My biggest win ever: and how you can be a leader
In the fall of 2021, I was given the honor of being appointed to the highest tier managerial position of my life; a true blessing and significant advancement for my professional career.
“I need a coach for the peanut butter dinosaurs!”, my boss shouts at me and my team of half-asleep co-workers.
“Huh…” I mutter.
We all sort of stumble awake realizing the misfortune that one of us will be going through for the next half hour.
“Not it!”, the team argues at once.
The next thing I know we are flipping a coin and of course, I lose.
“Fuck”, I yell as I bewilderingly walk over to the field, knowing I'm in for 40 minutes of annoying little kids.
“Hey, are you our coach?” one parent says, appearing disappointed.
“Unfortunately,” I mutter under my breath.
I always hated sports; running around for hours to score some meaningless points seemed like the furthest thing from excitement.
The idea of coaching five-year-old umpalumpas how to kick a soccer ball today was even less appealing. But thirty an hour will do something to just about anyone, so I take a deep breath and scope out the match.
This was a championship. These kids and parents had waited all year to play in the i9 soccer final, and here I was a barely legal adult with zero coaching experience, filling in for their manager.
“Heh, here we go”, I thought.
I look over across the field at our competition and see a parent in his late 40s confidently flipping through his clipboard of neatly planned out rosters and tactics. I realize that's the other team's coach.
Taking a look at my kids, I just picked the ones who looked fast and threw them all up front. I asked one kid to be a keeper, and so that was our starting lineup.
The first half flies by; some decent chances by both sides, but no goals. At halftime, I look over and see the other team’s coach essentially yelling at his kids for missing key chances. Christ.
“Any changes for the half?” a worried mom asks me.
“No, not yet,” I exclaim.
The second half drones on, just like the first. Near misses but nothing meaningful.
Once we hit the last quarter though, I decide to try something risky; I signal for a timeout and tell the fetuses that everyone is on offense, even the keeper. I get these crazy looks from the parents, but clearly, nothing else was working and this might lead to a goal. I hype them up by saying that this might be the only chance in their career to see a whole team on attack. It had to work.
And that's exactly what happened. Not even 2 minutes into the match, the deadlock is broken by none other than the goalkeeper. Cheers explode across the stands and the biggest grin flares up on my face.
Another 3 minutes pass, and we score again. This time coming from one of our center backs. I hear the coach on the other team practically screaming. While yelling at his kids to defend, I see him frantically flipping through his tactics to try and counter my press.
But it doesn't work. 5 minutes later, another goal.
If you were at this field and didn't understand the kids were playing soccer, you would sort of think my team was a mob of bullies violently beating the other side. They kept trying to play the ball out of their box, but each time my team would be there to intercept it and go forward. We had our foot on their throat; I won't lie, I was dying of laughter while this whole thing was unfolding. But seemingly, I still kept yelling for them to stay focused and keep fighting.
4-0 full-time. The parents rush the field exploding up and down and hugging their kids. You would think everyone on our team won the lottery with how exploding their energy was. Meanwhile, I'm sort of processing that 30 minutes ago I was half-asleep.
These kids had just won a final in the most outlandish game they’d ever played. I felt this weird sudden burst of energy alongside me. It was thrilling.
Next thing I know, I'm handing out trophies and medals to families around me, seeing some extremely excited faces and a few somber ones on the other side.
It's all going as usual, except for a single moment I take a minute to look around me.
I noticed something different about this i9 pitch than the other 500 ones I had set up: the mood. Visually everything was still the same: the tall uncut patches of dirt on the empty field, horrifically spray-pained field boundaries, or the littered sidelines. And yet there was this sort of aura I never quite took away from sports until that day. I looked around me, seeing the feelings of extreme jubilation for the winners, a vibe of regret and disappointment from the other side, and then the humor inside of me who coached them. It was emotions, they were everywhere. A field of drama and sentiments was flying all around me. And I was having all of it.
That was the day I fell in love with sports.
I know it sounds stupid, but coaching these kids to a meaningless title had me discover a passion for the beautiful game; my Saturdays are now forever tied to the Premier League and SEC.
But aside from an endless addiction, I also took away a few ideas on influence.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on this story, and what it means to be a leader. It inspired me to write down some lessons I learned. This is the word professionals love, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring with a few ideas.
Here are three takeaways:
Leaders aren’t always the smartest or most experienced🧠
I had no right to win that final; an eighteen-year-old who has never even played soccer. Still, with creative thinking, I managed to outplay the “experienced” coach. Sometimes all it takes is fresh thinking to be successful. While experience and IQ definitely come in handy, our ideas are the strongest weapon in this age of information. Facebook, one of the top 50 largest companies in the United States, was founded by a Harvard student who had a simple solution for digital socialization. In soccer teams across Europe, most captains aren't the best defenders or strikers in the squad. In fact, sometimes these “leaders” rarely get playtime. Rather, the role they play is backing up the head coach, and communicating their shared vision.
Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Tipping Point, really exemplifies my point. In it, he describes how ideas spread; identifying three types of people: Mavens, Connectors, and Salesman.
Mavens: people who find or create new ideas.
Connectors: people who know a lot of people; spread new ideas easily.
Salesmen: people who are persuasive and convince others to follow a spreading idea.
A great leader essentially plays all three roles; setting a vision for the team, communicating it clearly, and then motivating his followers. Their value lies in the multifaceted way they guide others to follow their own ideas. The skills to fill in these roles are a completely separate set of assets from general IQ or age.
The opportunity to be a leader is always knocking on the door. It's all about who steps up🎤
Being a leader was not on the league staff description for i9, yet there I was coaching. This shows the opportunity to step up and lead is always available, no matter how small. You don’t need to be the head coach at Liverpool FC to learn how to manage people; more often than not, leadership is available in places you wouldn’t expect.
There is a famous phenomenon in psychology that exemplifies this. Acutely named the “big fish in a small pond effect”, it's the idea that being in a smaller pool of people somewhere, at work/school/church, allows for a single individual to stand out much more. Since you are not 1/5000 people, it's actually advantageous for making an impact. This includes leadership.
Look into areas in your life where you are only one of a few people involved; the opportunities can be endless. It was work for me, but as I said, every situation is different.
Being adaptable is key to success in leadership🎯
To win that final I had to adapt to the game; when things weren't working I changed course. If you look at the companies or people who can stay relevant for long periods, the common trend is that they adapt; Netflix saw the entertainment demographic moving toward digital streaming over CDs, so they adapted. Apple noticed the shifting ties from home computers to mobile smart devices and hopped on the train. Amazon was founded on the awareness of the advances in the 2000s supply chain industry and capitalized. No matter how many trophies they have won, even successful sports franchises continue to invest in new players.
Humans are stubborn people. What sets good leaders apart is they are humble and listen to their environment or advisors; never becoming comfortable and instead building toward the future.
These are just a few quick lessons I can take away from the story. I think it’s an interesting one because leadership is a word that gets thrown around a lot. Stupid as it sounds, I’ve gained some more ideas on what it means to be a leader after running the circus at I9 sports.
