1 second left on the game clock. Insert players name here steps to the free throw line to shoot two shots. His/her team is down by one point; one make means at least overtime the second one means a championship. The player goes over the routine they’ve done since they were a kid. First shot goes up and hits off the rim hard, one more to go. Make one and your team goes into overtime, miss and you just lost your team the championship. Second shot misses, game over, opposing team rushes the court to celebrate and in an instant the hero that got fouled is now the goat. The player has gone through his/her whole life dreaming about that very moment. Rehearsing their free throw routine over and over again visualizing themselves making the big free throws at the end of the game, but when the opportunity presented itself he/she didn’t come through when it mattered the most.

Just like that basketball player on the free throw line, sometimes we put so much pressure on ourselves in life that it breaks us down mentally and negates our ability to think clearly. What is pressure? I don’t feel that pressure is making a free throw in a game, because at the end of the day it’s just a game. Pressure to me is not being able to feed your family, or being a prisoner of war. Those are pressure situations. I think a homeless person would shoot that free throw any day of the week regardless of the consequences if it meant they had a roof over his head.

“If your expectations exceed your effort than failing is inevitable”

I have a business training kids and running travel basketball teams. When I first started the company Crossroads Basketball I had exactly one client, and I didn’t charge her any money to train with me. For my first summer basketball camp, I put together some flyers and tried to distribute as many as I could to high schools in the Sussex County area (where I coached) In my mind I figured we would have at least sixty kids. I hired three of my friends to work the camp and bought around fifty camp t shirts. The first day registration started around 9am; around 9:05 I realized that I had more counselors than campers. Around 9:10 we had about three more campers than counselors and at 9:30 after the last kid registered I counted a total of eight kids in attendance. One of those kids I actually had to drive back from camp every day because he wouldn’t have been able to come otherwise.

So as I looked around I started doing some quick math in my head, the camp was one hundred and fifty dollars for the week and we had eight kids. That was twelve hundred dollars, I planned on giving my counselors two hundred fifty dollars each, and the shirts were four hundred and fifty dollars. If you threw in the gas that I was using to take one of the campers home every day (he lived about twenty minutes away from me) I was going to make negative sixty dollars for the week. That very next week I had another camp set up that I was going to run, and realized two days before it that we were going to have even less kids than we had the previous week. So the coaches that I had promised before the summer that they would be able to work three camps for me ended up working just one. This made me feel horrible because they were not only depending on the extra money from my camp, but they also passed on opportunities to help run camps with actual campers where they would of been paid.

The next summer I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be in the same situation. I had one of my players print out business cards (the same player helped me come up with the logo we still use today) and I went to even more high schools to spread the word. By this time I was training around five kids so I knew that they would at least be in attendance. What I didn’t know is that all the flyers that I passed out at the main offices at all these schools were either being thrown out or left in a desk somewhere. High schools run their own camps during the summer and mine happened to be during the same week of most of them. So needless to say “spreading the word” on my camp wasn’t part of their immediate agenda. That year we ended up with twelve kids (2 came for free) and I actually had enough kids the following week (eight) to have two weeks of camp.

The pressure of getting more kids was wearing on me. I wasn’t sleeping at all. I knew that I was showing kids the right thing and I was frustrated that no one else believed in my camp enough to send their kid to it. Finally I just said to myself that I’m going to run camp even if I’m the only counselor and I have three kids in attendance. I wasn’t going to let the pressure of running a camp take away from what my camp was about and that was helping kids get better. In the movie Field of Dreams there’s a famous line “if you build it they will come” and in my mind I knew that the product was good and eventually the word would get out. I wasn’t raised with a lot of money so struggling a little financially has never been a problem for me. I knew if I could whether the storm eventually good things would happen.

Over the last six years camp numbers have gone up significantly every year. Thanks to the growth of our travel teams (started with two teams and now this year we’ll be up to 16) , training more kids, doing youth coaches clinics etc the word is finally out. Now I’m no longer scrambling to get kids to come to a basketball clinic or to sign up for camp. This past weekend we held tryouts for my travel teams (AAU). We had over 200 kids both boys and girls tryout from all different areas. I couldn’t believe the number of kids that showed up. I’m an optimist but this exceeded even my expectations.

I think about how different it could of been if I allowed myself to crack under the pressure I was putting on myself. All of the great relationships I would of missed out on if I decided maybe doing this basketball training thing was a little too much for me. I believed in the product and that was enough for me. I knew that others would believe in it also no matter how long it took.

“The right amount of pressure can motivate the wrong amount can cripple”