I am catching my breath after my first nine month national tour of 15U competitive club volleyball. Watching my daughter develop her skills was remarkable. Winning was so fun. Adopting “LFG” in my regular vernacular, hilarious. But the greatest take away for me includes three themes that I saw consistently from her tryouts to the parent meeting to every practice, match, and tournament. Let me explain.

This all started at the 14U Presidents’ Day Classic in Crystal Lake, Illinois in February of 2023. As a Chicago native, Crystal Lake felt like another world and the volleyball gym experience was not anything I felt I had been missing. And yet there I was, fully immersed. Our team struggled. Nice group of people across the board but as a volleyball novice, even I could see some fundamental gaps. I wasn’t willing to make that kind of a commitment or add volleyball as a new weekend ritual unless we were aligning with an operation that valued excellence—that’s just the way I am wired.

That weekend I saw a volleyball club across the gym and something felt different about the team. Their energy. Their power. Their presence.

I knew we had to be with the right club. I wasn’t willing to make the investment that competitive youth sports requires and do it haphazardly. Our daughter’s growing interest and aptitude for the sport demanded that we catch up quickly.

Five months later our daughter, a new volleyball player and boundlessly driven human, joined the club I saw at that Presidents’ Day Classic and as we were recently told, this year she got a PhD in volleyball. It showed.

Traveling the country with eleven other families has felt like a sacred journey shared among coaches and parents whose lives never would have crossed if it weren’t for the fastest growing sport in the NCAA, women’s volleyball.

The families and coaches we traveled with do not live in the same neighborhoods. We do not work in the same industries. We do not share one politic or world view. But together, we committed to something. Together we did unreasonable things that stretched us. And together, we learned to disagree with one another, count on one another, love one another, and practice what is so easily lost and forgotten, that there are things more important than winning and moments that are bigger than any one individual.

The last nine months gave our daughter the deep dive she needed in volleyball but for me, as someone that has worked with thousands of people, I started to notice themes within her club and on her team that in today’s disposable world so driven by short timelines and instant gratification are in desperate need of a resurgence:

Coaching
I am an exquisite coach. It’s a full body devotional exercise for me. I don’t regurgitate frameworks or models. I listen and tune in to the sport of my client. The game they want to win. And I am all in. I only work with clients that are playing full out. I have no interest in dragging clients along.

I have coached a wide spectrum of human beings from artists to activists and executives to entrepreneurs. No matter how good a coach I may be, the most important ingredient in breakthrough performance is coachability.

Most adults are not coachable. They’re fixed. Dug in. Defensive.

Most adults develop a resistance and fragility to feedback. In many coaching circles you will hear about the need to ask your client or the person before you if they are open to feedback, and while I understand the importance of establishing receptivity, openness, and consent, I also realize the stubborn nature of adults. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest something that transcends openness, something that goes beyond a person’s willingness. It’s important to remember that willingness is an egoic response based on the need to agree. A good coach does not pander to one’s egoic fragility.

If you have a trusted coach and if you’re willing to check your ego upon entry then you are always available for coaching. As an expert coach, that’s what I witness when watching youth volleyball—the players most invested in development and least invested in their ego have the greatest growth vector. The thing that is fascinating about a coach to player relationship in sports is that it’s real time. Volleyball players are getting real time coaching. If a volleyball player were to stop and check in to see if they are open and available to feedback they’d miss the point E V E R Y. S I N G L E. T I M E.

These girls take the coaching and are expected to implement it, right away. They don’t debate it. Challenge it. Argue with it. They don’t deliberate on if they’re open and willing. They don’t entertain their opinions or indulge their feelings. They take the coaching.

See, if you’re interested in coaching, if you’re available for growth, if you’re capable of surrendering to someone that is devoted to your greatness then you don’t need to ask the question of openness, receptivity, and availability. Human beings that are really interested in actualizing their own greatness stay open, remain ready, and relate to every bit of feedback as an incredible opportunity for quantum leaps.

Culture
Every family, every team, every organization, and every community has a culture. Either that culture is explicitly designed, stated, and practiced or it develops unconsciously as a kind of default outcome from a collection of human beings with unexamined assumptions and agreements.

