Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Motivational Minute - October 10, 2007

I am reading a book right now called The Man Watching about Anson Dorrance, the women's soccer coach here at UNC. You have probably heard of him. Since I have been here, I have had the opportunity to speak to him and to listen to him speak. This is a great book and I want to read you a brief passage from it. It is about Mia Hamm, who you may also have heard about before. Mia was on the US National team before she came to play soccer here at Carolina for Coach Dorrance.

Mia Hamm was nervous. She was sweating profusely sitting across the desk from her coach. It was the goal-setting meeting at the beginning of her sophomore year, and she felt woefully unprepared. She had been through these things before, and she knew what the critical question would be, but she had yet to figure out the right answer. Stalling for time, she spoke first, and her coach nodded a few times and waited patiently for Hamm to take a breath. Then he leaned over the desk, stared her down with his piercing blue eyes, and asked what he always asks, "Mia, what do you want?" Hamm had a million things swirling through her mind, but she didn't want to give him a dumb answer. "Ummmmmm, to be a good soccer player?"
"Can you be a little more specific than that?"
Hamm cautiously threw out some numbers about the goals and assists she'd like to accumulate that season and then immediately began questioning herself. "Are those too high...Too low?"
"But what do you really want?"
Hamm was dumbstruck. She couldn't think of anything to say. Suddenly, instinct took over and she blurted out, "To be the best." It sounded as much like a question as a statement, but Hamm still couldn't believe what she had just said. The words sounded crazy to her, but the more she thought about them, the more she realized that they were sincere. She sat in her chair, silently waiting for her coach to tell her to be serious.
"Do you know what the best is?"
Once again Hamm sat there clueless, perspiring and praying that the question was rhetorical. Finally Dorrance stood up and walked around the desk behind Hamm. He flipped the light switch off. The two sat in darkness for a moment. Then Dorrance flipped the lights back on. "It's just a decision, a light-switch decision," the coach said. "That's all it takes, but you have to make that decision every single day. You can't make it today and then say, 'Whew, glad that's over.' You have to make it tomorrow and the next day and the day after that for the rest of your career."
"I guess deep down I wanted to be great, but I had no idea what that really meant when I first said it in the meeting," Hamm says now. "On that day being the best became something tangible, no longer abstract. It would require a huge commitment made up of a series of smaller efforts."


Hamm went on to become the greatest player in the history of women's soccer. She graduated from UNC after leading the team to four NCAA titles. She became one of the most famous women athletes in the world, an iconic symbol of women's sports. She was named the FIFA World Player of the Year the first two times that award was given.

This meeting with Dorrance was a seminal moment in Hamm's career, a moment where she could have gone one way or another with her career, and she chose to become the greatest player ever. Is there someone on this team who is going to become the greatest swimmer ever? Maybe, I don't know. I wish you each could see the goals that you have set for yourselves. All of you came in with goals that are set pretty high. If this group achieves those goals, we will be the best Senior group in the state of North Carolina. To top that off, it is possible that some of you sold yourselves short and didn't set your goals high enough! When you set those goals, you have to figure out what you need to do to achieve it. And that's our job - to help you realize what it takes. That's why we are on top of things like attendance, why we are trying to get the best effort out of you every single day - because you all have set your goals very high and have ambitions to be truly great in this sport. More than one person on this team told me they wanted to make it to the Olympics. That is a fantastic goal, but it doesn't happen without making that light-switch decision. From here on out, every time you have to make a decision to take a step toward your goal or not take a step, you need to take the step to be as good as you said you wanted to be.
The excerpt about Mia Hamm is a great example of an athlete who was already at an elite level deciding to become the best. Mia Hamm was already near the top of her sport before she came to play for Coach Dorrance at UNC, but she had to make that light switch decision to become the best player in the world. Whether your goal is to become the greatest swimmer ever or to be an Olympian or to just go two seconds faster than your best time, you have to make the same decision. Whether you make the decision every day or not will determine whether you reach your goal.

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