Coach Anson Dorrance

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Coach Anson Dorrance
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Anson Dorrance

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What will you choose to be?

Speech given to all freshman athletes at UNC

First speech: February 2, 2005 . . . this revision March 5, 2007

By Anson Dorrance

From the Carolina Creed: I am asked to speak to one part of our athletic mission statement.

“I will excel athletically by committing myself to performance excellence, team success, and continual improvement.”

I. I would like to share with all of you a personal coaching epiphany I had in the spring of 2004. It was after I read small article in a USA Today newspaper. It helped explain to me the extraordinary success of Steve Nash of the Phoenix Suns and the football success of that great former Tar Heel football player Lawrence Taylor who went on to fame and glory for the New York Giants. It also helped explain some of my coaching failures.

The reason Steve Nash and Lawrence Taylor needed “explaining” is because neither one of these two athletes were heavily recruited out of high school. So what did they have that took Nash to the MVP of the NBA and Taylor to his Pro Football Hall of Fame?

Steve Nash: high school soccer player from Canada wanted to play basketball at Syracuse but they didn’t want him so he went to play at Santa Clara.

Lawrence Taylor: from Virginia probably wanted to go to UVA but with no schools really interested him in state, he decided to leave Virginia and play for us.

Basically, neither athlete had overwhelmingly visible talent coming out of high school. But all the recruiters missed something because both of these athletes had other qualities even more important that transformed them into the professional superstars they became.

II.

A. All of us that coach have missed some brilliant players like these but it was because their talent was not overpowering and we were not convinced. And then of course we have all lived to regret it as less visible qualities took over and transformed them.
B. Just like the presence of these qualities have transformed the less talented, the absence of these qualities have torpedoed the talented.
C. These less visible qualities were missing from some incredibly talented kids that I had recruited to come play for me and without these qualities they never made it here. And for years I had not been able to put my finger on what I did or didn’t do to these kids that for all of their incredible talent were passed by . . . two of these recruiting “busts” were the National High School Soccer Players of the Year! This USA Today article defined these qualities to me and this “epiphany” has changed what I coach and what I try to see now when I recruit.

III. So I tell all the freshmen athletes about this guy named Herb Greenberg who started a company called Caliper and through his company he sells his services to the NHL, NFL, NBA and major league baseball.

A. What he is paid a lot of money to do is to analyze athletic potential and advise different professional teams who to draft.
B. His methodology is to have the athletes he is asked to analyze take a battery of psychological tests to see if the three most critical qualities for athletic success are a part of their make up.
C. If one or more of these qualities is not there he advises his clients not to draft the athletes being considered, not to take the risk.

IV. There is nothing horribly profound or surprising about what he is searching for in his tests.

He is looking for the core of athletic character. He is looking for:

One . . . self-discipline

Two . . . competitive fire and

Three . . . self-belief

A. All the talent in the world can be torpedoed by any one or all three of these critical qualities if you are missing them.
B. All of you have choices to make that will sort out how good you are going to be . . . how you chase these three areas will be the final measure in your athletic greatness . . . it is not your talent . . . it is your athletic character.
C. These qualities don’t always jump out at you when you are watching the athlete play which is why Greenberg and Caliper are hired. There is nothing more tempting to recruit or draft than talent; and nothing more frustrating to coach than an athlete who does not work or compete or believe in herself, especially a talented one.

V. I am sure everyone in this room has huge talent. The University of North Carolina does not recruit athletes without it.

A. And some of you are going to make it because you have the self discipline to separate yourself from your peers even though self discipline is an extraordinarily uncomfortable state . . . it is not easy for ordinary people. Most of us would rather be comfortable. But I want everyone in this room to understand being ordinary is not an indictment it is not in your genetic code it is a choice.

“The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching”. This is a note I mailed to Mia Hamm in the spring of her senior year at UNC. I sent this to her after I saw her training on her own in a park on my way to work one morning. She included it in the beginning of her 1999 book , Go for the Goal. I named my second book after the first five words: The Vision of a Champion.

B. Some of you will make a name for yourself and your university because your competitive fire lights up whenever you are challenged. Do you remember the day or the moment you decided you were always going to play to win? Some athletes never make that decision.

