KFW

Excited to get back on the court with my team next weekend! @TBWexposure @JWadeBoggs @OHS_LadyPatsBB @Bshiftyhoops @MEnhancing

👉It will never get easier. 💥What will happen is you will handle hard better! 💪💪💪

@KaleighnRich_29 @HamlineWBB Good luck! Go get better!

Good luck and safe travels to those competing across the country this weekend! 📍 Drop those schedules - our staff will be watching! 👀🍿🏀 #goHU

Stay strong kid! You are amazing and God has the perfect plan!

“Too many kids today are afraid of failure.” - Doug Collins What happens when kids never learn to fail? They quit when it gets hard. Because no one let them practice getting back up.

Another reason not to take them!

What begins as intention becomes character through repetition.

In order to lead and succeed, you must be willing to be uncomfortable. You must be able to hold yourself, and others, accountable. Growth doesn’t happen in the comfort zone. Your job is to grow people and that growth comes with a cost. I’m reminded of Kirby Smart’s 3 Cost of Great Leadership: 1) You will have to make hard decisions that negatively affect the people you care about 2) You will be disliked despite your best attempts to do the best for the most 3) You will be misunderstood and won’t always have the opportunity to defend yourself. Leadership costs, and it’s expensive, but it’s crucial for growth & success. Do what’s best for your people and help them to grow in every area. It’s your responsibility & duty to do so. Set the standard. Help others to Rise to the Standard!

❤️

The standard is always set by @dawnstaley 👏

Winning isn’t what you collect. It’s what you carry- Forever.

Play multiple sports!

SMH!

Character wins over talent in the long run EVERY TIME! Bank it!

Talent is great, but there’s always gonna be someone with more. If you don’t know how to utilize that talent, then it’s a waste to have. You must have more. It takes pillars to lead to success. For me personally, it’s: Discipline Accountability Relentless Effort Toughness Service It’s trying to live with those every day. If you don’t have something to implement or someway to maximize your talent, you won’t achieve what you’re capable of. How are you maximizing your talent?? What are you doing extra to improve?? I love Herb Brooks’ comment, “You don’t have enough talent to win on talent alone.” It takes more. It’s taking that talent, however much it may be, and improving on it every single day. You can have talent, but if you don’t have heart, toughness, a relentless pursuit, you won’t be able to overcome adversity when it hits. It’s putting the Team over Yourself. Great teams work together. Great teams know how to utilize and maximize the talent they have. Great teams know it’s not about one person, no matter how talented they are. It’s finding ways to serve the team the best way you can. Take your talent. Work on it daily. Develop the intangibles. Maximize that talent with a selfless attitude. That’s how you truly become great.

This can't be said enough!

If you’ve never cried after giving everything you had to something that mattered, you’ve probably never given everything you had to something that mattered. The UCONN women’s basketball team was undefeated, 38-0 for the season. But with a little over a minute left in their final four matchup against South Carolina, Kayleigh Heckel went up for a lay-up to cut the score to 9 and keep alive a tiny bit of hope. She missed. The camera zooms in on Heckel as she drops her head and tears began to flow. It was a harsh moment of realizing that the dream was over. In 2024, Keisei Tominaga was captured crying on the sidelines with a minute left when his Nebraska team lost to Texas A&M in the tournament. Back in 2006, Adam Morrison had a similar reaction with a few seconds left, after Gonzaga had blown a 17 point lead in the sweet sixteen. Will all due respect to Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own, there is crying in sport. A lot of it. And contrary to some of the talk on social media, it’s the opposite of weakness. It’s a clear signal of a genuine competitor. We cry because we care. Tears are proof of our investment. Psychologist Ad Vingerhoets at Tilburg University has spend decades studying crying. He found that humans are the only species that cries emotionally. And the primary reason we do it is it acts s a kind of communicative device. Tears signal to others that something matters deeply to us and we need support. It’s as if the tears are saying, “this thing matters to me more than I can say.” As a coach, I’ve seen the toughest of competitors, athletes who are among the best in the country or even the world, break down from time to time. It’s one of the beautiful things about sport. For many reasons, it’s one of the few areas where we let the guard down, show what we really feel, and express genuine emotion. Sometimes, that means tears of joy, other times a crushing bitter disappointment that we can’t quite process. This is especially true for men, who often try to be stoic, thanks to a combination of culture and biology. Yet, in the days before memes Morrison might as well have become one, as he “got murdered for it” and was “kind of shocked by how much negative feedback” he received. Heckel’s been met with a mixture of support and the sadly expected condemnation. Those people are clueless. From the sidelines, it may look like a weakness because you’ve never been in those moments. You’ve never given your all to something, risked greatness, and saw that dream get ripped away. When you step into the arena, you put it all on the line. And in sport, music, and performance arts, one of the few places that are the last bastions of reality. You can’t fake it, it’s all there to see, and there’s a clearly defined success or failure. You have to care deeply to even be in that spot in the first place. No one made it anywhere close to fulfilling their potential, let alone the pinnacle of their endeavor by not caring. That kind of nonchalance is reserved for the sideline. It’s the cool kid in high school who tries to convince others not trying is the cool thing to do. All so they can protect their ego and say, “I would have gotten an A, made the team, won the tournament, if I had tried…” Caring is cool. It’s also the only way you see how good you can be. Our brain has a kind of internal safety mechanism that prevents us from ever truly pushing to our limit. And for good reason. If a marathoner really ran out of glycogen or let their core body temperature keep rising, then serious illness or death awaits. Instead, we run a kind of inner calculation that says: is the juice worth the squeeze? Caring deeply is what allows us to push just a bit harder. It tells that safety mechanism, “Ya, we’re in a lot of discomfort right now, but this means a lot, so give us a little bit longer of a leash.” So if I ever saw someone crying after a tough race, I knew that was an athlete I wanted on my team. It meant they cared. It meant the moment meant so much to them, that they could no longer put on a face, or hold things back. It meant more to them than they could verbally communicate. We need more people with passion, who are willing to risk it all, to be have the emotions of the moment overwhelm them. It’s only by stepping into the arena and taking that risk that we find out how good we can be, and more importantly, who we are. The potential for tears is the price of admission. Morrison got murdered for crying in 2006. Tominaga said it should be celebrated in 2024. He was right. -Steve

grateful for this team 💙