When I attended the 2023-2024 Parent Meeting at our new club I felt the culture. It was unapologetic. It became the single greatest inspiration for the culture of my business. The Club Director and Co-Owner was very comfortable having players and families leave. Unwilling to compromise on their values I heard him state explicitly what excellence means for the culture of the club. It was repeatedly articulated, what they stood for and what they wouldn’t tolerate.

I have watched the organizational leaders of this club be challenged and recommit to their culture throughout the season. It’s not that they are flawless or without their own organizational shortcomings. It’s that you know where they stand and they keep coming back to it.

Explained to us in a recent 1:1 meeting, they value developing excellent volleyball players at the collegiate level. They do not measure success through the most number of wins, medals, or trophies at a youth club level. Sure, they want to win but they are more interested in developing strategic thinkers that are exercising volleyball calculus and strengthening their resilience than playing basic defense that dominates in a particular age bracket—that’s a cultural value.

Crafting a culture today is more complex and nuanced than ever. Leaders can no longer pull rank and drive results based on hierarchy or individual power. We’re in an evolution of the human species.

To create a rigorous culture that prioritizes devotion to the craft while attuning to the whole human is a relatively new phenomenon. To create a culture of accountability while cultivating potential and prioritizing fun is a delicate balance that requires attention to detail.

Community
A youth sports club can only do so much to create a sense of community among the coaches, players, and parents. An organizational leader can only do so much to create community. The demands and logistics are tremendous. The emails and text messages of opinions don’t stop. As a former community leader and now business owner, I know this well.

Community is a collective exercise. At some point, you realize that it is not the responsibility of others to serve up the community that you desire. Community exists when human beings take responsibility for their impact and the sense of belonging they desire.

I will never forget our first weekend tournament, a seasoned dad on the team made a pocket size laminated directory of parents and players so we could learn one another’s names and kids as easily as possible. As he distributed them I offered to give one to a couple that was in the gym. He insisted that he personally distribute the pocket directory to each parent so he could welcome them and get to know them. No one asked him to create the laminated pocket directory. No one advised him to personally distribute each one. He wasn’t assigned the job. He didn’t have an official volunteer title. He just did it. Because it mattered to him. And we all benefited from it.

One by one each parent contributed to a sense of community. From schlepping portable grills to parking lots on long weekends, shooting and circulating game footage, organizing dinners, sleepovers, and carpools. A community formed.

We didn’t wait for the club directors to organize a cushy experience for us. We created a sense of connection and belonging among a group of human beings that none of us got to choose—a kind of forced family. The seasoned parents demonstrated contribution for the good of the group and those of us that were new got the message.

Traveling together created moments for more honest conversation and realizing the different sacrifices that each family was making for their daughter. We got to know one another.

In today’s virtual world it is essential to create community where you can. Creating community beyond boundaries of ideology is the great reminder that we share so much in common and that we can learn to love and disagree.

Commitment
There are extraordinary gifts to the convenience we enjoy in today’s world. It seems like just about anything can happen fast. But that’s the illusion. As I observed our volleyball team take on coaching, culture, and community it was clear that none of those themes existed without commitment undergirding all of it.

Commitment is the foundation that is eternally overlooked, undervalued, and infrequently celebrated. It’s the choice that’s made every day. It transcends feelings and moods. It’s bigger than that.

When watching the Olympics or attending a concert it’s easy to overlook the inconvenient commitment that must be made to oneself and those that count on you. When I compare myself to my mentor that has thirty years on me I undermine the importance of staying power. I forget the value of patience. I lose sight of what it really takes to produce results that matter.

Whether you find inspiration through the discipline of Olympians, the devotion of parents, or the wisdom of elders, the quality they all share is commitment. A commitment to keep going. A compulsion to channel focused energy in a particular direction over and over and over again. And to not give up or give in when it gets tough and uncomfortable.

When human beings lack commitment it is a function of a few things, either they’re involved in something that is not really “theirs to do”, they’re unconsciously afraid of succeeding, or they haven’t developed the muscle of digging in.

As Howard Thurman most beautifully stated, “the world needs people who have come alive.” And I know of no better formula than:

Find your thing. Dig in. Be surrounded by devoted human beings. And get after it. This is your life.

Let’s fucking goooooooo.

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