Coach Shane is still the most intense person I’ve ever been around, and I’ve been around a few trust me.
I played basketball at La Lumiere, a boarding school in Indiana, before I went off to Xavier University. Shane was my coach there. He cared about one thing.
Winning.
He’d run us until somebody threw up, then run whoever was still standing. He’d raise his voice about 34 times a day and every one of them hit like the first time your grandparent ever yelled at you. You’d think you’d go numb to it eventually. Nobody did.
There’s one game I think about more than any game I actually played well in.
Snowy Wednesday in Indiana. Our record was 21-0, undefeated. The team that came in was a prep school out of Phoenix, one of those setups where you’re not sure there are classrooms involved, or a campus, or anything happening at all. Cheap jerseys. They were taking photos of our arena on the way in, which tells you where their heads were at. They were happy just to be standing there.
We were up 40 at half time.
If you don’t follow basketball, that’s like if you couldn’t be late to your 6pm dinner and halfway your ETA says 3pm. The game stopped being a question about fifteen minutes ago. Zero atmosphere in the arena walking into half time.
Every other coach I’ve had or played against walks into that locker room and says some version of well done boys, second half, keep it going.
Shane walked in and went off.
One bad turnover. One, in a half where we’d beaten a team by 40 points. He’d been sitting on it since the moment it happened and he let the whole thing out while we sat there sweating, up 40, being told we were nowhere near good enough.
I was 16. It felt unhinged. It felt like there was no version of this where the man ends up happy, so what’s the point in trying.
Took me years to get it.
His point had nothing to do with that game. That team from Phoenix was never going to make us pay for the mistake. But in March, against somebody real, on a neutral floor, that same mistake is the whole game. It’s the possession you’re still thinking about on the bus after.
Reality is you either made it or you didn’t, and whether you got away with it is a separate conversation.
If your standard moves around depending on the score, your focused on outcome instead of process.
That’s the part I kept, and it turns up in my work most weeks.
Week one of a campaign can feel exactly like being up 40. Numbers through the door are big, contracts are going out, the vendor’s ringing the office in a good mood. You get 20 contracts out after the first week and it is very tempting to stand in someone’s kitchen on Saturday afternoon and tell them the hard part’s done.
Contracts issued out is not a result. A crowd at an open home is not a price. Interest is the easiest thing in this job to create and the most expensive thing to misread, because the person who wears the misread is your client, and they wear it four weeks later when the auctioneer is standing out the front with one bidder.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend Shane’s methods were fine. Running teenagers until they vomit isn’t something I’d defend now and it isn’t how I run anything. You can’t yell adults into caring either. I’ve worked under people who tried and all you get is a room full of people who are very good at looking busy when you walk past.
So what I took from him is the standard sits where it sits no matter what the scoreboard says. Especially when you’re winning. Especially when you’re up 40 on a team who were photographing your gym an hour earlier.
Nobody is going to walk in at half time and tell you the one thing you got wrong is going to cost you in March. You have to be the one who notices, usually while everybody around you is telling you how good the margin looks.
Shane never said any of it in a way that sounded like advice. He just yelled, and then about ten years later it made sense.
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