Roleplayers

For some reason, in sporting circles, the term “role players” has some mixed connotations. For coaches, we love it; we preach that everyone has a role to play, and for us to be successful, everybody has to play their role to perfection. For players, it is a different story. Everybody wants to be Michael, LeBron, Kobe. Nobody aims to be a facilitator. Why be the guy who performs effortless chest passes to the star in the lane, when you could be the stud windmill-dunking it and lighting up the highlight reel? Nobody wants to be the guy who passes; they want to be the star that dominates.

The same is true in football. The Lord blessed me with great size from an early age, which meant I had “lineman” stamped on my forehead since birth. I loved playing offensive line, because that was my personality and archetype, but it isn’t a role for everybody. You rarely touch the ball. Your name is never in the newspapers. If you stink, everyone knows it. If you do your job perfectly well, your runningback or quarterback gets all of the credit. The less your name is called, the better job you’re doing. It certainly isn’t a job for those who’re seeking glory, as so many young athletes so often are. For me, I just wasn’t good at throwing, catching, or carrying the ball; blocking and protecting just felt right for me. I’m cuddly like that.

So many years later, now a coach in charge of training athletes, trying to convince a young person to NOT be the star is one of the hardest parts of the job. I’m asking players to step out of the spotlight, swallow their pride, and let someone else shine. I need five, minimum, offensive linemen, plus several back-ups in training, in order to move the ball. Let one, two, maybe three stars shine while the rest of the team are simply there to make them look good. To serve roles.

Like I said, my heart goes out to my big brethren on the O-line, but my story here is not about them; it’s about a star who listened and chose not to be a star for the betterment of his team.

In 2015, I was at Saluda High School in Saluda, South Carolina. A young man named Stewart Young was the head coach; he was young, enthusiastic, and in his second year as a head coach. I have worked for a number of head coaches, and despite his young age and lack of experience at the time, he was and still remains the best head coach I’ve ever worked for. For a number of reasons, he will always have my eternal respect. That year, he hired me on to take over his big nasties while his old O-line coach, a fantastic coach in his own right, needed to concentrate on being the offensive coordinator and playcaller. They had only won two games in his previous year, but with Young’s leadership and the players coming back, we were in a unique position of making incredible forward strides in the upcoming season.

We had an incredible runningback in Malik, a well-seasoned field general at QB named Forrest, a duo of incredible wide receivers, a large and talented O-line coached by yours truly, and a number of talented role-players to create a very potent scoring machine that took us to eleven wins and a state championship semi-finals appearance for three years in a row (and a State Championship victory in Stewart’s fifth year there). One of those role players was a Senior named Tyrell.

Tyrell was listed in the program as wide receiver and DB, but he hadn’t been in the program long and hadn’t really established himself in any position, really. He couldn’t catch as well as our two starting receivers. He wasn’t an every down back like Malik was. While he could throw (he had a cannon of an arm throwing downfield), he wasn’t accurate and had no touch, so Forrest’s reliability made him the preferred starter at QB. What Tyrell was, and there was no denying this… the kid was fast. He could flat fly. Few could hang onto him in a straight-up footrace. He sat in this athletic purgatory for us; he wasn’t great enough at one thing to specialize in any one position, but he was too fast, too athletic, too good at carrying the ball to waste away as a back-up. Stewart knew, one way or another, this kid needed to be involved, and involved in a major capacity.

It was also around that time that Anna and I were, with considerable difficulty, trying to have kids. It was emotionally tumultuous, but with a great deal of patience and prayers, the Lord blessed us with Lucas and Logan. I figured why shoot for base-hits when you can knock it out of the park, am I right? Honestly, it came as no surprise; Anna’s family notoriously comes in pairs. Here we find the genesis of these musings, that raising infant, then toddler, and now young child-aged boys is similar… nay… embarrassingly identical to coaching hormonal teenage prima-donnas.

Before we had the boys, Anna and I sat down with a pen and a legal pad and listed out a number of things we had to agree upon before we started growing our family. One was that I couldn’t be a journeyman of coaching different sports anymore; I had to pick one. The other was that she would, without reservation, want to stay home with them. At this time, she was undoubtedly the bread-winner (I was, after all, an underappreciated public school educator), so we had an understanding that when the time came, she would be giving her career up in favor of staying home and raising the kids. It was easy to put on paper, but that is undoubtedly a commitment that is… well, it’s easy to say, but a lot harder to put into practice.

When Anna puts her mind to something, she means it. From the moment we put pen to legal pad, we started saving. Investing. Jumping into real estate. Dabbling in the market. Started couponing folders (a hobby Anna dove head-first into). Anna started a business. Then another. All in the design of being able to stay at home, work from home, and be readily available for these beautiful boys whenever God saw fit to give them to us. And when the boys came, that is exactly what we did.

Now bless that woman: we were just home and situated when Spring Practice came around, and she smiled and let me go. For this and many reasons, Anna is a freakin’ superhero to me. But I returned to teaching, returned to coaching, returned to living a mature and adult life. She said goodbye to adult interaction. Yes, she worked from her pajamas, but those pajamas were always stained with baby food and vomit. I would come home in the evenings and see Anna, blood-strained eyes, begging for conversation and attention, deprived of mature human connection. And, many times, she longed for solitude, having to be at the beck and call of needy twin newborns every second of the day leaving no time for independent reflection and solace.

