Understanding What People Carry

Most of us think about what people carry. We think about the weight of what is on a player’s mind, the burden a coach is dragging into practice, the invisible load a support staff member has been hauling around for three weeks. We think about the heaviness of it.

But there is something we tend to miss. It is not just the weight. It is how long they have been carrying it.

Think about a pen. A pen weighs less than a pound. Hold it out in front of you right now, arm extended, fingers closed around it. You could do that for thirty minutes without much trouble. Three hours and you would start to feel the fatigue. Research shows that within twelve hours you could no longer hold it in that position at all.

The pen did not get heavier. You just ran out of capacity to carry it.

That is what we are walking into every time we step on a campus. Not just people who are carrying heavy things. People who have been carrying things for a very long time. And they are almost out of capacity.

If we are going to be elite character coaches, not because anyone is watching, but because we actually care about the people we serve, we have to understand what they are carrying and how long they have been carrying it.

Read both passages slowly — both deserve a breath after them.

And then this one:

Let those sit for a second before you move.

I was at Lehigh University in early January when I finally went to our coaching staff with what I can only describe as a small dose of courage. We had a player from inner city Chicago. Great kid. One of the ones I have stayed closest to over the years. When he left for Lehigh, his friends on the street told him he had sold them out. He had taken a scholarship and walked away from them to go play in the Patriot League at a high academic institution in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

He arrived on a campus where Range Rovers and Mercedes and BMWs outnumbered every other car combined. He was not home. Then Christmas break came. We were all like, Christmas, great, time to recharge. I asked him how it went. He said it was not very good.

He told me what happened. His parents had divorced. His dad was living in the basement. His mom had a new boyfriend who had moved in, and the boyfriend’s twelve-year-old son was now sleeping in his bedroom. He came back to campus having lost his friends in Chicago, having not yet made friends in Bethlehem, and having lost the one room in the world that was his.

And our coaches were on him consistently. Play harder. More purpose. Get dialed in to the game plan.

I went to them and said: you cannot speak to him this way. You will not get all of him. Let me tell you what he is carrying right now.

We had no idea. And once we did, everything changed.

That is the first thing I want you to take with you. You cannot coach what you do not understand. You cannot reach what you have not taken time to see. Before you can be effective in anyone’s life, you have to ask the question underneath the question: what is this person actually carrying, and how long have they been carrying it?

Here are four things I see athletes carrying most often.

The first is performance identity. For many athletes, performance is not something they do. Performance has become who they are. It is the root of their identity. Jesus looks at each one of us and says he does not care what we have done or what we have failed to do. He cares about who we are. But our athletes have been told since they were eight years old that their value is what they produce.

Sean McVay won the Super Bowl and then said publicly that the lie he had told himself was this: once I win, once I prove I can perform, then I will be happy. He said it was a miserable way to live. Tom Brady won three Super Bowls, was married to a supermodel, had more money than he could spend in ten lifetimes, and told Sports Illustrated he still could not figure out why he was not happy. Performance and identity are a dangerous mix. Our job is to step into the space when the game ends and say: you are more than what you produce. You are more than your minutes, your stats, your position on the depth chart. There is more.

The second thing athletes carry is instability. The modern athlete lives with an elevated amount of it. There is always another recruit, another transfer, another player in the portal, someone who wants the scholarship they are standing on. Coaching relationships that used to develop over four years now compress into eight months. In the middle of all that uncertainty, some of the most powerful ministry you will ever do is simply saying three things: I see you. I value you. I am for you.

I grew up in a single-parent home. My dad left when I was in seventh grade. Within eighteen months we were in what I can only call abject poverty. Welfare, Section 8 housing, free lunch program. In seventh grade, every Monday morning the principal would come on the intercom and announce that students who qualified for the free lunch program should come down to pick up their coupon books for the week. From September sixth to November fifteenth I did not move. I sat paralyzed in Mr. Hook’s homeroom because I was afraid of what people thought. And then in mid-November I got hungry enough that I stopped caring. But what followed me out of that room was shame. You are not good enough. You cannot do it. I know what it is to carry that. And so do your athletes, in forms you may not recognize until you ask.

The third thing is comparison. The generation we serve does not compare themselves to the person next to them in the locker room the way we did. They compare themselves to everyone carrying a phone. Every scroll is another person’s highlight reel set against their own ordinary day. The gap between where they are and where they think they should be is constantly being widened by an algorithm designed to make them feel less than.

The fourth is what happens when none of the above gets addressed: people bury it. And buried feelings do not die. They come back. They come out in anger at a teammate, in distance from a coach, in that thousand-yard stare in the weight room. When you see those things, you are usually looking at the surface of something that has been buried for a while. Your job is not to fix it. Your job is to create enough safety that it does not have to stay buried.

So how do you actually get there? Three practical things.

First, be a Barnabas. Barnabas sold everything he had and gave the resources to the disciples. What resource can you give the people you serve? Your time. Your presence. Your willingness to sit with someone in their feelings without needing to fix anything. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He knew he was about to raise Lazarus from the dead. He wept anyway, because he had to sit with those women in their grief first. Sit with people. That is ministry.

Second, find the low-hanging fruit. Find one person on the staff who is a believer, or someone you already have a connection with. Build that relationship first. Go to lunch. Walk across campus together. Do not start with a formal program. Start with a sandwich and a conversation. The relationship you build with one person will open doors you could never open on your own.

Third, get an internal champion. When you have someone on the inside who knows you, trusts you, and believes in what you bring, they will get you into rooms and conversations and moments that no amount of effort on your part could manufacture. Invest in that relationship first. The internal champion is the key that opens everything else.

That young man from Chicago? He came to know Christ in his junior year. We did Bible study every week. He has played professionally overseas for two years. He still texts me constantly. A while back he sent me a picture with a note on the front: love you always. He said he carries it everywhere he goes.

That is what this is for. You do not always know which conversation, which lunch, which moment of showing up is the one that matters. So you just keep carrying the presence of Christ into the room. You sit with people. You learn what they carry. And you trust that the one who told us his burden is easy and his yoke is light knows exactly what to do with everything you bring him.

This question is meant to move from general principle to a specific person. The goal is not to produce a list of burdens but to identify one person the character coach has not yet leaned into, and to create a next step toward understanding what that person is carrying.