In psychology it’s called the Doorway Effect. It happens to everyone. You’ve got an idea in your head, something you’re focused on and want to accomplish. You get up, motioning your body forward in the direction that will accomplish it, but then something happens. You walk through a doorway to the place you sought and all of a sudden, you can’t remember what brought you there. For those desperately clasping onto what brought them there, this can be a frustrating, all too common experience. For others, this problem becomes an opportunity, so long as they are open to the present and what lays before them. When all is said and done there is often a clarity to the events that have come to pass that most likely, you didn’t conceive of beforehand. You may even be able to look back and see how things came together in such delicate balance and wonder how it could have aligned so perfectly. And yet it has. And yet, despite having had a different plan beforehand, despite your focus being elsewhere, somehow things fell serendipitously into place, exactly as they were meant to.
When players make a team, be it their high school team, a university program or get drafted by a professional team, they think they’ve made it. They think just getting there was the final destination. For many, that is the goal they have set in their hearts, and everything they have done, all the hours of practice and training they put in, all the people they sought out to help them on their way, all led them just to get here. And when they finally do arrive, they think now they can breathe out, now they can put their feet up. At the opposite end of the process, the coach that put their name on the team list, the university assistant that recruited them, or the GM that drafted them, may have had a slightly different view of what lay beyond the door. Both sides looking at the future with plans for what it may look like, as if through a keyhole, but never really seeing what lay beyond.
For the player, making the team, or getting drafted is often the achievement. They don’t realize that all they’ve done is open that door. That what happens when they walk through it, offers them much more than what they can conceive of. How the players, the coaches and the circumstances to come will help shape them into something they weren’t able to see before entering. The coaches and organization also experiencing this, never truly know what they are getting when they invited that player in. Sometimes the player gets the opportunity they sought, or the staff get the player they recruited or drafted, and nothing more. But every so often something magical happens. Every so often, a university team recruits a high school kid and it changes the direction of the program and the coach forever. Every so often a university picks up a kid off the transfer list and the process leads both to more than they imagined. Every so often an NBA team drafts a little known 18-year-old kid from Greece and he not only leads them to a championship but builds up the little community that has welcomed him in.
When we look back we’re able to put the pieces together and understand how it all makes perfect sense. It’s like looking at the back of a math textbook for the answer and upon seeing it, the lightbulb going off, begging the question, “how could you have missed it?”. We see how the scrawny 5’9” point guard had just the right coach to land him at a university would do so much more than build a program around his defensive prowess. We see how that kid wouldn’t just lead the coach to successes he’d never experienced before, those successes would open other doors that the coach only dreamed of. We see how a highly touted player choosing a perennial powerhouse in the NCAA and it not working out, being a blessing instead of a failing. How things not working out there would develop a grit in him that he’d carry to his next team when he transferred universities. How that grit would make him a lethal threat in crunch time and he’d used that not only to help them bring home a Big XII championship, but also fuel himself through a grueling pre-draft process where he wasn’t even a consideration at first, to finally being drafted by one of the NBA’s historic franchises. We can see how in 2013, as David Stern conducted his last draft in his role as the NBA’s commissioner, a kid from half the world away that no one had heard of seven months earlier, all of a sudden was stolen ahead of schedule and drafted fifteenth to the Milwaukee Bucks. How that kid, who was not a highly touted prospect, found a home in one of the NBA’s smallest markets and did more than bring an NBA championship to it 8 years after being drafted, he helped build its community.
Sometimes, you walk through the door for one reason, but end up somewhere you couldn’t have imagined. And that might be the greatest blessing you never could’ve asked for.
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