Rigor

“We do not apologize for our rigor here.” That’s how the president welcomes parents on day one to new student orientation at Carnegie Mellon University. Can’t you just hear a British accent dripping off a baritone voice? If you’re one of the exemplary 15% of high school applicants who gets an opportunity to attend there, sleep better not be high on your priority list.  And if you’re the parent of a student about to embark on the journey, you best leave your helicopter at home. They aren’t messing around. There’s no opening joke.  There’s no awkward drivel about the history of the place. No “Welcome!  Welcome!  Congratulations!” for producing such a prodigious child.  Just a clear cut, “You’d better get ready.”  A straightforward lay of the land.  

Retrieved from www.cappex.com

I pulled my shoulders back and sat up taller in my chair when I heard the story.  I can’t imagine how the parents in the room must have felt. An unapologetic promise of rigor… I didn’t know people made those anymore. Naked expectations not incased by bubble wrap--what a gift! In one tiny sentence, the parents in attendance were served notice for how things were going to go. They were given a frame for the next four years of their children’s lives, a spandex one that would stretch to contain whatever it might need to hold. Ironically, the rigor in the middle would be what would change the shape of things.

Immovable hard is like that. It makes our insides to grow.

When people ask me to talk about a favorite moment from coaching, the first one that always comes to mind is the moment I knew we were going to our first Final Four. I don’t think any coach anywhere forgets how that feels. But almost as quickly as I go there to Boise, Idaho in my head, I also go to Lawrence, Kansas in my heart. Both had different endings and yet each is tattooed on my soul.

In 2020, we all found ourselves at the base of a mountain we did not sign up to climb. Covid 19 popped up like a monolith in the middle of the freeway while we were all going one hundred miles an hour with our eyes everywhere but on the road.  We ran into it with our faces. What happened next was a bunch of really hard things.  For college athletes and coaches, the global pandemic meant (among many other things) trying to run and play basketball and teach and coach basketball in masks –to communicate and unite and fight and scratch and claw without touching--a concept at once as weird as it was hard. In addition, the rules surrounding play throughout the pandemic changed almost daily and most all of them contradicted one another. It was like walking through a giant haunted house with scary half-arms and chains mauling at us from the periphery while monsters were leaping out of the corners at every turn. You never knew what was coming and it all took your breath away.

Lawrence, Kansas is the hard that season I remember most. 

We had nine players on our roster going into the asterisk year, after opt-outs and injuries were factored in, but we were committed to piecing the year together. The NCAA allowed conferences to do what they needed to do to try to get their league games in, so the Big 12 started prior to Christmas. In early December, we opened on the road at Kansas, but we entered the hall of horrors on the day before we left.

In the days of the Covid season, we had a cotton swab stuffed up our nose every single morning. About an hour of purgatory then followed as we waited for the results to come back about who could and could not play. On the day we were to depart for Lawrence, about an hour after testing, I got the call that one of our point guards had tested positive.  This set contact tracing into motion where it was determined that our leading scorer, her roommate, had been within striking distance and as such she, additionally, would not be allowed to play.  That knocked us down to seven.  Our trainers then began to comb through practice film to attempt to determine whether or not anyone else had been endangered.  One coach was sidelined as she had watched film with the player who tested positive. One manager was sidelined as he had dinner with her. We had what we had-- two coaches and me--so we ducked our heads and started to map out a way to win. About 15 minutes into the conversation, our trainer came in with more bad news.

Our post player had been wrapping Christmas presents with the point guard, so she would be out, too.  Uh oh. We were down to six. We thought the threshold for competition was seven but were reminded by the conference office that even though the rule was created to read “six scholarship players” and not six players total, there was no addendum put in, so we would need to play. As I gathered the staff, I got the call that our strength coach had tested “inconclusive” and would be assumed positive until after a nasopharyngeal test which could not reveal results before we were to leave. That news meant another pre-game change and fewer hands on deck.  We took a deep breath, walked through a new defensive strategy, and added a couple of offensive wrinkles for the way we would have to play.  

 Then we were off to Kansas, my little band of ballers and me with “Maybe” on our minds.

Retrieved from www.twofishleland.com

 We took the floor at Phog Allen Fieldhouse, fought our guts out with six--four freshmen, no post, and zero experience at point guard--and we had the lead as we entered the last four minutes of the game.  Unfortunately, a couple of critical turnovers down the stretch did us in.  One player who had been precariously playing with four fouls finally fouled out.  We ended the game with the five we had who were still allowed to play, and when the final buzzer blew and Kansas had more points than we did, our six raced off the floor to fall apart.

The post-game locker room was filled with audible sobs, the kind that come from someplace deep inside you that you didn’t know you had.  Our six were devastated. I tried to tell them that as bad as the devastation felt, it would be good in a forever kind of way. This is what it feels like, I told them, when you throw your whole heart in the ring, and knowing you can do that will change the course of your lives. I told them that they would grow more from their valiant fighting that night than from any other single thing that might happen that year, regardless of the numbers that were glowing in Allen Fieldhouse, displaying the final score.  

The rigor of the undertaking made our insides double in size.

I didn’t like the way the game ended any more than my players did, but I’ve never been prouder of a group in my life. It’s one of my favorite memories from a file full of 25 years. The 48 hour gauntlet gave us walls to run into that would shape what we could become.

I hope Carnegie Mellon never apologizes for the rigor. As a matter of fact, I hope they put their promise on a billboard and shine lights on it at night. I’ve never known anything better for getting things to grow.

P.S. “Maybe” the Pig