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The Injury That Changed Everything
During the last home game of my senior year, I took a hit to open the second half and didn’t get up the way I was supposed to.
It took about two series before anyone realized I had no clue what was going on out there.
They pulled me off the field, and the diagnosis came back as a concussion, which meant I was sitting out the following week, our first playoff game.
Watching From the Sideline
If you have played, you know exactly what that math felt like.
Lose, and the season ends.
Lose, and I never put that uniform on again, and the last snap of my high school career would have already happened without me knowing it.
There was nothing I could do but stand there in street clothes and watch the quarterback behind me, a genuinely talented player, go out and light it up.
Our offense moved the ball at will.
We won and moved on to the second round.
The Reality of Sideline Competition
And I spent most of that night sick to my stomach, which had nothing to do with the concussion.
He was that good.
Every completion he threw felt like a threat to something I had decided was mine, and I would be lying if I said I celebrated the way a teammate should have.
I clapped when I was supposed to and said all the right things in the locker room afterward, but underneath it, part of me was hoping he would play just well enough to win and not quite well enough to keep the job.
Facing the Truth
Read that back, because it took me years to be able to.
My entire season was riding on that kid’s arm.
My last chance to ever play the game I had loved since I was seven years old was riding on that kid’s arm.
And I still had to fight the part of me that didn’t want him to be great.
We won.
I got cleared, came back for the second round, and played the last game of my senior season, a game I only got because a teammate handled his business better than I was handling mine from the sideline.
I wasn’t a great teammate that night.
I was a guy protecting his spot.
The Trap Almost Every Athlete Falls Into
You want your teammates to do well, just not better than you do.
Nobody says that out loud, but watch any team long enough and you will see it.
The kid at your position rips off a great practice and something in your chest tightens.
That feeling can pass for competitiveness, but it works in the opposite direction.
Real competition points forward, you against the version of you that showed up yesterday.
What I felt on that sideline pointed sideways, and sideways competition freezes you in place, because your goal quietly changes from getting better to staying ahead.
Staying ahead of one guy in your grade is a low bar, and I would know, because I grew up in a town of 13,000 where that was the entire strategy.
Then I got to a college weight room where nobody’s number was mine to chase, and I had no idea who I was without someone to measure against.
The great teammates I have been around figured this out long before I did.
They are not measuring sideways.
They are measuring against themselves, which is exactly what makes them safe to root for and exactly why everyone around them gets better.
What a Great Teammate Actually Does
None of this is personality or talent. It is behavior you can choose at your next practice.
- Consistent Effort: They give effort that doesn’t check the calendar. Rainy Tuesday in February, walkthrough the day before the rivalry game, same standard either way. Nobody should have to wonder which version of you is showing up. Reliability is a skill, and the athlete who has it doesn’t need to be asked twice.
- Positive Competition: They compete with the person at their position instead of against them. If that player raises their game, you have to raise yours, because iron sharpens iron only works if both pieces stay in the room. The moment you start hoping they slip, you have made your ceiling their performance instead of your potential.
- Instant Ownership: They own the mistake in real time. The play is over and the rep is gone, so you say my bad, take the correction, and run the next one clean. Dragging a bad play into the next three is how one mistake turns into a whole quarter, and on the days the mistake isn’t yours, you are the one picking your teammate up and watching the film alongside him.
- Unmatched Coachability: They are coachable to the point of being annoying about it. What did you see? What do I fix? Then they fix it before the coach has to say it a second time.
- Unassigned Leadership: They organize what nobody assigned them. The 7 a.m. lift in June, the extra reps after, the text to the freshman who doesn’t know he is allowed to come. Cliques shrink teams, and somebody has to decide first that it is one team, one mission.
- Honest Accountability: They hold teammates accountable when the effort drops. Almost nobody wants to do this one, and it is the one that matters most. Accountability says I care more about where you are headed than whether this conversation is comfortable. Anyone can be a nice teammate. Only a great one tells you the truth.
Being That Teammate Will Cost You Something
When you compete like that, you become inconvenient for anyone who wants to coast, because you raise the standard just by meeting it.
Most of your teammates will love you for it.
A few won’t, and it won’t be because you did anything to them, it will be because your effort makes their effort obvious.
Pay that price anyway.
And when the wins come, pay attention to how you handle the credit.
My favorite part of playing quarterback was the ledger it forced on me: when we won, it was the offensive line, the receivers, and the defense, and when we lost, it was the throw I missed.
Give the credit away and absorb the blame.
Do that consistently enough and you will never have to ask anyone to follow you.
One Action to Take Before the Season Starts
Not a system. Just one decision.
Before your next practice, pick the single part of your effort you would be embarrassed to have a college coach watch on film, like loafing on the backside of a play, the conditioning you jog through, or your body language for the ninety seconds after you screw something up.
Pick one, fix it for the next 30 days, and don’t announce it to anybody.
Your teammates will notice before you ever tell them.
They always do.
One player like that is valuable.
A locker room full of them is dangerous, because that is a group that understands their personal goals come second to what the team is chasing, and those goals tend to show up on the way there anyway.
You control your effort.
You control your attitude.
You control whether the people next to you get better because you were there.
So going into this season, answer one question honestly: would you want to play alongside you?
Have fun and #LeadEmUp
