Demystifying Excellence:
Results
I have never forgotten this empowering lesson -- the way I reached out to my community, and they reached back -- and it's the basis of my entire career. My life as a teacher and Doctor Noize is basically spent saying to kids: You are great, you are strong and sophisticated, you are smart, and I expect you to have the courage to be a kind and brazen adventurer on this planet. I try to replicate the feeling of family, community, and purpose my high school community gave me in everything I do.
As a teacher, I made it my business to inspire my students to stretch. I was told in my first year teaching by my school administration that nobody would sign up for a high school elective on classical music history, because kids only like rock music. "Just put it on the elective sheet," I answered. Then I went out and recruited my first music history class, playing music and sports with kids after school, connecting with students. In class, I painted the great composers as the crazy visionaries they were. I gave the wild background stories behind key pieces of music, and then played them for enrapt teenage audiences who could relate to the angst and melodrama that drove most great composers to create. Parents started emailing me asking what I'd done to get their teenage sons to ask them to take them to the San Francisco Symphony. Within a few years, the classical music history course was so popular it was made a required class for all incoming freshmen.
As a soccer coach, I used my experience to dare kids to risk the effort and focus it takes to succeed -- or fail -- at a high level. The Pinewood High School Boys Soccer Team had not won a league game in seven years. They were losers -- not because of the scores of the games, but because of the way they conducted themselves. They expected to lose and did not have the courage to put out the effort to win. They pretended they thought this was funny, but I could tell deep down that they didn't. My first year coaching, we lost 11 games, tied one, and won none. Most of our games were lost by about five goals. I laid out a plan to get better to the team and told them I would work with them long hours, even over the summer, to get better. I told them they'd see results. Our second year, we also went 0-11-1 -- but almost every game we played was a close and heartbreaking 1- or 2-goal defeat, not a blowout. We were the hardest working, most relentless team in the league; everyone beat us, but everyone hated playing us. A victory against us was no fun.
Yet the record showed we were still losers. Many kids would give up at this point. But these young men -- who had still never won a league game in their life -- recognized their improvement and were undeterred by the identical losing record. They worked even harder in the offseason. Word got out -- about a two-time 0-11-1 team -- that something big was going on within the Pinewood boys soccer team. We had so many kids sign up the next year that we had to have a JV Team for the first time. We went 8-4-2 that season. We narrowly missed the playoffs, but everyone felt like we had won the World Cup. I love that team. Love them love them love them. Every time I think about them, I get tears in my eyes.
My experience with that Pinewood boys' team inspired me to go on and coach my own daughters' teams with the same principles of positive belief and hard work. We took a group of girls randomly assigned to us at 4 years old and helped shape them into a tight-knit group of supportive friends who feel like family -- players to parents. As we got older, we collectively decided to get serious about being our best. We had a meeting -- parents and players -- and decided to teach the girls not only skills, but pass-first game and formation philosophies that everyone told us kids that age could not learn. Even the professional league coaches told us that.
Five seasons later, we had earned the best record in the top division in the region four of those seasons, posting a combined 30-2-2 record playing a team-first, star-less philosophy. If you ask most people had has the most fun together as a team -- on the field and off the field -- they would say our team. We converted hundreds more passes per season than the teams we played, and the girls and parents hang out together off the field too. Kids love a challenge, they're up for it, and it bonds them in very deep ways. Parents dig that. These girls were not freak athlete all-stars -- they were randomly selected girls who decided as a unit -- with their parents -- to work hard and reach for their potential. We also taught them sportsmanship -- once we were up four goals, we'd institute internal game rules that ensured the lead didn't get much more than that. We never beat a team by double-digits like several of the other good teams in the region routinely did.
The reason I believed they could do it is because I shared an earlier commitment with those courageous Pinewood boys -- the league's biggest losers -- and watched them see it through to transform themselves into the league's biggest winners. They didn't win the league, but I've never coached bigger winners than those boys who came back for a third season with me after going 0-11-1 and realized a potential nobody but us believed in. They inspire me to this day to stop being afraid of failure and get on the road to success with what you've got -- no excuses. Do that, and you'll reach your potential -- most people stop short of making that commitment.
As a choir director, I had no idea what I was doing when we started. We started the choir because the school had none, and I had kids the first year who couldn't stay on pitch at all or read music. The Pinewood Singers were not very good in our first year. We simply stuck with it and worked on all our deficiencies -- conductor and students alike. I took a few conducting seminars to learn which hand I should wave the baton with, and the kids worked a lot, section by section, learning to sing together on pitch with expression. We had a team vibe to the choir -- divas were not encouraged. Kids helped me with administration and section leading. In my fifth and final year teaching, our school helped us raise the money to rent a bus to Anaheim for the only competition we ever entered. The Pinewood Singers won First Prize over high schools ten times our size and earned the only perfect score from the judges at Disneyland's prestigious Music In The Parks competition. It was a huge moment of accomplishment for me and many of the kids in my choir, some of whom went on to pursue music and teaching after they graduated. I know because I keep in touch.
Read the next Chapter -> The Courage To Fail.
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