Day 247 – Becoming Good

I am a new basketball parent. I was not really into sports growing up, and neither was my wife. I was a Speech and Debate Team, Chess Club, Mock Trial, Academic Decathlon, and Dungeons & Dragons kid. I tried out for the basketball team once. That was an embarrassing experience, to say the least. My wife was much like me — the idea of staying after school practicing, and then spending weekends at sporting events, was just not in her purview either.

Our first two children followed in our footsteps. They were book nerds and worked their way onto a debate team in college. However, the third child? Different story.

Enter me: at back-to-back basketball tournaments, sitting in a hotel room waiting for the next game. I sort of understood bracketology, thanks to March Madness, but I had no idea that kids all over the country were doing brackets like that just about every weekend. I own a chess club, so I am well aware of how intense parents can get about their child’s success — but sports like basketball? This is on a whole other level.

We tried to influence our daughter in our way. My wife and I would leave books under the Christmas tree. We’d have philosophical debates at the dinner table. We’d do museum tours on the weekends, hoping that we would produce another nerd. No chance.

Rather, we are now basketball parents — and to be frank, we have no idea what we are doing. I suppose “drinking from the fire hose” is the correct expression. After years of staging her resistance, my daughter has finally beaten her parents into submission. We are sports people now.

Instead of books cluttered at the bottom of the stairs, we now have basketball gear. Instead of sitting in classrooms and lecture halls watching our kids fight with words, we now sit on uncomfortable bleachers watching our daughter battle it out in the key (see, I even know some basketball terminology now).

She has been pursuing this in earnest for a full year. Not only do her parents have a lot of learning to do, but so does she. Most kids were raised by parents who encouraged the sport from the start — so all those basic mechanics were mastered at an early age. To my daughter’s credit, she has been dedicated, disciplined, and rigorous in her desire to climb this learning curve as fast as possible.

I’ll be honest: I have never in my life put as much effort toward something as she has. I have spent countless hours learning various tech and engineering topics — but her level of commitment dwarfs anything I have done.

That brings me to this idea of becoming good. Witnessing my daughter’s basketball journey first-hand, I’ve seen what it takes to become good. Becoming good is miles away from simply becoming competent or aware of something.

Becoming good is cramming thousands of hours into something in the shortest time possible. Becoming good is facing disappointment after disappointment and having the fortitude to pick yourself — literally, in this case — up off the floor and keep going.

Becoming good is pushing yourself so hard that you collapse, feel nauseous from exertion, and bleed. When you climb away from your practice session, you’re wiping up the blood and bandaging the wounds.

Becoming good is more than just commitment — it is going all in. It is falling asleep with the basketball as a pillow. It is not just every day — it is every morning, every night, and the entire weekend.

Good is not something that will ever be handed to you.

If you want to understand what it really takes to be good at something, go watch a high school girls’ basketball game. Watch them push through exhaustion, bounce back from setbacks, and fight for every inch on the court.

Then you’ll understand — becoming good isn’t a goal. It’s a way of life.