Rookies in Real Life

There is a fundamental piece of development that many of us miss when we grow up inside sports.

We are highly trained, highly coached, but also highly handled, which in-turn makes us completely underdeveloped as adults.

Think about how early it starts now. Mom fills out the forms, while Dad answers the emails and coach texts the schedule and trainer maps out the workouts. Your only job is to show up and handle business. You never book a flight, or call a doctor, or send an email. You go from middle school to AAU to high school with this whole little ecosystem built around you.

Parents become secretaries, while coaches become parents. The player handles one thing. And we look at that and say…Wow look how dedicated everyone is.

But there is a cost.

Every single time someone steps in and says, “Don’t worry, I will handle that for you” they are quietly stealing a rep from your development as a fucking human being. Like skipping leg day for ten straight years and then being pissed when it’s short season again.

The old school student athlete that handles class, workouts, emails, group projects, and still gets better on the court does still exist, but it feels rare now. We created this world where sport is everything. The schedule is built around you, while adults move mountains so you can get to where you need to go.

On paper it looks like love. In reality, it’s quietly becoming entitlement.

When every problem you ever had growing up was solved by an adult, you start to believe that is just how life works. Grades messed up, coach calls the teacher. Housing issue, mom calls the school. Need gear, bother the team manager. You never learn that uncomfortable but crucial skill of facing something that is not your fault and fixing it anyway.

Then you blink and high school is gone. You make it to college. Maybe a good one. You are on TV...sometimes. People recognize you at Chipotle. Your day is planned out before your feet touch the floor in the morning.

And then it happens…

The realization that you are not going to be one of the roughly six hundred best basketball players on the planet. You are not signing a guaranteed NBA deal, you are heading overseas instead, which is a huge accomplishment, but a very different game the second that plane lands.

If you spent your whole life with everything handled for you, overseas feels like getting tossed into the deep end with a fuck-ton of bricks in your pockets.

Who reads the contract? Who goes to the grocery store and tries to decode labels in a language you do not speak? Who finds the second opinion on your injury? Who keeps track of your money, your bills, your taxes?

Ummm…you.

You might have an agent or a team rep who helps a little. But when the lights shut off in your apartment at midnight because the bill never got paid, Mom is not emailing the team or the landlord. If every adult in your life spent the last fifteen years making sure you never had to carry anything heavy, this new world will break you.

People always say, I will figure it out when I am done playing.

Really??!

Try learning a new language at thirty. Try picking up guitar at forty. You can absolutely do it, but the learning curve sucks. You feel stupid and get frustrated.

Now compare that to a five year old learning Spanish or plucking on an acoustic. They soak it up. They do not care about sucking.

Responsibility works the same way.

If you grow up sending your own emails, calling your own doctors, booking your own travel sometimes, handling your own money in small ways, by the time you are twenty five and living in a different country, you can handle the shock. If you never touched any of that until the first time you are alone on another continent, life is going to punch you in the face.

People love to share the stat about how many high level pros go broke or struggle after their career. Most of the talk focuses on bad spending. But the ACTUAL REASON lies deeper than all of that…

Responsibility was never handed to them early.

They knew how to get thirty and ten, or push their body to exhaustion…but they never learned how to run their life.

When the checks were coming in, there was enough money to cover the mistakes. Once the money slows down, those same mistakes turn into glaring issues. Taxes they never understood, or contracts they never read and jobs they never prepared for.

One day they wake up and basketball is gone, and they feel like a rookie in a world that does not care what they did in Turkey.

The wild part is that a lot of this does not come from evil. Most of the time it comes from love.

Parents want to protect their kids and coaches want their best players locked in on the game. Even agents want their clients focused so they can perform and earn.

So the adults step in over and over.

The idea creeps in that if you are talented enough, things should just appear for you. The job. The endorsement. The role after you retire. So when someone offers a connection, or a meeting, or an entry level job, there are athletes who look at it and think,

Fuck this, where is my big check?

Like the world owes them a billion dollar payout just for surviving the grind. Nah…the world does not care what you averaged. It cares about what value you can bring today.

Everyone loves that phrase, What are you going to do after basketball? Sounds responsible. But the more important question is, What are you doing during basketball?

Are you learning how to talk to people who are not in your locker room, or learning how to read your own contract? Are you asking questions about your money instead of nodding along, or building skills that don’t exist within the painted lines? Because if you think you will magically turn into a responsible, humble, disciplined adult the second you retire, you are lying to yourself.

Like saying, “I will learn Spanish once I am in Madrid.” Yea you'll learn some…but it will be a huge pain in the ass.

If you are a parent or a coach or an agent, stop stealing reps. Guide, but give just a tiny bit of room to fail in real life situations while the stakes don't mean shit. Let them call the coach, or argue a grade, or deal with the late fee one time…you want them to make rookie mistakes while they are still rookies in life, not when they are retired with a family and a mortgage.

We've created this system where we train athletes to be world class specialists inside the lines and functional toddlers everywhere else. Then we act all shocked and post warnings on social media, when they struggle post career.

If you never developed the responsibility muscle to match all the others, life will remind you. And it will not care that you used to play pro and made tons of money.

So if you are still playing, start taking those reps now. Grab one thing today that an adult has always handled for you and own it! Ask the questions you usually avoid. Do one boring piece of life stuff you would normally dump on someone else.

The court will always be your comfort zone, but the rest of life does not give a shit.