Values, Coaches, and Meaning

During my undergraduate studies at Springfield College, I earned the opportunity to serve as an intern coach with the college's storied strength and conditioning department. It was a transformative experience, the likes of which I could write about for hours and hours. One particular facet of the collegiate (and wider) S&C field that I picked up on fairly early on in my career is the ever presence of publicly claimed values. It would be hard to come by a weight room, practice facility, or even classroom in today's day and age that doesn't have a list of descriptors, adjectives, principles, etc. hanging by the door (examples pictured) detailing what that place aspires to be. This of course begs the question, why do this?

What is it about a piece of paper or series of phrases printed on the back of an athletics department t-shirt that changes the social fiber of an organization towards excellence? A small, almost pessimistic side of my mind thought that coaches and teachers were simply pressured by administrators to pick three words at random to prove some deeper curriculum behind their everyday work. It didn't seem realistic to me that every facility in the world could actually act out the "values" that they claimed to espouse. At Springfield, the S&C department is said to be based upon Tradition, Integrity, and Excellence (TIE, easy to remember, right?). How did I, as an intern and member of a larger staff, act out those values in my decisions every day?

After months of reflecting on this problem and speaking with other coaches, it occurred to me that I was violating one of the most fundamental phrases from the Gospel: "Judge not lest ye be judged." Even if my skepticism was grounded, I could learn more from exploring the process internally than judging it externally (or, as Ted Lasso put it, "be curious, not judgmental"). And so I asked myself, what are my values? What does Alec Noé stand for? What are the hallmarks of my decisions? What dictates my every word, action, and thought? And so, with that thought experiment, this was born: