Ceilings

My previous post is intimately related to this one.  Anyone can make the A team, anyone can be valuable to the A team.  The road is long and tiresome, but the map is clear.  Obviously everyone is starting a different level and everyone will have to travel different distances, but in the words of dear Walden, “as long as you care enough you can make it.”

When a young whippersnapper who is lacking in athleticism (his gait is small, his mobility is poor, his strength is low, he isn’t explosive) it is easy to feel sorry for him, it is easy to say, “he will have to work so hard just to catch up,” “his ceiling is pretty low,” and it is easy to use these thoughts as excuses to never even try to make it.

He will have to work so hard just to catch up:

Saying this allows me to sympathize with him for not even trying, it allows me to be the nice guy that feels bad for me new friend.  It allows me to steal from him and opportunity to experience pushing himself.

I often wonder what people mean by “he has to work so hard.”  What is the image of “work so hard” that they have in their mind?  I think that putting in 12 hours a week is enough to make incremental improvements throughout a college career, I think that if you routinely budget this amount of time then you will improve all the way through your senior year.  Is 12 hours a lot?  I would never ask someone to be in the gym for more than an hour and a half.  I would never ask someone to go the gym more than 3 times a week.  Are my expectations still too high?

His ceiling is pretty low:

This one is great.  Vandervoort used to argue that you don’t want kids who played high school ultimate because they’ve already peaked and they aren’t going to improve very much moving forward.  This is a joke.

No 18 year old has peaked.  No 23 year old has peaked.  If you think that people are capable of playing a sport for 3 years and maxing out, then I’m not that interested in being friends with you.  I feel strongly that the lowest ceiling I have ever seen is still high enough to be valuable to a college Frisbee team.

Just because your ceiling is low doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.  Just because my ceiling is lower than someone else’s doesn’t mean I can’t be better than that person.  I think that there are many teammates who have had higher ceilings than me, but I’ve still been the better Frisbee player.  (I wish I had the guts to name names).

Even considering someone’s ceiling is a waste of time.  The only reasonable action to take is to try.  Try to get little better every day.  Try to squat .5x times your body weight, then .66x, then 1x, then 1.5x, if you make it this far go for 2x.  You can add an inch every single week of your college career and by the time you are ready to graduate you will not have made it to your ceiling.  This isn’t a reason to not try.

Back to my boy Sahaj:

Recently Sahaj did some film study of Justin Lin and Bobby Ley, he said he learned a lot but the one comment he had was, “they’ve been playing Frisbee for years, and I’m not going to get to their level.”  I told Sahaj that I get that, and that is completely fine, but that isn’t an excuse to try.  You can still learn things from good players; you can still strive to be better and to emulate them.  My boy Sahaj understands that he isn’t done until he is at their level, which he might never get to, which means he might never finish.  My boy Sahaj gets it because he is a thug.