As word began to make the rounds that I was stepping back as a player and instead turning to a new role as coach, Evan Cory asked if I’d be able to help when I could. It was a non-decision for me. Evan had been one of my close friends since he was a 16-year-old kid with a big arm and a blue nose. If there was anything in my power I could do to help him, there would never be a moment’s hesitation from me to do it.
We had a tremendous preseason, Evan as a player, me as a coach. Evan allowed me to tinker with various different drills and concepts and gave me a full blue sky as a coach. He enjoyed immense success early in the season, beating a handful of quality teams at a NORCECA qualifier and capitalizing with three medals. While he didn’t qualify, or even win a match, at the Guadalajara Challenge in April, he was excellent with Wyatt Harrison in an eventual 21-19, 19-21, 8-15 loss to Portugal’s Joao Pedrosa and Hugo Campos. At AVP Huntington Beach, his first event with Alison, he finished fifth, matching his career-high on the AVP Tour.
He was rolling, and both of us sought to keep that momentum through the remainder of the year.
So I kicked him off the beach.
Sent him and that blue nose of his straight into the mountains.
As a coach, you are able to impart wisdom you wish you had as a player. This was one I wish someone had told me, or told me fervently enough that I actually listened: We need breaks. And we need them, preferably, in nature.
I told Evan I wouldn’t work with him for at least a week, in hopes that he would go to Yosemite or Sequoia or somewhere in the Sierras – away from volleyball, away from any temptation to even look or smell the game. Into the real, natural world, where a true mental and physical reset can take place, where there’s no service, where, after a day or two, you can think for a change, clear the mind, heal the body and soul.
Then you can get back to work.
Jon Mesko, a mentor and close friend and another nature devotee, backed me up on this. It’s one of the reasons why, for the past several years, we made a tradition of taking our closest friends to Yosemite every December. It became one of our favorite weekends of the year.
And so Evan went, into the mountains, into nature. He came back recharged, so much so that he won his next two events, in Denver and Waupaca, knocking off Taylor Crabb and Taylor Sander in both, winning a hard-fought final against Troy Field and Tim Bomgren in the latter.
And then he went back into nature.
We continued this rhythm throughout the season, the most successful of a career that is going off like a meteor.
It wasn’t just Evan, either.
When Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk halted their run at the Olympics, he was as burned out on volleyball as a man could possibly be. One of the many similarities between Tri and I — we took personality tests at the beginning of the year and the results were nearly identical — is our love of the natural world, and water in particular. He was going to Tahiti, he said. Two weeks with his family and absolutely zero volleyball. I did my best not to contact him.
Some coaches may have pushed back on this. Here was a player who was not playing close to his potential. The traditional thinking would be to push harder, to train more, to rep rep rep all the things going wrong, to fix them by hammering.
I shrugged and told him he should stay as longer if he thought he needed it.
He came back and won his first tournament in Virginia Beach, with a partner, Ryan Wilcox, who had never won anything. Then they upset Chase Budinger and Miles Evans in Manhattan Beach, Tri alas exorcising his demons against that team.
I think Tahiti was the linchpin to that success in the second half of the season.
You do not, of course, have to be an athlete to reap the benefits of getting in nature. I am at my creative best when I am immersed in natural beauty. Much of my best writing has been done on hikes up Yosemite Falls or deep in the Sequoias or walking down the beach, mind wandering, chewing on whatever it must, answers and stories and ideas simply coming to me. As a Christian, nature is where I have always found God, always where I’ve been able to communicate with Him the easiest. Don’t know why, though I have my ideas.
God made the natural world, didn’t he?
Wouldn’t that be where we’d find him the easiest?
That’s my thought, anyway, and until the communication stops, until my creativity ceases to be put on hyperdrive, until my soul no longer feels satiated after time in nature, I’m sticking with it.
Where, you might ask, did I write this story?
On a run in Joao Pessoa, Brazil.
On the beach.
In nature.