For reference, you’re going to want to read this article by Issac Trotter.
If you don’t want to, see you next week.
If you do want to, read it and then come back here.
There’s a guy currently coaching college basketball in Green Bay, Wisconsin… And his name is Sundance Wicks.
Yes, that’s a real name.
And with a name like that and a Level 1 story to boot, you know he’s going to make it.
While that story is being written, there was a different part of the story we’d like to focus on today. The Level 1 portion of the story. The part that makes it heroic but doesn’t feel like it at the time. The early part. The come up.
The part where he loses his kush job in D1 basketball, has to move across the country with nothing but a car, to start training basketball players at a UFC gym and sleep on a beanbag at the same facility, just to stay in coaching.
Yeah, that part.
“When you get into the deep, dark pits of despair, there’s something that teaches you about yourself that success or good fortune can’t teach you,” Wicks said. “I’m blessed for that. The burden you bear becomes the blessing that shapes your life and the ones around you. We’re built on the building blocks of chaos.”
-Wicks
Why do I resonate so much with his Level 1 story? Here’s a bit of mine.
2 years as HC in the USPHL from 2017-2020. 1st year I lived at my billet house from when I was a player, rent-free (because I couldn’t pay). The 2nd year, we were served papers for possible eviction twice for overdue rent…
Left that job after hitting bottom financially, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually…
Then it all started ‘happening’ but never ended up ‘working out’.
1 phone call away from coaching in the NAHL in 2020. Then the team didn’t play that season.
30 days as a 15U HC in 2021, then resigned for moral reasons.
Ghosted by an ECHL team in 2022 after multiple rounds of interviewing.
A few less wins by an Interim coach away from coaching in the SPHL in 2023.
When you’re on Level 1, it’s the hardest portion of your career. Once I got ‘outside’ of the game in 2020, I’ve been on the outside looking in since.
How and why have to do with a videogame analogy… Click to listen to a short explanation:
To further this point, when you haven't collected enough coins to get a second and third life. If I wasn't dating Tiffany at the end of 2020, I would have been homeless like Wicks.
There were times during my USPHL HC stint when Tiffany was sending me money because her part-time job at a golf course paid more than my HC’ing job. I’d stopped getting paid 2 months into the season…
She’d Venmo me what she could come up with when my bills got tight but if I'm single… I’m homeless too.
Without a relationship with my now fiance (jokingly I call her my finance), it would have been ‘Game Over’ for me. She came into my life right before the hardest test of my life and I’ve got God to thank for that divine intervention.
When you’re at Level 1, it’s about collecting enough coins to get another life. To make another genuine connection, to find others who believe in you, to sleep on a gym floor in Arizona to stay in the videogame of coaching.
To DoorDash and Uber while putting your coaching thoughts on the internet waiting for another shot at it…
“You can’t connect the dots until looking back. It’s another life lesson about the coolest moments in your life coming out of the most desperate, obscure moments.”
-Wicks
P.S. On your way out, if you enjoyed this, would you mind engaging with this post: