Here’s two secrets about systems. One. You can’t actually see them. Two. They need disruption. Sounds weird and possibly quite scary, I know. Systems are like water to fish. Completely invisible. A fish doesn’t know what water is. They just know it’s around them at all times and they’re too busy to consider how it may be affecting them. A system isn’t something you are looking at. You are actively squinting through it, like the glasses you forgot you were wearing until someone walks up and takes them off your face.

In the high performance world you love our shiny gadgets and wearable voodoo like devices. You are cosplaying as modern day wizards conjuring meaning from our sleep quality, biometric gobbledygook, and gps breadcrumbs. It is control theater at its finest.

You rarely take a moment to stop and ask what the data is really showing You. Too many believe the idea that they are a meat sack needing optimization so they can pump out an inordinate amount of performance data but they forget that it leaves them with the same amount of meaning as the 90’s motivational cat poster. Hang in there.

You walk through life missing the depths of beautiful moments because you only experience it through your own eyes. It’s a limiting view you naturally have. And the conclusions you come to, you do so with a voice in your head. Like a sports commentator. Depending on your history, culture, family of origin, and the thousand other variables that factor in to your internal dialogue, the care, compassion, love, hatred, doubt is present. Your perspective on your life is determined by what you can see. But life isn’t one dimensional. There are more perspectives available.

The reality is, you view your life through replays. Clips of memories. You have the opportunity to see other people in real time, in moments that create lasting impact. But you will often miss your part in those moments because you don’t take time to be present in what’s happening. So you only can look back on those times. While it’s a beautiful reminder, you will often find yourself missing the fullness, the holiness of it all.

Anne Lamott wasn’t talking about lighthouses. She was talking about you. About me. About all of us that have fought to keep our footing where when the storm was crashing against us.

But this world that you live, and the cultural norms, push you to run. It is designed to teach you to show up how other people need you to show up so you actively choose to run. The reasons are endless as to why you do this.

You’ll run to fix.

To prove.

To earn.

To silence the inner critic.

Because stillness feels like a slow, painful death.

It’s only natural you chase boats like a desperate lifeguard searching for someone to save instead of standing like the lighthouse you were built to be.

No one respects a frantic, chameleon leader. The team you’re leading and your teammates don’t want a leader that morphs into a different version depending on the people in the room. People are searching for a leader they respect. The one who can hold their ground when the storm makes everyone else scatter looking for cover. The person who refuses to shift themselves to meet the unspoken expectations the moment demands.

The word sacrifice has been hijacked. Whether it be athletics, entrepreneurship, leadership training, religion, it has been overused and many times maneuvered with agenda. I’m deeply curious as to why this word holds the weight and cultural importance that it does not to mention what it is doing to our internal perception of ourselves, and the world.

Do we use the word sacrifice to make ourselves feel more noble or righteous or worthy in our decisions?

At the root, a sacrifice is a decision we make. It is a choice. So why not say “I chose to do this because that.” What we often hear or say ourselves is, “I sacrificed this for ___________.” Our reasoning to sacrifice often involves a future potential outcome. I sacrifice time with family and friends to do something that will grow my business. Or athletes will sacrifice time with friends to get more time in the gym or in the weight room so they can be a better player.

Growing up on the South Plains outside of Lubbock, I learned as a kid that comfort is not a promise that exist. The land teaches you that before any person does. The wind refrains from negotiation. It announces its presence and demands you recognize it. The heat doesn’t care. It comes from above and radiates from below on August afternoons. And the ground doesn’t give unless you work it, even then, it is a honorable opponent.

I learned to be present because distraction had consequences. Many of my earliest lessons came with a ball in my hand or riding the plow of a tractor with my Grandpa Leon in the driver seat. He farmed dry land cotton. For those who don’t know, that means no irrigation. Just what the good Lord provides. When you’re cutting through the unbroken soil that hasn’t felt rain in months, you hang on or you get tossed.

There is no smooth ride through resistance.

If you want something of value,

something that will sustain you,

you earn it through your grit, consistency and presence in the moment.

Nothing blinds us faster than the feeling of being right. Our brain loves it. It’s an intoxicating experience. Like a smooth hit of oxygen after coming up for air when you’ve been under water for too long. The moment you latch your internal need onto certainty, everything feels right again. It’s simple. It all makes sense. The world around you is predictable and manageable.

The deep inhale of certainty is the trap.

The brain is wired to seek safety. The three pounds of cells in your skull is a prediction machine. Constantly observing, categorizing, wiring, and predicting what will come next because the last thing it wants is to get blindsided.

This is why the smooth hum of certainty is what you search for. Once you hear it, you’ll sacrifice almost anything to keep that feeling around as long as possible. Growth, curiosity, creativity, and even your identity are all on the chopping block if the brain deems them uncertain.

To our brain, uncertainty is a threat.

Control is the love language of fear. You open the closet and grab the finest threads to dress control up with confidence, discipline, strategy. But it’s still fear in a beautifully tailored suit.

Because of this need for control you chase certainty. You are the greyhound let out of the gate running like hell so you can keep certainty just close enough to see it. You don’t chase it out of arrogance. You chase it because you are scared. The fear of feeling exposed, irrelevant, replaceable, unseen, are all too real. You are scared that if you loosen your grip, the world you’ve constructed might not hold up.

Your body reveals the internal battle before your mind can recognize it. Your jaw clinches, your chest tightens, breath gets shallow. These are our physical responses to the system begging for safety.

The trek that is our journey is rarely manicured and easy to follow. There are times when I knew where I needed to go and in order to get there I had to create the path. There was no bare earth under my feet because I had not walked this direction before. It was overgrown, unclaimed. In these moments of uncertainty I was the very thing I was dismantling.

Preaching growth while fighting the internal programming of my old systems. I helped others discover self awareness while I punished myself for being human when I had a moment alone. I taught presence while not always recognizing when I was white knuckling control. I collaborated to build frameworks of freedom while living inside the confines of my brain’s search for safety. I mistook pressure and deadlines for purpose. I thought fear was discipline.

The hypocrisy was surgical, maybe even beautiful. On the surface everyone saw the calm and thought it was mastery with precision. But churning beneath the zen presence was a head filled with fear and anxiety.

In a world of order and rules, there are birds that drift off course. Somewhere along the journey they take what observers would consider a wrong turn. They move beyond the confines of the patterns they were given. They fly into the uncharted areas of the map. Ornithologists (a person who studies birds) refer to these birds as vagrants. Vagrants are individuals who appear far outside their normal habitats. This happens for a variety of reasons. Storms. Magnetic misfires. Or unseen instinct. Most of these birds that find themselves in uncharted territory never make it back. Some will die on newfound soil. Others will survive and in doing so, will redraw the borders of what is possible.

This concept of vagrancy has implanted roots in my mind because in many ways, I am a vagrant.

To be fair, I didn’t want to write this

Not because there’s nothing to say but rather because this means the season is over and there’s more in my heart than I could put on a page. And if it’s over that means the war drums are quiet. The music mixed with voices and laughter coming from the locker room is just a memory now. Like incense in the cathedral we all built together.

Grief has a funny way of dressing itself up in team photos on instagram posts. We’re framed in smiles, but beneath the surface, the soul writhes like roots torn from soil. It is a slow, holy ache of something held sacred having passed through you.

And here we are. If I’ve learned anything this season, it’s that grief is just gratitude in its final form and the only way to honor what has been built is to speak it into permanence.

So this is my best effort.
A heartfelt letter.
A eulogy.
A celebration.

A letter of gratitude to the 2025 Lubbock Matadors.

There is a madness to it. Not the type you medicate, but the type that wakes you up in the predawn hours with your head spinning and lungs full of passion. A kind of spiritual rabies. You’re not foaming at the mouth, you are frothing at the soul. Hunger chews through comfort and howls in the stillness. It’s not something you catch from others. Its something that occupies space in your soul. When sanity frays and logic blurs, all that remains is the pulse pounding for something no one else can see. People will call you crazy. But you become holy and feral at the same time. You’re a prophet with blood under your nails.

I’m talking about the defiant ones.

The ones who never let up. Not when they’re winning and not when they’re down. Not when the ref blows a call or their number never gets called. Not even when they finally taste the sweet nectar of dominance. Because they know how fast that nectar spoils in competition.

Most athletes play the game with conditions.

I never met Anthony Bourdain. But somehow, I felt deeply connected to him. His honesty. His take on the world. His ability to experience life through connections with people sitting across from him sharing a meal. Like the bartender who remembers your drink and has it ready for you before you sit down, he just got it.

The ache in my soul.

The need to connect.

The hunger for something that sits in your throat but you can’t seem to put it into words.

He wasn’t after the travel you find on a postcard to send back home. His life wasn’t perfectly curated. He chased ghosts through war torn countries. Fed hungry crowds in Port-au-Prince. Slurped noodles on a plastic stool and shared a family meal with Palestinians in Gaza. He dug into history with a fork in one hand and a pen in the other. He crafted beauty from the bruises.

