TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Since we moved from California to Tallahassee, Florida – go Noles! – a few weeks ago, many have been asking: How’s Florida?
Short answer. Easy answer. Obvious answer already: I love this place.
To some, this will come as no surprise. I’ve long had a penchant for being content, happy wherever I’ve been.
Tri Bourne knew I’d love my new job as the assistant beach volleyball coach at Florida State University. Knew I’d love working with and learning from Brooke Niles and Nick Lucena. Knew I’d love bonding with the few dozen players on our team.
He was correct: I do love all of those things.
“As for Tallahassee,” he said with a smile. “There’s not much there. But then again, you and Delaney don’t need much to be happy.”
My wife loved that.
Thing is, and this took me a bit by surprise as well, I might just love the town more than the job that brought us here. I love the lake by our house I walk around at dawn and after dinner, the first a quiet meditation as the dew rises and the sun paints its first portrait of the day, the second a stroll with my family as we point out lizards and turtles and birds and pick up sticks with my toddling, giggling, sometimes tantrum-throwing son. I love the front porch with the grass and oaks beyond it and the barking dogs in the adjacent park. I love the back patio where my son stacks our empty boxes and topples them over and declares victory by saying “crashhh!” and then doing it again. I love taking those boxes and turning them into soccer goals, and then balancing beams, and then whatever other game he wants to play. I love our house, a little end unit in a lovely suburb that reminds me so much of home.
That makes me feel, for the first time in my adult life, like I’m building a home.
Tallahassee is where our real life is beginning.
When Delaney and I told our respective parents that we were moving 2,200 miles across the country, mine, much accustomed to their roving, circuitous son embarking on a new cross-country adventure, met it with a congratulations and a shrug and a bit of a smile that their son would at least be on the same time zone again. My dad even joined me on the adventure, driving 38-some hours in a 15-foot U-Haul, navigating both the entirety of I-10 as well as an exploded tire. Delaney’s parents, whose daughter had never lived outside of Los Angeles County, were a bit less thrilled.
Was this opportunity really enough to uproot our family?
But our family had no roots in Hermosa Beach, and Delaney and I both knew it.
Knew it was an exceedingly temporary chapter of our lives – a brilliant, indelible chapter I wouldn’t trade for the world, but one we knew carried an expiration date that was fast approaching. We did not want to raise our children in California. We were not in a particular hurry to leave, but we remained open-minded to opportunities.
In June, one came.
There was an opening at Florida State, and Niles and Lucena wanted me to fill it.
Their enthusiasm piqued me. It is a wonderful feeling, to be wanted.
I also wanted to fill that vacancy. More than I anticipated, to tell you the truth. Felt a familiar gut instinct I now know better than to ignore. Something pulled me there. Can’t explain it. Can’t explain why I’d felt a nagging discontent to leave California, given the astoundingly comfortable life we led there. But there was, make no mistake, a gut instinct, a little nudge from God that told me to go.
How much I have loved this first month in Tallahassee is far more than I would have guessed. I knew, after working with Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk, Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles, and Evan Cory this season that I loved coaching. But at Florida State, our work goes beyond simply coaching, the teaching of skills. We are teachers of young women, exemplars of a program and university that prides itself not just on excellence, but moral standards. What we are attempting to bestow upon them will go beyond the volleyball court.
Last year’s team motto was “Bigger than you.”
I think that applies to all coaching below the professional level, and even a good bit at that level, as well.
It isn’t that Tri and Chaim and Betsi and Julia and Evan couldn’t take anything we did this year and apply it to their lives beyond volleyball, but they are all fully grown adults. Three have children, four are married, one is engaged. We were peers, all in similar points of our lives. Our coach-player relationship was more transactional, mostly separate from that of our friendship beyond the court, although – and I hope I can speak for them as well – that they had as much fun on the court as we did as friends off the court.
My role at Florida State includes many of those aspects, but it is more relational than it is transactional.
As coaches, we will spend far more time with each of our players than their parents will this year. There is an immense responsibility with that.
Our home, then, is open to them whenever they need to feel the semblance of a home, a kitchen instead of a dining hall, a warm place to rest their minds rather than the stale walls of a dorm.
In California, I had jobs. Many of them. Those jobs provided a wonderful livelihood, filled with beaches and autonomy and a schedule of my own making. But there was a receding sense of fulfillment. I could cobble together all the jobs I’d like – and I did – and they still didn’t make a career. They still didn’t make a life.
They didn’t plant roots.
Here, in Tallahassee, the seedlings of the life we want to create for our family are beginning to set.
Will we be here forever? Not likely, although I’ll catch myself thinking it would be quite pleasant. But the image of what we want our lives to look like is beginning to become clearer by the day.
We still have a few boxes to unpack. The garage needs to be dusted. Rooms remain devoid of furniture.
But for the first time in 34 years, I feel roots in the ground.
Our real lives have alas begun.