In my early years as a coach I had a student for a time who competed and always gave his absolute best, but never finished anywhere other than dead last…not once.  I’ll not use his real name.  I’ll simply call him “Inspiring”, because that word best describes him. 

There are many qualities that an athlete must possess to be successful, with “effort” and “desire” being two of the most important of them. Inspiring had both in excess.  No one tried harder than he.  

“Natural ability”, though, is perhaps the most important quality an athlete can have, but unfortunately it can’t be built, either through an athlete’s effort or a coach’s teaching.  It must be inherited.  And Inspiring’s inherited natural ability was almost totally lacking. 

I began my coaching career as a speed skating coach while still chasing championships as an athlete.  I was what they call a “playing coach”, and I was balancing teaching and competing when Inspiring became a student of mine for a while.  

The first time I saw him was at the Regional Championship when he lined up down the starting line from me as a competitor in the five mile race.  His teeth were rotten, his eyes sunken, his face covered with stubble, and his shoulders were stooped, as though he carried some heavy weight on his back.  He was from somewhere in northern Washington state, but his uniform didn’t identify him as representing any rink or club. It was crudely made and homemade, and his tights looked to be dyed pajama bottoms with a crooked line of hand-stitched sequins wandering down each leg.  His jersey was made from some much-worn item of knit clothing with crude sequined designs sewn to the chest.  I assumed no team or rink would claim him.  He looked as though he had just come in from the street, and he skated as though his only training had been garnered from skating slow circles in public sessions. 

I led much of the seventy laps of that race and won it, but I lapped him so often that he became somewhat of an obstacle. As the meet proceeded through the week and I faced him in the other four distances we skated, he was quite simply in the way.  It was like racing the Indy 500 with one driver circling the track in a pedal car. My competitors treated him badly, and the officials considered disqualifying him for being a physical nuisance, though they didn’t.  

Besides being a very slow skater and teamless, Inspiring was obviously mentally handicapped, and I went out of my way to befriend him.  But even this was difficult, because he had problems with the spoken word. I never heard him string more than two or three words together, and they were so reluctant and garbled that I couldn’t understand him. He looked old, and might have been, but I suspect this appearance of oldness was not from any passage of years but from the hard life he looked to be living.  He was a mystery to me, and remained so to the end, but I thought it wonderful that he loved this sport and found such meaning in it.  His effort, though futile, seemed gallant.

Well…a few months later I came to unlock the door for an early morning practice at the rink at which I trained and coached, and waiting there in the half-darkness was Inspiring.  He was wearing his homemade uniform and holding his skates, and in his nearly unintelligible words, I gathered that he had come to be on my team.  

So I became his coach.

But  I swear, I gave him not a single piece of advice he understood.  He wanted nothing more than to be coached by me, but he was uncoachable. He cornered on one foot, as though fighting for his balance at the edge of a cliff.  His strokes were crude little steps he executed with his body turned almost sideways. The only positive thing I could say about his skating was that he managed to stay upright.  

I instructed my other skaters to be nice to him, but they found this difficult. He was an embarrassment to them and was always in the way.  The owner of our rink also found it embarrassing to have him representing his establishment, and he asked me to remove him from my team, though I politely declined.

Inspiring remained my student for only part of that year.  We did most of our training in the early mornings, but he was always there, waiting at the door and eager.  Where he slept and ate and spent his days, I never knew, nor asked.  His home might have been under a bridge.  Or then, too, with his diligent work habits and desire to please others, I suspect he could have performed simple work at a wage and made his way in the world in the same crude manner in which he performed his sport.  

Then, as suddenly as he appeared, Inspiring disappeared.  I never saw him again, nor heard of him.  My hope was that he hadn’t met some sad end, but I never knew.  

Through my years as a coach, and now as an ex-coach, I have often thought of him. I even composed a version of him as a character in a novel I wrote.  In it, he was not a skater but simply a damaged homeless man trying to keep a grip on life by fleeing the unkind city to eke out an existence in nature.

It’s easy for a coach to get his or her priorities out of order.  The lure of champions and championships is always tempting. But the memory of this early student whom I so admired has helped me keep my own priorities in line.  You, the coach and role model, are not there to help only the best of your students, but the least of them.  For every champion you are lucky enough to coach, there are many, many more who give their best but finish somewhere back in the pack…and perhaps dead last. 

As a coach, the championship is the mountaintop you will lure your students to climb.  But each student will find his or her own summit.

And some won’t even find the mountain. 

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* The stories in Winning Ways are of actual athletes but names have been replaced for privacy.