You Were the Man Back Home

Let me tell you something I wish somebody had told me my freshman year.

I came in thinking I was ready. I’d averaged 24 points a game my senior year. I was first team all-state. My high school coach used to tell me I was the best player he’d ever coached, and I believed him, and I’d been believing it for four years by the time I showed up here.

First practice. First real practice. I got destroyed.

Not a little. Destroyed. The guy guarding me — who I later found out was coming off the bench — made me feel like I’d never played basketball a day in my life. And I sat in my dorm room that night genuinely wondering if there had been some kind of mistake. If maybe I’d been recruited to the wrong place. Because the player I thought I was and the player I was in that gym were not the same person.

I see that look on some of your faces right now. I know what it means. And I want to talk about it.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

I’m not saying this to beat you up. I’m saying it because the thing that’s making this hard for some of you is pride — and not the bad kind necessarily, the kind that got you here. The confidence that you built over four years of being the best player in every gym you walked into. That confidence is real and it’s earned and it got you recruited to this program.

But here’s what nobody tells you: the version of you that was the man back home is not equipped for this level. Not yet. And the faster you can let that version go — the faster you can stop trying to prove that the person everyone thought you were is still true here — the faster you start actually becoming the player you can be at this level.

I had a teammate my freshman year, guy named DeShawn, who came in with even more hype than me. Division I offers out of 10th grade, the whole thing. And he held on to that identity so tight, man. Every time he didn’t start, every time he came off the bench, every time somebody outplayed him in practice, it was an attack on who he was. He couldn’t separate the role from the person.

He transferred after one year. Never played at this level again. And it wasn’t because he wasn’t talented enough. It’s because he couldn’t let go of who he used to be long enough to become who he needed to be.

Proverbs says pride goes before destruction. I’ve watched that verse play out in locker rooms more times than I can count. The destruction isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s just a guy who never figures out who he is at this level because he’s too busy defending who he was at the last one.

You were the man back home. That’s real. It got you here and it’s part of your story. But home is not here. The gym here is not that gym. The competition here is not that competition. And the player you need to become — the one who can actually contribute to what this program is trying to do — is someone you haven’t fully met yet.

Meet that player. Let the old one go. That is the most important work of this first year.

Let this sit. Don’t rush to the answer. The honest one takes a minute.