Chapter 10
Rowing through Adversity

P.J. Fleck

 

A photograph of a player and another person hugs each other.

Responding to Adversity

“Life happens” applies equally to sports, business, and life. It's how we respond to a circumstance that makes our organization and team who we are and determines where will be heading. The path to success will constantly be filled with peaks and valleys and everyone, without exception, will experience them. The vision we have for our life, career, team, family, or organization doesn't take into account the natural pitfalls that will come. When they come, we will deal with them at that time. Issues and challenges always arise as you rise and fall and rise again on your way to realizing your vision. Whoever is better able to handle adverse moments and periods will get ahead. Whoever fails at this will fall behind.

You must remember that the dream is the journey, not the destination. Every hard day, every loss, every lost family member, every financial burden, every “no,” every divorce or breakup, every hardship is part of your journey on the way to achieve your dream and is meant to teach you how to handle success and failure. These tests help you build leather skin for the assignments in your life. Have you ever had something happen to you that seemed devastating at the time, but when you looked back later in life you realized that it shaped what and who you are as a person? This doesn't mean it's easy to handle when you are going through it. But it does mean that if we keep rowing, we will see that the success is the journey itself, rather than a particular destination.

I love when players tell me they want to “make it” to the NFL. I ask, “Just make it there? One day? One week? Play in one game? Play a year? Make it to a second contract? Be an All-Pro? Be a Hall of Famer? Be the greatest ever? What's the dream specifically?” There will be a major price to pay during that journey, and it is definitely not filled with calm seas all the time. In fact, the journey is mostly filled with storms. Is the dream worth it, and can you keep rowing through those times?

Just as not everyone looks at the journey and life the same way, not everyone will row the same way. Not every boat is the same, and the water is different depending on where you are in your journey. Some will row harder, and some will row in a different direction. Some will lose sight of their vision. One of the key elements of your journey is surrounding yourself with people who want to go to the same destination. Only by rowing together can we achieve our goals.

Storms affect people differently, and 2020 certainly brought us heavy storms. COVID-19, social injustice, the political divide, and the election all affected people in various ways. Yet, regardless of the differences, we were all affected by that tumultuous year. You could not hide from it. You had to face it. Each of us made daily choices to row or quit rowing. In challenging times we could either think of others with empathy or just think about ourselves and how it affected us. We could live a life of serving, giving, and learning or choose to ignore the lessons we were being presented with. We could choose to avoid discussing difficult topics, or we could have the difficult conversations we needed to have as a team and a society in order to learn and grow together. In order to successfully navigate the waters of 2020, we would need to live with a compass of faith.

Compass of Faith

Nothing in 2020 was predictable, organized, or regimented. We all had to adapt to changing tides and winds. New “norms” were established. To a coach, a schedule is everything, and we had no schedule. Just like the rest of the word, there were times we couldn't leave our homes and instantly our homes became our offices, and Zoom calls became our normal way to hold meetings. We could only have so many people in a room at one time. Many of our staff and their spouses had to become teachers at home. We saw many families being separated for months because of flight restrictions and quarantining. Those in the medical community risked their lives daily, while many others had to deal with the pain of not being able to see their sick loved ones in hospitals. Too many died alone with no visitors to ease the pain or to comfort them in their suffering.

I acutely felt for the patients in the children’s hospitals that were accustomed to the many visitors that helped brighten their days. Now they were restricted to being visited by just a single family member.

In the realm of football, we saw canceled seasons, opt-outs, canceled games, and experienced the anxiety of Q-tips being jammed up our noses daily and the stress-filled 15 minutes before you found out whether you had contracted a virus that could harm you. We recruited players to come to our school whom we had never met and who had never even visited the school before.

Where was the safe and reliable place we all had in our lives? There was no playbook for this. However, if we set our compass to faith, we had a chance to get through this and become stronger and better than before. If we complained and worried only about ourselves, loneliness, depression, and anger would take over. Whoever could keep rowing no matter what came their way had a chance to make it through 2020 with an elite vision and focus for 2021. For me and our team it was about having faith that all that happened to us in the big storm of 2020 was there to teach us and prepare us to create a better world tomorrow.

The Ultimate Response

In 2020, the game that would define our Row the Boat response to all the change and adversity we had been through was when we played against Nebraska. We were down 33 players (the majority being COVID-related) playing in Lincoln, where the Gophers had only won one time since 1960. We were 9.5-point underdogs. We had around 20 freshmen playing and were playing to our third-string kicker. We overcame so much adversity, kept rowing, and won the game. It was a feat that could only happen with everyone rowing for each other. Winning that game might just be a quick memory for some and maybe will be forgotten by many, but that game ball is going in a display case for what it meant to our Row the Boat culture. Everyone was needed for that cultural win!

It wasn't a championship season for us. We lost to Wisconsin in overtime the following week. We had a losing record after a historic winning season the year before. But I will never forget how our coaching staff, players, and program kept battling throughout the year and the season together. We kept fighting and despite being outmanned in almost every game we played we never gave up. We rowed the boat through adversity and demonstrated that we truly believed in the RTB principles no matter how difficult the circumstances. I know without a doubt that it had made us stronger and will prepare us for the future.

The year 2020 taught me five things that I will take with me forever:

  1. Faith. Row the boat no matter how hard it gets. We had faith that 2020 was there to teach us how we could all grow more, do more, become more, and love more.
  2. Empathy. Sacrifice for the person next to you. Serve them and their needs. Get to know who they are and their story. No matter our race, religion, or gender, we need to put ourselves in the shoes of others and learn, listen, and act to make a difference!
  3. Unity. Together is the only way. You can't row by yourself. We all need one another—no hierarchy, no division, no ignorance. We can all row together and row with one another. Hold each other accountable and don't be afraid to have difficult conversations. Our compass is each other!
  4. Gratitude. COVID-19 showed us how much we needed to appreciate our daily blessings by taking so many of them away. We need to be thankful for each other and take care of one another.
  5. The standard will always be the standard. Circumstances will change and reasons for not upholding the standard of the culture will always exist. In drastic times of change this will be tested.
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