One of the difficult parts of playing a new sport is that I’m not good at it yet.

My lab played volleyball this summer. Every Wednesday after work, we trotted out to the grass behind the conference center, doing our best not to complain about the humidity and heat. We greeted the other two teams in the league (both of which had clearly played volleyball before–not just in gym class in high school, or, in my case, once during a summer program five years ago), we helped set up the nets, and we began bumping a ball around.

Volleyball was not where any of us excelled. Sure, by the end of the ten weeks, everyone in the lab had improved. We could do what might be called a volley. I could be in the right place at the right time to hit the ball, even if the ball then flew off in completely unintentional directions. When I served, the probability that the ball would both get over the net and stay in bounds was greater than chance (if I remembered to stand on the right, that is, because my serves always flew too far left). It was great fun.

It was also frustrating. I knew that given enough practice, I could be a half-decent volleyballer. Instead of the game being a matter of physical skills and pure luck, it could evolve into a complex, strategic battle, with us setting up plays and plotting out how to outwit the other team. But ten weeks isn’t quite long enough to get us to that point. (Sometimes, I’m impatient.) We lost just about every match played against the other teams.

Losing is hard to watch

My lab had split into two teams and recruited a few extra interns, so most days, the five or six of us on my team rotated through four spots on the court. This meant that some games, I stood on the sidelines during the game point.

That was difficult.

I had no direct control over whether we won or lost. I had to stand there, watching, as hands missed the ball, as the ball smacked the dusty grass, or flew too far out of bounds. I had no power over how hard my teammates tried (whether they desired to win enough to dive after the ball; whether they were tired and sweaty and just wanted it to be over). I could be a cheerleader, but I could not actively influence the outcome of the game.

That was new.

My usual sport is fencing: highly individual, always solo. When you’re on the strip, it’s just you. If you mess up, if you lose, you only have yourself to blame. Even in team competitions, you’re just adding up the scores you and your teammates have separately acquired. You don’t realize, unless you’ve been part of a team, how important it is to trust your teammates. And that’s what made volleyball difficult: because none of us were that good, it wasn’t easy to trust my teammates to be there, backing me up, putting in their best effort to win even though the games were casual and couldn’t be taken seriously given our level of experience.

The thing about trust is, most times, it has to be earned.

Trust and control

Fortunately for my lab, playing volleyball is not what we did full-time. When working on our summer project–establishing the Autonomous Vehicle Lab–I learned I could trust my labmates to have my back. We all cared about the outcome; we could trust each other to each do our part. Not being in control of every little detail (and occasionally standing on the sidelines) was okay, because I knew my labmates were trying just as hard as I was to debug their programs and get the quadcopters flying.

I guess the moral of the story is (besides the obvious “teamwork requires trust”), if you ever have the chance to play a new sport, do so. You never know what you’ll learn.

I recently discussed the varsity athletics for academic credit proposal that was in the works at my college. Well, here’s the news:

The proposal passed.

Starting in September, varsity athletes can get half a unit a season for up to four seasons for participating in their sport. The details, of course, are still being hammered out: what to do about freshmen who may drop the sport and walk-ons who may not make the team, whether an academic component (such as writing a paper on the history of the sport) will be required, which semester the credit will be granted for sports that span both semesters, and so on.

It passed, but…

The proposal passed with approximately 2:1 approval. Of the concerns expressed by faculty, the main worry was that students who were getting credit for their sport would choose to skip class or labs in favor of practices and games–or even in favor of some downtime before the practice or game. Such things already happen. Some faculty have complained of student-athletes emailing the day before a class or the day before a big paper was due to say “Sorry, I can’t be in class or turn in that paper yet, I have [athletic event] to attend instead.” That’s just wrong. Being an athlete does not grant a person special privileges. If anything, it holds a person to a higher standard, committing to both academic and athletic excellence.

