(editor’s note: Article originally written in March of 2022)
I had the pleasure of speaking with the boys basketball team at my old high school.
Please click here to listen to the 2-minute audio version of this article from the Success is a Choice podcast network.
I’m very proud of them and their coach Jeff Turner (he was my JV coach). In fact, they won the conference title this year.
As I was talking to the guys, it hit me out of the blue that this was 2022 and my team won the championship in 1992.
Despite 5 out of 4 people being bad at math, this was fairly simple for me to compute all by myself that it had been 30 years since we won.
Wow! I’m getting old.
As a sports guy I know there’s no such thing as an unbeatable opponent.
But I’ve got to say, Father Time is undefeated!
30 years since the Jonesville Comets were picked last in the Big 8 preseason poll but then lost only one conference game en route to winning the title.
Our group of 6 seniors (Chad Benson, Pat Dempsey, Paul Lyons, Marty McKitterick, Jason Walker, and yours truly) had come a long way since we won ONLY five games TOTAL during our middle school years.
Sure, we added some valuable pieces to our core group of seniors but still, nobody outside of our circle thought we’d be much.
The great motivational speaker, salesman, and author Zig Ziglar used to say, “A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else, thought they could.”
Don’t get me wrong, we believed we could do something special, but we also needed a coach that believed in us and would work to develop us.
We needed someone to maximize our strengths and minimize our weaknesses.
It was important for us to have a leader that not only told us where we could end up but show us how to get there.
The 2015 University of Central Florida football team was horrific. They went 0-12. They didn’t win a single game.
Two years later, UCF went undefeated winning all 13 of their games.
They had 51 players that played on both teams.
Sometimes we just need to spend more time developing the potential of the people we already have.