Why I Coach

October 27, 2025

I still recall with vivid clarity sitting on the edge of the exam room table in the orthopedic surgeon's office near Red Bank, NJ. I didn't even want to go although my boss at the time went through his connections to get me the appointment and made sure I went, even telling me to leave work early to get there. My knee felt a little funny after a weekend of rugby although I didn't think it was anything to think much of. Time for a shock.

"You tore your ACL," the doctor put it bluntly, "and you have some damage to your meniscus." He kept going before I could reply. He probably learned this from years of young folks crying in the middle of his diagnoses, thus wasting his time. "I can get you into surgery next Monday." I just laughed, genuinely thinking the situation was funny. Man, I really did some damage this time. Stage one is always denial, let's see how long it lasts.

"Well," I replied, "I'm moving very soon. That very day, actually, is when I'm scheduled to fly out." My smile faded as the reality began to set in and logistical thinking took hold.

"Not ideal," again, blunt, he stayed on target, "but I can help you find a surgeon where you're going. Where are you moving to?"

Well, that's the tough thing doc. I'm about to start a year (at least) of service work on the Blackfeet reservation in a town called Browning, MT. You see, I first went out there when I was 17, fell in love with the place, the people, and the work and ever since then my mind has been set on dedicating at least a year of my life to the school I work at there. I just finished undergrad a few months ago and all that's been on my mind for a few years now has been getting out there. Everything I've done has been leading to that. Anyways, there are not a lot of doctors out there, as I'm sure you could guess...

Cha cha real smooth

If you read all of that last paragraph, you have more patience than the doctor. He cut me off sometime between the words "reservation" and "Montana".

"Let me stop you right there, that's not happening." A knife to the heart. Thanks for playing, denial. We'll skip anger and maybe do some bargaining later. Straight to depression.

I left that office and stepped into what felt like a changed world, a reality somehow altogether different than the one I had inhabited only an hour before. Is this real? This thing that I've been planning for years, the thing I've been telling everyone is priority #1 in my life, the journey of a lifetime all gone up in smoke in the space of a moment. My first call was to my high school strength coach, a mentor then and still to this day.

"Exciting news? A job offer maybe?" He met me with a smile, expecting something to celebrate. I sat on the curb, told him the news, and cried. I cried the whole night. I didn't even know how to tell the school I was going to volunteer at on the res that now all of a sudden I couldn't go. And for what? Because I had been an idiot and played in a rugby tournament I shouldn't have. When I write that I cried the whole night, I mean for the next eight or so hours I laid in bed in the dark and agonized over my life, the kind of agony that only 5 years of eagerly waiting for something only for it to be suddenly swiped away at the last second can give you, until I fell asleep.

"If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same"

That all makes sense; when sad, hurtful, or even traumatic things happen, sadness is often the natural response. I can explain my sadness and justify it because that is how a sane person would react. What I can't explain is how I woke up the next morning at 6am, saw the ceiling of my bedroom as I always did, and a few simple words came to me: "I'm not going to feel sorry for myself." I don't know why but for whatever reason I got out of bed, got dressed, made breakfast, and went to work nice and early like I always did. It wasn't denial - I was in full comprehension of the ramifications of what my reality was at that point. I can't even really take credit and say that I had an epiphany or that moral superiority and discipline had won out. Even as disciplined as I can be I had spent exactly zero minutes the night before trying to see any silver lining. I don't know what or how but something had happened in my mind as I slept that made it possible for me to win this battle.

When I got to work at the facility, the only other person in the building was one of our athletes, a professional hockey player who was a few weeks away from shipping off to his team. "I heard what happened, I'm so sorry," he said. He's had more injuries than me, is far more accomplished than me, and was truly, from his heart, extending kindness towards me. "Don't be," I replied. Simple, move on.

I can write it like I'm the toughest man on the planet and that I was going to shake it off, but I know that is the opposite of the truth. Inwardly I was full of doubt and uncertainty; my entire life had just been shaken up. I wasn't even 100% sure I still had a job in NJ given that I had planned on leaving. Now I had to get surgery too? AND go through rehab to boot. If you dwell on it too much, which is the natural way of operating in my mind, these fears can become an echo chamber. Maybe this is a form of denial, this moving on for the sake of outward coolness. It was becoming more and more real to me that everybody I saw in the next week who knew my story would offer me their condolences. Nothing made me feel sicker than that.

The strength coaches of Elite Sports Physical Therapy, 2024; couldn't ask for a better staff

So, what was this all for?

So often, I think about the blessings and best parts of being a strength coach. Without a doubt what I come back to most often as the greatest perk of the job is the fact that a strength coach can have such a positive impact on people's lives beyond athletic performance. The process of becoming "stronger" rarely refers to physiological changes that occur over a macrocycle. Going through the injury process myself while AT THE SAME TIME coaching athletes through their recoveries is one of the most humbling experiences I'v ever had. More often than not, at Elite Sports Physical Therapy, our patients would be high school or college athlete who were dealing with not just their first real injury in their career but their first real adversity in life. Their ACL reconstruction or labrum tear or whatever it is can be the first time a serious roadblock has been put in front of them and impeded their way forward. This is where the coach sees the real beauty of the trade: the obstacle becomes the way forward.

The young folks we work with of course get stronger, faster, bigger, etc. from the hours of training we put in front of them; all of that matters. What makes the difference and what keeps someone away from needing to come back to PT after another injury down the road is the psycho-social transformation they undergo as a result of heartbreak, struggle, and perseverance. Something clicks in the minds of the people we see that teaches them more about life than any other experience at that time could have. A person is suddenly confronted with reality in such a raw and direct way that they have no choice but to "deal with it" (to quote AA); to do the personal work necessary to grow, however painful it may be.

This is what keeps me coaching. Not the sets, the reps, the PRs, the achievements - as nice as those all are. It's the metamorphoses I have witnessed in countless people from one stage of life to another as a result of their response to adversity. It could be a fifth grader I taught in Montana learning a new reading skill and that experience teaching them to have confidence in their ability or it could be a 22 year old college fifth year digging deep and fighting tooth and nail to get their "bad leg" healthy in time for preseason. The people change, the method of challenge changes, but what never changes is that what stands in one's way becomes the way. All I do as a coach is respect that the real teacher is the experience and that my job is to guide the learner through the experience, nothing less. That's what the injury process taught me and that's why I am a coach.

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