I remember feeling the trepidation in my chest. Even though I had seen it done successfully with everyone before me, there was still a lot of anxiety when it came to my turn because I wouldn’t be able to see the outcome until it became reality. My cousin was the one directing the exercise and of course I trusted my cousin, right? I stood on the picnic table with my heels on the edge. Listening to his instruction, I crossed my arms and closed my eyes. Stay stiff as a board. Don’t try to protect myself. Don’t brace for impact. Just fall backwards. I was fifteen. The mix of excitement and fear was difficult to distinguish from each other. But there I stood. My fellow counselors-in-training sounded giddy behind and below me. Many of them had already successfully passed this test. Their success didn’t lessen my nervousness. But then, after overthinking it, and overfeeling it, at some point that felt it took forever to get to, I finally did it. I let myself fall. I can remember the feeling in my stomach as I did, as it rose into my chest and throat. When my fellow counselors in training caught me, the elation was so much more than relief. It was joyful! I had never performed a trust fall before. It was a simple team building exercise for us as counselors-in-training at the Columbus Boys Camp, but it was something I came back to as I tried to build our first championship team at St. Pat’s.
It was pretty taboo to try and do that as a teacher with students. I knew everyone would be fine and that no one would get hurt. But unlike what we did at Columbus Boys Camp, I put in a little safety net in the form of a crash mat where the players would fall, just in case. We did it at the end of practice one afternoon when very few staff would be around. The players stood on a desk in the gym instead of on a picnic table. One by one they got up on the desk. I got to watch them as though I was watching myself a little more than a decade prior. Some made a scene out of it, wanting the little bit of extra attention while they had the stage. Others tried to act like it wasn’t a big deal. All of them expressed the same elated joy I experienced after they successfully allowed themselves to fall. To them, it seemed like an abstract exercise meant to build comraderie. That was until after everyone had gone and I brought it all back to the game. I explained what it meant for what we do as a team, and how it was vital to achieving our ultimate goal.
If we were going to put a gold-coloured banner on the wall, we were going to have to trust. Most often, we think of trust as a belief in something because we’ve become familiar with the outcome over repetition. We trust that we’re going to make our free throws because we make them all the time. We trust we’re going to work our tails off because we do every day in practice. But to realize this kind of trust, we’re going to have to gain a deeper understanding of what trust is. We’re going to have to realize that the truth of trust is that you have faith in an outcome that could go any which way. No matter how many free throws made before, you don’t actually know if you’ll make the next one. No matter how often we worked hard in practice, that, in and of itself, didn’t mean we would when it mattered. No amount of conditioning means perfection is guaranteed. The truth of trust is that it’s an act of faith and only after the outcome is realized will your trust be rewarded.
At St. Pat’s, we built our program on defense. The thing about defense though, is that you can never win just with great one-on-one defenders. Defense is a team game. You need to be able to rely on your teammates even when you can’t see what they’re doing. Offense is completely opposite. Facing the floor, you can most often see every one of your teammates in front of you, even if some of them are in your peripheral vision. On defense, each of us are focusing on the ball. So we don’t see that everyone is, where they’re supposed to be. We can use our voices to tell them where we are, or what role we’re fulfilling, but we have to trust what we can’t see. That in itself teaches us the most valuable lesson: trust is an inside job. You never know what will actually happen, whether it’s making a free throw, or allowing your man the drive so that they run into your teammate, all you can do is trust from within. Sometimes, our trust won’t be rewarded and we’ll be let down or disappointed. But if we let that guide us away from trust, we’ll never realize our ultimate goals. Championship level trust is an inside job, it’s something you have to choose for yourself. The reward of that trust is seeing what you believe become reality.