Spilled Over

Hi. I am terrified of this format. So, let that be a warning.

Every year I wait a little after the new year to start on my resolutions, sometimes a day or two and sometimes… February 8. This Substack is this year’s resolution / putting some stuff out into the world. I’ll start with a story of frustration.

On Wednesday, I was working with one of our defensive players on some serving. Before spring break this year, we are doing some one-on-one training. I don’t love it as a way to get better specifically, but our players feel so good about the hour a week they get that I think it’s functional (maybe more on that another time). Anyway, if you have never been to Jake Nevin Field House, it is a practice site that is in public. Off of the gym floor are offices for compliance, student services, track and field, women’s soccer, baseball, golf, both lacrosses, and one athletic training room. There are athletes, coaches, and staff walking around the gym during practice all the time. It is one of the things I’ve become used to at Villanova—though I don’t always manage it well. After practice, our gym becomes a rec gym for intramural and club sports; because of this, a number of non-varsity athletes will be around the gym as well. Occasionally, we will have to remind someone that we are in fact in practice. The questions from randoms about what time practice is going to end are an annoyance that drives most of us batty. My old response was to ask them back, “Would you ask Jay Wright the same question?” With Jay gone now, it isn’t as fun. So, as I am giving some feedback on serving, a group of women’s soccer athletes are headed from their coach’s office to the training room on the opposite corner of the gym. They know the deal and are walking around, but just ahead of them is a guy. He doesn’t seem like he’s a Villanova athlete, but I am not sure. He is wearing a brown coat, not too tall, with over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones on and his phone occupying his stare.

What I liked that I did that day was give a cue to our servers that I’ll continue to work on. If the antennae is from the net white red then white (going up) then our goal is for the ball to pass the net at the level of the red and the second white. And I’m convinced that very few athletes can hit it hard enough to get the ball to pass the net at that height and still hit it out, but I have a literature degree and so that math seems too much right now. But that’s what we were trying to do. She was serving well when along comes this guy with the headphones and phone. And he walks right from the space between the two courts in our gym out onto the court. He’s oblivious, now fortunately for him he wasn’t struck with the ball. What he was struck with was a verbal assault from me. I lost it.

Remember I am used to this stuff in our gym, and my temperament in practice is very chill. I haven’t had an anger spell in a long time. I just survived a cardiac arrest in June, what could there be to be mad about. So, out came a few F bombs and I scared the poor kid out of his mind. Another one of my players watching said that she would’ve cried had it been her, but that she wouldn’t ever do it again. Regardless I was embarrassed and felt awful. I couldn’t apologize as I didn’t start feeling regret until he had gone. I apologized to the women’s soccer players who watched and to my team who was there. And later I thought of this, which I read to my team at some point:

You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere.

Why did you spill the coffee?

“Because someone bumped into me!!!”

Wrong answer.

You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup.

Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea.

*Whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out.*

Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It’s easy to fake it, until you get rattled.

*So we have to ask ourselves... “what’s in my cup?”*

I don’t know where I got this , but it reminded me that I wasn’t really upset about this guy walking across the gym floor. And that I needed to deal with those things quickly if I wanted to do a good job with my team. So, this weekend my son and I made veggie chili. I made a blueberry pie that I wouldn’t recommend eating. I finished a great novel. And I’m trying to let go of two jobs that aren’t mine: one I turned down and one I didn’t get a call on. I’m forgiving myself for the former and acknowledging I have no control over the latter.

The chili, on the other hand, is delicious.