The Athlete Way

The holiday season is upon us, and as we search for presents, I hope we remember what's at the heart of our searching; a higher power that won't be found stacked on the shelves of Target.  What are we actually looking for when we are looking for God? Maybe, we just want to say that we don't have the answers. We need help. I’ve been searching for God lately.  I’ve looked everywhere. Scrolled for God on my phone. Googled God on the internet. Shopped for God in Target. Listened for God in Taylor Swift’s lyrics. Watched for God in every practice, every play, every game. Read for God in the bible. I've told myself that I'll find God in a new job, new relationship or new place.  I know it sounds ridiculous. But it's true. I've wandered aimlessly around Target looking for something greater only to realize that the thing I'm looking for can't be found in Target.  I'm looking for inspiration, meaning, connection, purpose, holiness, sacredness. I'm loo

This is dedicated to a teacher and coach who challenged me to live the lessons she taught. Thank you, Coach Shelton.      After 42 years,  Karen Shelton retired. I still can’t believe it is true. When I first saw the post, I scrolled quickly passed it, thinking it was another celebration post - the type that has become customary to Tar Heel fans over the past decade of Carolina Field Hockey dominance. A few seconds later, something made me pause. There was something more in that post. So I went back and read it fully.       My stomach dropped. My eyes welled with tears. A flood of emotions overcame me. Indescribable emotions.  There was shock. This is really happening. There was grief. This is the end of an era. An end that always seemed unfathomable. I can't imagine a Carolina (or recruiting sideline) without Karen Shelton (and Willy) leading it. There was love. The love surprised me the most. That it was still there, beating strong, after the years of hard times, difficult conver

The holiday season is upon us and that means the season of endless gift searching for the important people in your life. So what do you gift that ever so incredible coach who has hustled all year to help her athletes thrive?  Well, beyond the customary ‘Best Coach Ever’ coffee mug (which she totally deserves), we've put together a gift list that will help her stay legendary in her everyday life. This list will inspire you to think fab and functional.  If you have a gift item that should be on the list, let us know and we will add it.

Culture. It’s magical, mystical, and dare I say yet another buzzword that leaders use when they want to sound like they are doing something really special within an organization. The use of the word culture veils what is the actual bedrock of any culture - the ordinary, everyday, and seemingly unremarkable behaviors of the people within an organization. The standards people hold themselves too and are held too when no one is watching. Daily Behaviors     These behaviors include s imple things like: What time do team members show up for work? How do they show up? Do they keep showing up when things get hard? How do they interact with one another? How do they resolve conflict? How do they share and express ideas? What type of work do they produce? What’s their follow-through on projects? How quickly do they respond to emails? How do they leave the locker-room after a game? The boardroom after a meeting? Where do they invest their time and money? Do they show up consistently? How do they

     The most valuable lessons I have learned about coaching, I learned a very long time ago from an unsuspecting source, my mom. Karen Dawson is the least coach-type person you will ever meet. She never played sports, and I am not sure that she really likes them, or understands them either, though she has watched a lot of them. She is the only parent I know who fell asleep while sitting in the stands at the Olympic Games watching her daughter play (she claims she was just resting her eyes). Still, her influence on the way that I coach is beyond measure. My mom didn’t teach skills, she instilled values. She didn't coach teams, she raised one. A friend from college asked me recently if my mom ever yelled at us growing up. I had to think about it for a moment. She definitely got annoyed and overwhelmed by us; she raised her voice when we were being ridiculous, told us to go outside and swing on the swings, but I can’t remember a time when she ever yelled at me in a way that felt de

        When I was in college, I was adamant about one thing career-wise and one thing only. I was never going to be a coach. I professed it emphatically to anyone who would listen. When I am done playing field hockey, I am done with the sport. Totally. Forever. Never going back. Done.  I was especially defiant about it to anyone who told me that I would make a good coach. Well, tough luck, because it’s never happening.    I’d say. I love playing. Not coaching. I was so stubborn about not becoming a coach that I enrolled in the business school at the University of North Carolina just to defy the stigma of my identity as an athlete. I wanted to prove that I could belong in spheres of education beyond the field hockey field.  The irony makes me laugh because as you may have guessed, I now coach field hockey and I really enjoy it.  Coaching brings me joy. When I am on a field with athletes or talking shop with other coaches, I lose track of time. I love the game; I love sharing it, wa

     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

 “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” ― Vincent Willem van Gogh  Every morning when I sit down to write, two things greet me - a blinking cursor on a blank page and my dear friend, doubt. I often stare at that blinking cursor wondering what I’ll write about, and if its even worth the time and effort to write. I chide myself that it is a silly task. That I am an imposter. That I don’t have anything meaningful to say. Few people will ever read my words and the ones who do have most likely done so out of pity (to my pity readers, I really appreciate your pity reads, keep doing it please). The doubts are demotivating. They tell me to stop writing.  Here’s a dramatization of my daily battle with doubt that I wrote in a journal: It’s my 37th birthday. I’m sitting at my writing desk. The computer is open. The coffee is steaming. The morning light drapes itself dimly around me. I’ve set the stage perfectly. I put