Now, I (by no means) mean to judge or condemn anyone for their life choices; everyone’s circumstance are different. But we chose to sit down and plan, to the best of our ability, what our values and priorities were and how best to achieve them. Anna was adamant about breastfeeding, feeling that it was the most natural and healthy way to help our babies grow. Now that is, by itself, a sacrifice for just one child. To do it for two simultaneously is a Sisyphean task, if there ever was one. Anna and I both were all for not sticking them in some childcare system; my mom stayed home with me, and I stayed healthy and loved, and I wanted the same for my boys. Anna didn’t want some latchkey situation going home, so we were both committed to one of us being home with them at all times, usually Anna in all her superheroism. We both had a litany of moral and ethical requirements we wanted for the boys, and thankfully, we had it all situated before the boys came into this world. But it required sacrifice, and it required an understanding of what our roles would be. We had to stick to them; we had to be rolepayers.

Tyrell understood this. I have limitless examples of times where I, or a coach of equal measure, asked a kid to do something for the team that he would rather not do. Most of them involve asking players to be offensive linemen; nobody wants to be told that they aren’t athletic enough to catch or throw or carry the ball, and most think of being stamped “lineman” as an insult to your athleticism (in reality, it requires the most players and the most depth of any other position, which is why the need is so high). For Tyrell, on any other football team in the state, he would have been in contention for starting quarterback. Or starting receiver. Or starting runningback. But in this situation, what we needed most was for him to play all of them. At the same time.

Our quarterback was a game manager who knew the offense like the back of his hand, but he had stone feet and couldn’t move in the pocket. Malik had D1-caliber potential, but he was coming off ACL surgery from the year before; his back-up was our starting middle linebacker, so we needed depth at RB. At wide receiver, we had amazing talent, but a slot receiver who could stretch the field could change our offense completely. So Stewart had to sit Tyrell down and sell this to him: you wouldn’t start at any one position, but instead, you would have to learn and play them all.

And he did. Amazingly.

Against our local rival in a contest of juggernauts, we found ourselves in an uncontested scoring battle. Our defense couldn’t stop their potent, balanced attack. Our offense needed to show up, and at the start of the second quarter, we played our trump card, and Tyrell stepped in at quarterback with our offense backed up inside our 18. The play was real simple: QB sweep to the left. We don’t fake anything, just catch the snap and run left. Tyrell scampered 82 yards for the touchdown. And that was the story for the rest of the night. Forrest would come in and do an adequate job, and in comes Tyrell to take the head off the top. We beat our rival that day for the first time in a very long time, a signature win for Stewart so early in his career.

That was simply one example. There were many defenses confounded by Tyrell on quarterback sweeps, reverses, double passes, jet sweeps, end-arounds, rocket sweeps, everything. And, on occasion, when defenses thought they could crowd the box to stop him from running, he would show off that cannon. His numbers were rarely astounding, because he was never the primary option at any position. But without fail, when his number was called, he stepped up. There were many factors in jump-starting Stewart Young’s rebuild of Saluda High School in 2015. I’d like to think that I had a part to play, but that isn’t accurate. I simply played my role, hopefully as well as Tyrell played his.

Which, for the record, was breathtaking.

Parenting, especially co-parenting, involves a number of different roles, as well. I will never disparage a single-parent household. I think a mother who can raise her children successfully without a man is awe-inspiring. But let’s not pretend for one second that this was the preferred method, that this was somehow by design. Can a woman (or a man, for that matter) raise children by herself? Absolutely, and she can do it well. But I will never be convinced a family is better without a good, Godly, hard-working man and a loving, caring woman. Anna had to be mother; there’s no doubt in that. She was also bookkeeper, finance manager, investment banker, grocery shopper, nurse, doctor, comedienne, juggler, clown, chef, scientist, therapist, clerk. The list goes on. There wasn’t a hat that she didn’t wear.

I mean, I did my share, too. I played my roles, especially that clown one. But I’ll never forget the hero my wife was in that time. We played our roles together, but there’s no doubt: she was the MVP. But I was there to pick her up whenever she got weak, to let her rest when she was tired, to support her whenever and however she needed. I worked up to twelve-hour shifts at times to provide for my family financially, but I didn’t come close to the 24-hour shifts that Anna pulled every day.

Here’s the greatest lesson I learned from this time in my life: while we all have to play our roles, the most important role I could play was “husband”, just as her most important role was “wife”. Trying to have babies, then the pregnancy, then the actual having of the babies… Anna needed me to be provider, caretaker, butler, personal shopper, very amateur chef; she needed all of these things. But she needed me to be husband most of all. Again, a single parent can raise a child independent of a partner very effectively, but why would you? If you had the chance to share these burdens (… I mean, blessings) with someone you love, someone who loves you in return, isn’t that better for everyone involved? My wife understands that I love her, that I support her, that she can rely on me (even if I can be dumb and immature from time to time). My kids see not only an example of what a man is and should be, but they see the example of how a man should love a woman, what a healthy relationship with a partner should look like. Luke and Logan see us fight and see us struggle. But they also see us kiss, and snuggle (again, I’m very cuddly); they see us work through these things together.

When Anna was overwhelmed, something that parenting can often do to you, what she needed from me was to be a supportive husband. And I’ve lost count of how often she has been that supportive wife to me. I may be the Christian head of our household, but she is definitely the strength and heart of it.

I will always respect Tyrell for being able to sacrifice some of that spotlight so that he could be what we needed, when we needed it. I will always revere Stewart Young for recognizing that Tyrell’s was a talent that couldn’t be wasted and for showing me how to use the talent we had, change the gameplan to use the tools at our disposal. And always and forever, I will love my wife for giving me two beautiful baby boys, and for managing so many roles with grace. In order to be successful in anything, everyone must selflessly play their roles.

The end result is always worth it. On the field, hugging those players after every victory made it worth it for me. And here at home, those results just hugged me around the neck and asked me for a snack. They’re worth everything.