The Winning Edge

March is finally here.  If you are a basketball fan like I am, you are excited because it is MARCH MADNESS.  We'll soon be filling out our brackets.  There will be 68 top-notch teams in the NCAA basketball tournament.  I heard an announcer on ESPN say that this year's tournament might be the most even tournament in NCAA history.  Half of the field has a shot at winning the whole thing.

Talent alone will not set these teams apart.  There are so many teams that have fairly equal talent.  Just like our team that has started their quest for an 8th high school state championship.  We are talented but so are other teams.

What is going to take us from talented to good?  What is going to give us an advantage over other talented teams? What differentiates us from the competition?

Successful people do things differently.  Here are a couple of ways that we can gain a winning edge:

Opportunity Knocks

The Oregon Ducks and the Ohio State Buckeyes will battle Monday night in the first-ever College Football Playoffs Championship Game. Both teams have glaring examples of people who took advantage of opportunities presented to them and didn’t quit or become disruptive to their teams. I will come back to these Bucks and Ducks in a moment.

As a long-time coach and now an athletic director, it pains me every time that I see a student-athlete get disgruntled over playing time or their role on the team. In nearly every case, the player quits. Oh, they might not quit the team and they might not even make a visible show but slowly and surely they cash out mentally. Instead of seeing the opportunity in every challenge, as Winston Churchill used to say, they see the difficulty in every opportunity. Unfortunately instead of persevering, they make excuses and take on a victim-mentality.