In honor of the release of Kelly Ripa’s memoir, Live Wire, I decided to share this story.      Our values and behaviors are anchored in our beliefs. Belief prompts action.  I am not speaking of religious beliefs but more simply the things we hold to be true about life. For instance, I believe that everyone I meet is a teacher. This belief prompts me to frame interactions that are challenging as having a lesson to offer. It opens me to learning in non-traditional ways.      When  we look at high performing cultures and teams, we often see groups of people with a shared set of beliefs. These teams believe in the way they train, play, communicate and interact. These beliefs often permeate the organization that surrounds the team. Think about Barcelona football during the Pep Guardiola era, there was an unwavering belief in how they played and approached the game of football. Because they believed it, they lived into it.      Everyone has their own set of beliefs that shape their lives. Be

I grew up in South Jersey about thirty minutes outside of Philadelphia. That is to say I grew up a Philly sports fan in the mid-90s and early 2000s, which really is my way of saying that every time I hear the word practice, I immediately and incredulously respond, ‘PRACTICE? For real, we talking about PRACTICE…PRACTICE…?' These are the iconic words of 76ers legend Allen Iverson from a 2002 media interview after a disappointing finish to the season. If you’ve never seen the video, watch it.  All that is to say, yes, we are in fact talking about practice. Specifically, we are talking about deliberate practice, and the role it plays in high performance. High performers come from all walks of life, perform in all spheres of life, and possess totally different personalities and abilities. Regardless of where they come from, their personality, or their domain of excellence, common threads are woven into the fabric of high performers. What makes a person a high performer? Is it the envi

What is high performance? The phrase has become a catch-all in the world of sport, business and society. The educated define it in astutely researched papers, giving us lay people finely wrapped tools for applying it to our daily endeavors. I love reading those papers, however the scholarly, distilled version of high performance paints an almost too cozy and comfortable image of the actual high performance experience. I’d like to explore high performance from a slightly messier perspective, those of my own lived experiences.            There is still so much about my experience in sport that I don’t fully understand, specifically the implicit behaviors that led to a sustained career in sport. What made me a high performer? When did I develop the traits of a high performer? My words will be neither astute nor finely wrapped, instead, they will be a wild foray into hopefully what becomes a deeper understanding of my own experiences in sport.  I’ll begin with a story. A memory that ha

        I am ready to stop pretending. I am ready to be honest; ready to reclaim my beauty, my story, my passion, and my voice. I am ready to wrestle with the truth, and that means standing face to face with the lies. I retired from field hockey six years ago, and I am finally ready to stop playing the game.  I am 36 years old and sitting at a table with my family in the ballroom at the Union League of Philadelphia. I’ve come here to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. This should be a happy moment but happy is not the right word to describe it. I don’t like the word happy. Happy is wrapped in deception and comes with a lot of baggage. It expects way too much from us. Decisive is a better word for this moment. It’s decisive because I feel something I’ve never felt before - I feel like myself.  I’m wearing a bright orange dress that I found on the sale rack at Kohl’s and earrings borrowed from my sister-in-law. I dyed my grey streak with a box of color from CVS the day before. All

          I remember the first lie I ever told. I was five years old. I can still feel the weight of that lie in my pocket. The lie was yellow, rectangular-shaped, and wrapped in plastic. It was called Chiclets Chewing Gum. Chiclets were the expensive, sparkling white, candy-coated gum, shaped like teeth and reserved in my young mind for the upper echelon of society.            Chiclet-chewers were glamorous thin wealthy white women with straight blond hair, long legs and sparkling smiles. Chiclet-chewers snapped their gum with effortless confidence. They didn’t ask for attention, they demanded it, and damn, they got it. Chiclet-chewers were desirable.            Suffice it to say, I wasn’t a Chiclet-chewer, and I wasn’t desirable. I was an over-sized awkward kid from a blue collar Catholic family in New Jersey with frizzy hair who wore hand-me-down clothes, sucked her thumb and drove around with my mom in a gigantic, ugly as hell Dodge Ram Van. I wasn’t allowed to chew gum, or drink s

To the generation who fought for Roe, I am sorry for not understanding sooner. Thank you for your gift. To the generation that comes next, I promise to fight with all the rage inside me.  We fight the same battles, over and over, decade after decade. And now, 53 years later, we find ourselves fighting a battle we thought we had won. We are fighting for a right that only a week ago was guaranteed to all of us.  I was on the phone with my sister on Friday morning when the news broke.  Oh my God, she said, Roe was overturned. Like actually, overturned. I can't believe it. There was a hushed knowing between us. A rushing in the veins. The slow rising of rage. Rage that had been tamed, taunted, pushed down, held back, silenced, dismissed. The rage of knowing that this was coming but not believing that it would actually come.  The rage of realizing, yet again, that we've been duped by the ones empowered to serve us. I am not sure how I expected to feel in that moment. I knew the deci