The Season Arc
Right now, the person practicing next to you might be competing with you for the same spot.
That is a specific kind of tension. You are teammates and you are rivals at the same time. You want them to do well because they’re part of this program — and you want to outperform them because the roster isn’t final and you need the spot. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and pretending they aren’t doesn’t make the tension go away.
Read this passage slowly.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.
Philippians 2:3–4 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
Value others above yourselves. Paul is not asking athletes to lose intentionally or to pretend they do not want the roster spot. He is asking for a posture — the orientation of a person who competes with full investment and still genuinely wants the people around them to succeed, because the team’s success is larger than any individual spot on the roster.
The preseason competition is not a war against your teammates. It is a sharpening. The player who competes hard against the person next to them in practice is not betraying the brotherhood. They are making that person better. The competition that makes everyone sharper is in the team’s interest even when it is uncomfortable.
What goes wrong is when the competition becomes personal in the wrong way — when the desire to win the spot becomes the desire to see the other person fail, when the normal tension of roster competition curdles into resentment, sabotage, or the refusal to invest in a teammate’s development because it might cost you something.
Compete with everything you have. Push the person next to you. Want the spot. And root for everyone in this room to be the best version of themselves, because the team that builds that culture in camp is the team that can handle anything the season brings.
The preseason competition is not a war against your teammates. It is a sharpening. Compete with everything you have and still root for everyone in this room to be excellent.
Is there anyone in this room you are competing against for a spot and have been treating differently because of it? What would it look like to compete fully and still be genuinely for them?
Honest and specific. This question often surfaces real tension that the room is already carrying but not naming.
Compete fully. Root for everyone. Both things are required.
This devotional is specifically for the period when rosters are being determined and players are competing against teammates for spots.