character

I’ve been gone and I apologize! I have a good reason. I’ve spent two weeks with JFK High School at their football camp. I’ve previously mentioned that I am the volunteer strength/conditioning coach as well as the running backs coach. It’s been quite an education. My high school football experience at Collegiate (about 35 years ago) was not adequate preparation for this experience.

The first week was 10 hour days in the rain with young men who are coming back from a 1 and 8 season record. There is a completely new new coaching staff. The second week consisted of 14 hour days in the heat at Monticello, New York. I was reminded why I was there when one of the boys told me he didn’t know Monticello was part of New York since New York consisted of “the three boroughs.”

We’ve got players who dream of stardom in the NFL and players like MK who joined the team in this, his senior year, because he wanted “to do something fun, stay out of trouble, and not be like my gangster brothers.” They don’t have a list of colleges they want to attend, they haven’t taken the SAT, most of them would be the first in their families to attend college, and they don’t have a lot of role models for success – inside or or out of school.

The nights for the coaches consisted of film study, chewing tobacco, a LOT of profanity and sausage sandwiches at 2am. I did the film study and sausage sandwiches ( and I still lost two pounds! – perhaps I can write “The Football Coaches Diet?”). My 9 year-old son was a trooper and witness to this “man thing.”  Times like this make me even more happy that I left the professional lie that I was living.  During the day, I got to practice what I had learned from books, DVD’s, “Remember the Titans,” “Friday Night Lights” and YouTube about what it means to be a football coach. My preparation didn’t prepare me to talk the boys through their tears of pain and frustration, the need for my Reiki skills, the need for mediation and bouncer skills, and the fact that the Emotional Freedom Technique would be accepted and welcomed by tough teens from the Bronx.

I have a new respect for the game and its potential to develop and reveal character.
To play at a high level requires incredible amounts of self-discipline and focus. There is a need to surrender your ego to accomplish a greater good. If you want to succeed, you must be persistent and learn to deal with adversity. At its best (and please don’t tell my fellow coaches that I said this) it’s learning how to trust and to love.

The boys at Kennedy work so hard to improve at the game. Their cynicism would melt from their game faces and an audience would gather when I or any of the other coaches talked about our lives and our journey to manhood. They were so kind to my son – teaching him the “proper” way to do a “soul handshake;” correcting his form when he threw the football; listening to his plans to breed mice; thanking him for his help with drills and providing water; and in one case, a player sharing that, like my son, he was also named for a character from Norse mythology. In his case, his mother expecting a girl, named him after Thor’s daughter! This revelation was overheard and he was the source of teasing but he felt the cost of the disclosure was worth the benefit of gaining common ground. So many of these young men are incredible and deserve much more than life has planned for them. I hope I’m able to tilt at this windmill for at least this season.

I should be doing more of the work on my bill-paying coaching business but right now, this volunteer coach thing is working for me. So on my way to being a rich and famous leadership and life coach, I’ve found something else to keep me in the ranks of the army that continues to fight “The Long Defeat.”

My adventure now includes a role as a volunteer high school football coach.  In fact, my posts haven’t been as regular as I’d like because of the “two-a-days” being conducted at the high school’s field in the Bronx.  This post is not going to be profound.  In writing it I get to be a little wistful, a little amazed, and a lot frustrated by the experience.

Each time I show up to the school, I enter into an unapologetic man’s world.  It’s one of sweat, profanity, chewing tobacco, childish humor, and talk of the glory days long past.  My own football glory days were limited as my high school had only enough personnel to field a team for two of my high school years.  With the recent revelations about the brain injuries that football can cause, I now believe that my truncated career was a blessing.  But I now get to engage in mature reflections about the game and at the same time improve my cognitive function by learning its intricacies.

I’m working as the strength coach and assistant running back coach at one of the largest high schools in New York City.  Their four-year graduation rate is under 30%.  Despite the challenges, a group of 45 young men show up in the summer for ten hours of daily character-building.  In between sprints, pushups, and blocking schemes they are directed to pull up their pants, eliminate the use of the “N word,” to support each other, and to “finish strong.”  These tough teenagers look you in the eyes, thank brand new coaches for their advice, and begin to figure out that they should have a cause bigger than themselves.

They don’t know, that despite this work ethic they are developing, that their life choices are being unfairly limited by people they have never met and by circumstances that they had no hand in creating.

This coming weekend is football camp in upstate New York.  I’m taking my 9 year-old son with with me but it still means time away from family, close living conditions with the other coaches who are not in touch with their feminine side in the same way that I am (and who also happen to be strong, engaging male figures for these boys), and time away from the marketing that is critical for my fledgling leadership coaching business.  However, there are men to build – 45 African-American, Dominican, West Indian, Puerto Rican, and Russian teens who deserve to get a little traction on the path to the people they deserve to become and who are fighting against incredible odds.  Stay tuned.