The Athlete Way

     I want to share something that I think is important for all American field hockey players, coaches, parents, umpires, and fans to hear - the game needs you.      I’ve observed an interesting trend in the sport of field hockey over the past few years. It goes a bit like this:      An athlete graduates from college, hangs up her stick, says goodbye to the game for good and sets off for a new horizon. She moves to New York or San Francisco or Colorado or Texas or some other new place. She forgets about the game for a while because the game doesn’t have anything left to offer her. No one knows about the game in this new place; no one knows what it meant to her.       A few years pass, she makes her way in the world, makes a life for herself away from the sport, and then a chance encounter happens. She reconnects with an old teammate, catches an amazing highlight on instagram, sees a kid with a stick on her way to work. This small but meaningful encounter rekindles something within h

Developing talent means delivering feedback. Not just any old feedback, but measurable, actionable, performance-based feedback. Failure is, and always has been, one of my favorite forms of feedback. Why? It’s clear and ruthlessly honest. It delivers only that which is essential in the moment. Did you meet the mark or not? Failure isn’t vague. It hurts. It forces you to confront the gap between your desire and your reality.  Some of my most memorable triumphs in sport can be traced back to a lesson-learned from a pivotal, gut-wrenching failure: Not making the U16 National Team in 2000 led to making the U19 & U21 National Team in 2001. The Lesson: Work when No one is Watching. Let your work be your talk. Losing to Argentina in the Pan American Final in July of 2007 after being up a goal at half-time led to an undefeated National Championship in the Fall of 2007. The Lesson: Never Take a Lead or Moment for Granted. Things can change quickly. Be relentless and humble. Respect the game.

Let's take a dive into the talent pool.   America’s got talent. A lot of talent. What it doesn’t have though is time and a cohesive system to identify and develop that talent to maturity. The short timeline for the development of talent undermines the country's ability to succeed at the highest level. A multitude of factors play a role, yet the most influential is the win now mentality driven by the demands of college and youth sport. This mentality  - and the money behind it - dominates the American sport landscape; it leads to early selection and deselection, myopic views of talent, and the narrowing of the playing pool before most athletes have time to emerge and fully develop. Recruiting accelerates the timeline. We expect more from athletes at an earlier age. We evaluate them at an earlier age. We select and deselect them at an earlier age. The consequence is that an abundance of talent drops out of the pathway, or goes unidentified and undeveloped. A number of factors