The secret is you keep showing up

I ran on a pretty good cross country team in high school, and maybe one that could have been great. That sounds like what many of us say when realizing we know now what we didn’t know then -- but the state championship we blew is actually something I’ve come to treasure.

My last fall season we had a new assistant coach, who showed up and figured that more yelling at the runners would be the motivation the Bulldogs needed to get over the top. It wasn’t. We didn’t get any better, and he lasted one season. The calm, collected and joyful head coach -- who now gets invited to weddings and funerals, had the school’s home course named after him, and recently returned from retirement to lead the team again at age 77, because he was needed -- stuck with us, just like he did for others over a few decades of coaching. And he did it, and loved us, even when we didn’t quite reach our potential or get the trophy he may have quietly craved.

My life was impacted deeply through four falls (cross country) and four springs (track and field) of being around Jess each day, and when I started volunteering with a youth track and field club in Bremerton more than a decade ago I thought of him often. I try to mimic a lot of his tactics. They are more about getting to know kids, ensuring that they want to return to the next practice and making running fun than they are about winning.

Winning does feel good, no doubt, and our team has done some of that. But I’ll never forget the founding coach of that Bremerton team, a guy named Tim Lavin, telling me that he most enjoyed all the little kids circling the coach at the end of a workout, still bouncy with energy, and counting down “1-2-3-Jaguars!” in unison to cap practice. Tim said that was heaven.

Unlike what the Apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians, Tim’s version of heaven did indeed come by works. For two or three evenings a week every spring and on all those long Saturdays, he, his wife Sue and the rest of us put off the yardwork at home or sitting on the coach to wait at the track for the seconds or minutes of competition. You deal with the parents and other coaches and the officials running a track and field meet, very little of which is a slice of heaven. You do it year after year. You keep showing up.

And doing all that doesn’t mean the team always listens to you, or likes you. One of my first roles was convincing 9-year-old girls to run 400 meters, which is one lap around the Memorial Stadium track. You can imagine how well they listened. I remember a coach with a little better insight into their world saying to me, “You don’t know how to talk to them, do you?” He was right, gave me a little encouragement, and I humbled myself and learned. And kept showing up.

I mentioned the Bible earlier, of course, because it’s hard to talk about coaching this week, when they eyes of the country were on Bremerton, without that context.

So I’ll leave you with this. The thing I like about Jesus, as one of those old Sunday School songs says, is that he loves the little children.

It’s time as a community to exhale very deeply. No matter which school you live near or your kids attend, maybe cheer a bit for the Knights, and their dedicated coaches, to have a memorable season for all the right reasons.