Carla Overbeck played for me years ago and in her freshman year . . . didn’t win one 1v1 game. In her senior year did not lose a 1v1 game. Somewhere between her freshman and senior year she decided to compete. She told the press: “I was sick and tired of seeing my name on the bottom of the list”, since we record and post on a bulletin board everything we do in training to create competitors. Carla Overbeck was the captain of the Olympic team in 1996 when we won our first Gold Medal and captain of the U.S. Women’s National team when we won the 1999 World Cup in front of 90,000 people in the Rose Bowl.

C. Some of you will make a name for yourself because your self-belief keeps coming back, regardless of what happens to you.

Heather O’Reilly has a wonderful story about never giving up:

1. She broke her leg the summer before she entered UNC and her 203 World Cup and national team hopes dashed but she won the National Championship & Rookie of the Year at UNC that fall.
2. Asked to play for U-19’s again and not the Olympic Team in the spring of 2004 . . . heart broken but did not give up on her dream. Talked the coach into training with the team and made the Olympic team on the last day.
3. In overtime in the 2004 Olympic semi final had a chance to take out Germany the team that beat us in the 2003 World Cup . . . she missed the breakaway, she hit the post . . . but beat them in golden goal minutes later because she did not quit.
4. In 2006 we graduated Tarpley-U.S. Women’s National Team, Chalupny- U.S. Women’s National Team, White-U.S. Women’s National Team pool, Fletcher- U.S. Women’s National Team pool, Wingate-All American, then Heather led a team of Freshmen to National Championship in fall of 2006.

VI. I am here to tell you, you control all of these qualities. These are not genetic traits you inherited, these are all decisions you all have made or can make now to make a difference.

VII. I learned a wonderful lesson about choice from a math teacher (Dunleavy) I had when I was a sophomore in high school.

A. He said he was going to give us a homework assignment every day. It was going to be worth a percentage of our final grade in the class.
B. He said we could select to do the assignment or not. Then he showed us with percentages (after all this WAS a math class) how little our grade would be affected if we choose not to do it. He also said he would never get upset with us over not choosing to do our homework. Looking back it seems like he was actually “daring” us not to do it.
C. Then he said something wonderfully profound. He said he honestly could care less whether or not we did the homework but he did care about this: if we selected to so something else he wanted us to make sure that what we selected to do was more important to us than lowering our math grade that small percentage.
D. For a while all of us in that class periodically did something crazy that we pretended was our “more important” choice, hoping that he would ask us one day what we had selected to do rather than do our homework. Bragging about our exploits we hoped would take us into boarding school legend but unfortunately for us, he never asked. In fact he never talked about this again. And to our disappointment not turning the homework in did not upset him in the least, just like he had promised.
E. I have never forgotten that extraordinary lesson from that obviously very wise man. He was the first person that treated me completely like an adult. In his very clever way he made me consciously accountable for my choices and never took a self righteous position on any choice I made but taught me in an extraordinarily powerful way that every choice has a consequence and I have lived my life accepting everything that has happened to me because in some way I have chosen it. He was the man that convinced me of this.

VIII. So let me ask you freshman . . . your whole lives are ahead of you, what are all of you going to choose to be? This core of athletic character is not what you have been given, it is what you choose to have. So will you choose to have:

- self-discipline
- competitive fire and
- self-belief?

A. And if you don’t choose it, and none of your athletic dreams come true; will you have the strength and nobility to take responsibility for the choices you have made and accept the consequences.
B. And similarly if you have maxed out every part of your athletic character and you run into a teammate with similar character but more talent, will you gracefully accept a lesser role and remain loyal to your coach and your teammate and your team’s mission and be a noble human being in the process or will you choose to be a “selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy?”
C. The Tracey Bates story. We were in Riva del Garda Italy competing in the “Mundialito” and in the process of developing a U.S. Women’s National team to compete in the First Women’s World Cup . . . that day Tracey had lost her starting position to Kristine Lilly . . . and Tracey Bates still defended my choice even though it was obviously very difficult to see a younger player take her position, what class, what character.

IX. This speech is about choice and accountability but also about circumstances and nobility. We all can make significant statements about ourselves on both sides of the athletic playing time divide. What statement are you going to make about yourself?

X. I am proud to be a part of an athletic department with a history of athletes who have made choices that have separated them. Good luck to all of you, I hope you decide to demonstrate your character and make history in the process . . . have a wonderful year.