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Chapter 2

All-In

“My grandfather gave me one dollar for every goal I scored. That made me happy, because I loved scoring goals, so I felt like I was going to be rich! And he gave me $1.50 for every assist. He helped me realize that being on a team means that other people are involved, and that it would be more rewarding for me to enhance or empower other people. That has stuck with me for forty years.”

—BRANDI CHASTAIN, SOCCER PLAYER

There comes a time in each athlete’s career when a bigger commitment is required and a decision is made to be all-in. This point on the arc is one of energy, excitement, and enthusiasm. As you improve and experience success, tougher benchmarks are set, and you tackle more challenging hurdles. Not all experiences are positive, however; some are downright tough. But as an achiever, you learn to ignite the attitude of “I will overcome the pitfalls and handle the intensity, and when I experience a failure, I will learn from it and keep moving toward my goals.” At this point on the arc, you deepen your connection with the nine practices and continue to gain knowledge about yourself. The desire is to succeed, and no matter what the discipline (athlete or not), being all-in is a stage all high performers can relate to.

Being accepted to the team feels wonderful. Perhaps the first time you made the team you gave an inward cheer for yourself: “Yes! I did it!” You may remember the ups and downs of being all-in, too. For young athletes who are at this point on the arc, one week it can seem as if the whole world is smiling on you. Parents congratulate, coaches encourage, teammates high five, friends and family cheer you on. The next week could be a completely different story with a different set of emotions, such as embarrassment, sorrow, or shame. At this phase, everyone invested in the athlete develops (and sometimes destroys) them. Adults who surround young high performers carry immense influence.

The shift from simply participating to being all-in differentiates the high-performing child from other children. Before I went to Pine Crest, I trained three times a week for forty-five minutes each session. Then, suddenly, my day started with training at 5:30 a.m. I had classes from eight in the morning to 2:30 in the afternoon, and then I jumped back in the pool before working out in the weight room until five in the evening. Throughout the day I squeezed in meals, and at night, I faced the academic demands of a prep school, toiling away at homework until I fell into bed. In my first year, I barely met the minimum standards to return. The training schedule repeated every day, all year long. I couldn’t skip it or sleep in. This positive but demanding environment meant I had to cultivate every single one of the nine practices. When I was at high school, I learned that being all-in is hardly a balanced lifestyle. It is a choice that must be made every day. Today, forty years later and far from the athletic environment that absorbed me then, when I set my sights on something, I know I have the capacity to achieve that goal because I understand what being all-in means and that it is still deeply ingrained in who I am.

THE PARENT–COACH SHIFT

As parents of young athletes watch them grow and flourish they gradually encourage more autonomy in the children, sensing their readiness for new-found freedoms and increasing responsibilities. At this point, children often invest a strong but naive belief in their coach. Even young athletes know that, to improve their performance, they must put their faith in the coach’s direction. Most parents don’t have experience with the demands of an intense, sport-focused environment, and they trust the coach implicitly. Over time, parents tend to abdicate part of their responsibility to these powerful influencers.

Once the rules and structures for the young athlete have been established, parents might pull back further by joining carpools. They begin to feel more secure about dropping their children off for practices and games without needing to stay and observe. As the athlete matures, the role of the coaches, and their control, intensifies. When parents see their child is improving as a result of the coach’s direction, they, unsurprisingly, come to trust that the coach will do what’s right for their child. This assumption can have long-lasting positive or, in some cases, negative effects.

Financial need also plays into the parent-coach shift. When their child has early success in sports, parents may develop unrealistic expectations that their child will be offered college scholarships or possibly enter a pro career. They might make grand assumptions that their kids will make it big, even when they’re in their early teens or younger. “This sport is not for the faint of heart, gymnasts and their parents said,” reports a CNN investigative article on gymnastics, “and they would often put up with abuse and hardship” to reach their Olympic goals:

“It’s a tough sport,” said Lisa Hutchins, a former Twistars mother and coach. “It takes tough parents and tough kids. The culture is toxic. To be the best, we believed kids need to be coached with a certain degree of threatening. [The coach] was really good at pitting parents against each other to keep it that way. He wanted control over what the parents and kids said or did. And if you stood up to him, your kid would pay.”

[He] was known for getting his gymnasts college scholarships, another way they say he exerted power over them.

“It’s hard to explain the pressure that [he] puts on you,” said [gymnast] Bailey. That college scholarship is everything.”¹

Coaches know all too well that for many families, the only way their child will be able to go on to postsecondary education is with financial aid or a scholarship. Although representing a school is an athlete’s badge of honour, it can also be a backdoor admission to higher education. And an athlete who plays college sports is provided additional support along with that higher education, including academic tutoring, specialized coaching, and paid travel to competitions.

The reality is that playing at college level launches a professional career for very few athletes. However, some parents begin to see their child’s investment of time in sport as one that will yield future professional and financial dividends. Young athletes often absorb these all-consuming ambitions and pressures, and down the line, they may feel they’ve disappointed their parents or as though they’ve failed. They may stay in sports long past the time they want to quit, or they might grow to hate the sport they once loved.

