateful to you, in my own quiet way, and I’m not sure I did enough to say thank you when you were around to hear it.

When we met, I was a lonely freshman with few friends, a latchkey kid who spent afternoons alone absorbed in books. My parents, in an attempt to get me out of my solitary world, told me to find an activity. Since I had done well in fall track, I took the bus from the middle school, where our ninth graders still attended, and entered the high school as a varsity cross country runner each day after school.

It has been too many years to remember my state of mind back then. However, looking back at a time where a haze of social humiliation still occasionally turns up, clinging to the bottom of memory rocks in the riverbed of my brain, I never remember feeling like I wasn’t doing enough. Like I wasn’t enough somehow. All that mattered each day was to come in, do the work, and leave knowing I had given everything. Accomplishments were long game thinking.

Over the course of my four years under your mentorship, a lot happened. You retired from teaching while continuing coaching. You had a heart attack but returned as our mentor just days after surgery. We won. A lot. We lost. Possibly more than we won. We practiced until we thought we would die. We practiced more. You trained champions. You trained self-confident young adults and helped guide us to find goals beyond high school. You helped us grow into better people than we were before you met us. My future life offered many more possibilities, thanks to the lessons that you taught me.

What You Taught Me

My (somewhat jaded) teenage years were full of people whose actions contradicted their words. You stood as one of the biggest exceptions to this. You offered motivating speeches, but more than this, your training principles were life lessons that offered me a better way to look at the world. They included:

• You need both smart strategies and hard work to reap the best rewards

• Value effort over performance

• Take stock. Every time.

• Your only real competition is yourself

• Don’t just give back, give first.

This bouquet of wisdom probably looks a bit different for each one of us that you have coached. However, when I speak to most people who knew you, the watercolor memories and lasting respect are universal.

You Need Both Smart Strategies and Hard Work to Reap the Best Rewards

A lot of talented people entered your team. But they were rarely the champions after four years based on raw talent alone. Without exception, these accolades went to the people who put in the work. Every time. You taught us that success exists on the far side of work ethic. You also taught us that work without focus and direction is just busywork. Strategy within a race and a training schedule involved knowing when to work harder versus smarter.

Value Effort Over Performance

Though long before the famous marshmallow experiment, you knew the value of encouraging effort over speed. In doing so, you gave us the inner fuel to continue after a bad practice or race. You celebrated a hard-earned loss and helped us to pick up our hearts after a terrible race. Not only this, but you fostered this in all of us. Regardless of our place in the race, our job was not done until the last person crossed the finish line. If we were early, we were expected to run to the places where the course was toughest and encourage our teammates through the hilly portion, muddy field or home stretch. You did not play favorites but valued every one of our efforts during every race. And every runner, first to last, got to feel valued as well.

Take Stock. Every Time.

As an English teacher, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that you had us write about our race during the evening of each competition. For you, it probably gave you insight about what was physical vs. in our heads, what we saw the obstacles to be and how we divided our efforts between brain and body. For me, it taught me how to take stock of successes and failures after something big. Learning how to do this has helped me in so many aspects of my life, from re-evaluating my relationship after a fight to constantly finding new and better ways to perform a task at work. Writing race essays also sparked my love of writing.

Your Only Real Competition Is Yourself

Cross country is, in many ways, a solitary sport. If you run a bad race, there’s nobody else to blame. But that is also true when you are running at the front of the pack. When you are alone in front, with nobody close behind you, then you must become your own competition. Beating someone else while not putting in any real effort is hollow. You encouraged us to be our best, to do our best, during every race. Your only measuring stick was our own past performances. This allowed everyone on the course to end it as a champion, no matter their place. It also taught those in the lead how to strive for more, even when there wasn’t anyone but ourselves left to beat.

Don’t Just Give Back. Give First.

While you encouraged all of us to give to our teammates and our community as members of our team, it was your example that best showed me how to give of myself. Every afternoon of the season, every race weekend and all summer long, you were there for all of us. As a latchkey kid with two parents working multiple jobs, this gift went much deeper than simple availability. It was the first time I felt worthy of an adult’s commitment to be there, no matter what.

I don’t think I would have been able to put that into words as a teen, but looking back, I know that I gave more because you were always there for me, and it inspired me to work as hard as I could and give as much back as I knew how. It gave me a taste of what success based on work ethic was like. It helped me to set my gaze beyond the dramas of high school to college and beyond.

The other adults I knew were very busy people; they worked hard, striving to get ahead. Giving back, to them, meant first accumulating enough to feel like they could share some of it. But you, on your teacher’s salary. You, with your endless string of used, five-hundred dollar cars with coffee cup rings on the hood, gave first. You gave us your time, your attention, your praise. You didn’t need to get enough of anything. Instead, you made us feel like we were enough. Even after you retired during my sophomore year, you continued to coach us and to dedicate your time to us.

You have been the model for how I have tried to prioritize giving in my own life.

Coming Full-Circle

As I write this, one of my sons is nearing his tenth birthday. Three years ago, he received a diagnosis for an extremely rare form of congenital muscular dystrophy. As he grows older, certain muscle groups, for him, will grow weaker. He will be smaller than other kids. Certain activities will always be off-limits for him, like roller coasters, because he doesn’t have the neck support to safely enjoy them.

As we have navigated this future for him, it is your example that I have come back to, Coach, and I realize that you have given me all of the tools I need to help him be his best self.

We Try Hard and Work Smart

We have a team of doctors helping us to navigate when to work hard and when to try a smart, new strategy to help him succeed.

We Continue to Value Effort Over Performance

As a family, we value effort over performance. We know that it takes him twice the effort to walk a hill that it does for his brother to run; we celebrate everyone’s ascent. His little brother has become his cheerleader and supporter. He offers a hand and to carry a heavy load without our needing to ask.

We Take Stock

My habit of writing down what I notice led to a pretty good list of medical information that helped to track down a diagnosis after six years of not knowing what was wrong. The diagnosis itself was reassuring as an answer but scary, too. I have continued to take stock, learning what this will mean for him. I have also been teaching my son this skill, helping him to take stock as certain things get easier for him and others become more difficult.

We Compare Ourselves to Ourselves

My son is a brilliant storyteller, a charming conversationalist, a budding inventor and a wonderful artist. Our expectations for him, as parents, are to work hard to achieve what he loves and to try his best with everything. We don’t compare him to anyone but himself, and we encourage him to do the same. And as a mother with two jobs, a child with a medical condition and plenty of flaws, I try not to compare my mothering skills to anyone else’s, either.

We Give Back as a Family

Neither my husband nor I can quit our jobs (medical care is expensive). However, we give as a family and let our children take the lead in choosing ways to use our time, words and hands to make the world better as a family. We have tried to foster a network of adults that they can feel are there for them and worthy of their time. We have also been conscious of our son’s younger brother, of making sure that he never feels like he comes second to his brother’s medical needs.

When It Gets Hard

Our life gets hard sometimes, as lives often do. When this happens, it’s your voice I hear in my head, coach. I envision you pushing me forward, reminding me that glory lives on the other side of this pain. Telling me, like you used to, that it’s temporary.

And you’re right, like you always were. Because of you, I have spent my life dreaming big, trying terrifying things, working harder than I knew I could, falling and picking myself up, ever pushing forward. Because of you, I chose a job that allows me to give something back, every day, before I return home to my family to give more. Because of you, my big, imperfect, messy life is full of heartbreaks and successes. But it’s not full of regret or fear to try. Because of you, my life is full of the deep, meaningful rewards of love, friendship and self-respect that only come from leaving everything on the course every day.

For that, I’m not sure thank you is enough.