Bourdain was fully himself, and that’s what made him magnetic. Equal parts poet and barroom philosopher. A man who carried his demons like carry-on luggage, never pretending they weren’t there.

There is a phenomenal series on Hulu called The Bear that I wished more people watched. The lead character Carmy is a high level chef who has moved back to his hometown to take over his brothers Italian beef spot. I want to talk about Carmy because he’s not just sweating in a kitchen, he’s performing surgery on his own nervous system with a boning knife. He’s the walking embodiment of what happens when pressure becomes identity. When perfection is the only way you know how to breathe. In the religion of performance, your worth is the offering and the scoreboard is god. And Carmy? He’s not just devout, he’s sacrificing himself on the altar.

Sound familiar?

Yeah. That’s why we’re here.

In the current framework of athletics, you’d think toughness was the only currency that matters. You hear it in everything athletes step into, from team mottos to playoff t-shirts to every coach's favorite soundbite the regurgitate in the locker room. Toughness is the one thing people like to push the hardest. Pressure. Grit. Tough players win. Show up and deliver. Burn the ships. The catchphrases go on and on.

But after years in this space, working with athletes from middle school to the pros, across every possible kind of intensity, I keep coming back to this truth:

Sustainable performance doesn’t come from grinding harder. It comes from creating environments where the nervous system doesn’t feel like it’s being hunted.

There are times when I wonder why we keep yanking fish out of the water just to explain to them what they’re swimming in. We reel them in. Net down into the water with a quick scoop, only for us to hold them by the mouth while they’re gasping and flopping. All the while we’re standing over them with a whiteboard, diagramming currents and drawing flowcharts about resilience and self-awareness.

It’s absurd.

Perhaps the real move isn’t pulling them into our world, but learning how to join them in theirs.
Maybe we shut up, dive in, and figure out how to breathe through gills.

Here’s the deal: so much of coaching, especially on the mental side of the game, is based on the assumption that we need to convince athletes to see it our way in order to grow.

As you ascend the mountain of self growth inching closer to greatness, whether you find yourself on the pitch, on the court, or on the field, there comes a serene but seismic realization that not everyone who was with you at basecamp is equipped for the thin air of higher altitudes. While it takes other people during times of growth, it is very much a singular journey. Only you can do the work. Growth is a clarifying fire. A ruthless eliminator of the ill equipped and unprepared. You can’t fake self evolution. Your best attempt to fake it will be endlessly talking about everything you’re learning. They’ll buy a book about the climb, post it on Instagram, and feel spiritually sore for a week.

In athletics, the illusion of there being a world “out there” is persistent and cunning. The scoreboard, the crowd, the stat sheet, are all moving independently of you, while you simply react. As if you're simply a participant in a the game. You were handed a jersey and a role by coach, left to cope with whatever the game decides to throw at you. This is the myth of separation. This idea that the performance lives outside of you, and your job is to catch up to it. You’re the quintessential greyhound chasing the rabbit. Though you pursue it with tireless resolve, it evades you as if tethered to the horizon.

A large part of my work lives in the shadows. watching athletes compete and looking for their patterns to determine when the quiet unraveling behind their eyes begins. I’m not just observing a missed free throw or a busted defensive rotation. I’m witnessing someone carry the unspoken burden of expectations that were never theirs to begin with. Echoes of past failures. Family projections. The punch in the gut of a setback. The identity crisis in the midst of a major injury. The haunting of what could have been. The ever present should be gifted to them.

In every game, there’s more at play than points on the board.

Most people aren’t drowning in the deep end. They’re flailing in the kiddie pool of their own avoidance, screaming for a lifeguard that isn’t on duty. The water isn’t the real threat. The outright denial that you can stand up at any time and save yourself is.

Remember, you are the light. But don’t be naive. Being the light means you’ll cast shadows too.

Pole vault is a dance between chaos and control. It’s a sport where the laws of physics meet the will of an athlete. It’s not just about clearing a bar, it’s about convincing your nervous system that hurling yourself toward the sky, inverted with a fiberglass pole is somehow the act of a sane person. Nicho, thankfully, never seemed burdened by what limits most of us.

I’ve worked with Nicho through the quiet months. The ones no one posts about. The mental reps. The vulnerable conversations about fear, relief, frustration, expectation, internal dialogue, pressure, and identity. Vaulting isn’t just physical. It’s psychological warfare disguised as sport.