DREAM SHAPERS

Promising young athletes who dream of one day firing the slap-shot, who wins the Stanley Cup in overtime, or bicycle-kicking in the clincher for their World Cup team know that their coach shapes the dream. Most early coaches in children’s lives are volunteers. Later in competitive sports, coaches are paid by organizations and, like any employee, they are recognized and rewarded as an essential, talented factor in the success of the enterprise.

Coaches move up and down their own ladders of success. At any level, they may be asked to coach on a bigger stage; at a more prestigious high school or college; for the state, province, or country; or in a professional league. Owners and associations determine the coaching hierarchy based on personal and political reasons, as well as on finances and job performance. Their bosses evaluate them, as do the athletes in locker rooms and the parents in the stands.

Although their primary task is to produce winners, many coaches also provide positive support, encouragement, and life lessons, and this means that the athlete-coach relationship is complex. An athlete may love their coaches one moment and hate them the next, and for various reasons, such as ego, puberty, issues at home, or because they were singled out with harsh criticism during practice. One thing is certain, though: all athletes experience conflicted emotions:

“The coach hates me! She thinks I suck!”

“The coach loves me! He thinks I’m the best!”

“The coach doesn’t know how good I could be! Why doesn’t he play me?”

“The coach is a jerk! I hate him!”

“I wish the coach would just give me a break. Why am I getting pushed so hard?”

Parents can further complicate and reinforce these emotions: “Why doesn’t the coach play my kid more?”

Coaches are like an athlete’s boss. Whether qualified in child development or not, they are in charge of shaping the child’s athletic results. Good coaches understand that the child is more than the results. Questionable coaches might produce results, but they might also ignore or verbally, mentally, or physically abuse athletes to get those results. They may pit parents against one another to promote competition, or they might promise unrealistic results.

During my swimming career, I was sworn at by trainers and saw the head-shaking disappointment that others had in me when I didn’t live up to their expectations. I’ve had swimming kickboards thrown at me by coaches, sometimes out of frustration and anger, and sometimes as a curious form of encouragement.

When I was at the University of Michigan, every other year the women’s swim team travelled to Hawaii over the Christmas holidays for a training camp. We left after exams in mid-December and returned the day before school resumed in January. Christmas in Hawaii sounds like a great holiday, but it was a vigorously intense training period where Stu Isaac, our coach, pushed us to go beyond any limitations we could imagine.

On Christmas Day, the whole team was in a foul mood about not being at home with our families. Stu understood this and he pressed us harder—maybe so we would lose our personal emotions to physical pain. He gave each of us a personal challenge, something we hadn’t yet achieved in a workout. That day, I struggled wearily. After talking to my family early in the morning, and with my muscles aching from pure exhaustion and utterly overwhelmed by training six hours a day, I started sobbing. During warm-up, all that saved me from feeling total humiliation was the fact that I was swimming with my face in the water.

Swimmers often talk to themselves as they do laps, staring at the black line on the bottom of the pool. It’s a great problem-solving strategy. I used to rehash the events of the day in my head, or mull over how to resolve a conflict in my life. Sometimes I silently recited notes for an upcoming exam. That day, I directed my internal dialogue at Stu. As I warmed up, I called him all kinds of names and glared at him whenever he was in view. Without the option of quitting or hopping on a plane back home, I gathered my emotions and started the set he had assigned me: a 200-yard backstroke (eight lengths of the pool), times five. I had two minutes and fifteen seconds to complete each set of eight lengths. Until then, my best time ever was just over two minutes, and he expected me to do that five times in a row!

To this day, I remember my times down to the second: The first one I swam 2:10, which meant I had five seconds of rest. The second one, I went 2:11. Four seconds of rest. The third, I let my body take over (no time to feel sorry for myself!) and went a remarkable 2:08. Seven whole seconds of rest. My fourth time was 2:09. Six seconds of rest . . . I could sense the whole team cheering me on to finish the set. I pushed off for the final 200 yards and went 2:06!

When I touched the wall, I was spent.

My limbs shook. I took huge gulps of air.

I half-smiled, because I had done it. But I was also still feeling pissy. As I looked up at Stu to say “I’m done. I did it,” he didn’t congratulate me. Instead, he jumped into the water with all his clothes on and exclaimed, “You did it! If you can do that, you can do anything!”

I wish I could say that I was happy and started laughing, but my immediate thought was “Stu, you are an idiot. Your clothes are wet, and your glasses are sinking toward the bottom of the pool.”

I recognize now more than I did at the time that Stu had given me the confidence to do something that was, in my mind, impossible. He used me as a role model for the team: “If she can do it, so can you . . .” His words shifted the perspective of everyone around me. In this phase of being all-in, we need coaches and mentors who can push us to do things beyond what we think we’re capable of and, importantly, who are worthy of the trust we place in them.

Power Relationships