The faculty are worried about student-athletes abusing their newfound credits, and, well, so am I. As much as I’ll argue that many important things can be learned from participation on a sports team (and I have, just see the end ofmy previous discussion of the varsity athletics proposal), at this time, in this college, academics come first. The best way to allay these worries may simply be to demonstrate, over the next few years, that granting credit doesn’t change how student-athletes behave. We can help this effort along by proactively ensuring that student-athletes are committed to both academic and athletic excellence. Give a boost to the general student-athlete reputation, so to speak. Here are two of the things we’re doing:

• - Our Student-Athlete Advisory Committee drafted a Best Practices document some time back, outlining suggestions for successfully balancing academic and athletic commitments. All teams are being reminded that this document exists for a reason.
• - The athletic department is designing an academic excellence program geared towards helping freshman and sophomore student-athletes. Upperclassmen will be advisors and mentors, providing new student-athletes with academic advice as well as advice on how to balance their academics and athletics. Other awesome stuff TBA–the program is still in the brainstorming stage. Hopefully, it’ll be rolled out in the fall.

Relevant facts in favor of credit

All of the above is happening whether or not you personally agree that credit should be granted. If you do, great. If you don’t (and my previous discussion didn’t convince you), I’d like to introduce you to a pair of interesting and relevant facts that may change how you think about the proposal:

1. In the academic year 1971-72, the number of units required to graduate increased from 32 to 34, due to a decision to grant credit for Physical Education courses. Varsity athletes, under the new rule, will be able to get a max of 2 units from their athletics participation.
2. Varsity athletics are the only area of the college in which student performance is closely overseen by faculty members (in this case, our coaches) but is not awarded credit. Areas that do get credit include drama department shows, voice lessons, and jazz ensemble, to name a few.
3. We don’t have a physical education requirement. Most, maybe even all, of our peer institutions do have such a requirement and do allow students to count varsity athletics towards the requirement. Oberlin College has no such requirement, and funnily enough, awards credit for participation in varsity athletics.

Give it a think.

One of my fencing coaches told me today, “You’re one of the people on the fencing team who deserves a big hug at the end of the season for your hard work.”

I appreciated this comment. I appreciated it far more than I expected. What I appreciated was not the implicit compliment (nice as that is), but that someone had noticed the time, effort, and thought I put into the team and into improving my own fencing.

Back to ambition

If you take a look at my recent rambling on ambition, you’ll find I think it’s up to you to achieve what you want to achieve. You’re the only person you’ll have to blame if you’re not satisfied with how you’ve lived your life, be it a sport that you’d like to excel at, a dream job you want to have, a novel you plan to write. The only person who can get you the places you want to go is you.

I call this drive and determination to do the work needed to do the things I want to do ambition. A friend of mine, though, noted that “ambition” often has negative connotations. It’s associated with evil overlords and corporate weasels. And “work,” that’s associated with external imposition. It’s something to be avoided. This comment made me think: Why do I approach work (and ambition) differently?

Fencing coaches give good advice

The most prominent influencing factor that came to mind was my first fencing coach, George Platt. He was a cheerful, positive man, and he explained the difference between achieving success and achieving excellence to all his fencers.

Success, he said, is how good you are in relation to the rest of the world. Success is job promotions and high salaries and winning medals in competitions. Excellence is how good you are in relation to how good you individually can be. Achieving excellence is being the best you can be, regardless of how good anyone else is. And that should be your goal: being the best you can be. Doing what you enjoy and putting effort into the things that are important to you.

Most of us, we’ll never be The Best at anything. The hard part is not letting failure to achieve success dissuade us from continuing to pursue excellence. It’s easy to be discouraged. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “I work, but no one else does and no one appreciates it, so I’m going to stop.” It’s easy to lose motivation. So in a world increasingly full of lazy slackers, we need to acknowledge the people who do work hard, no matter what results they garner. That acknowledgment may be exactly what they need to keep going.