THE CREATIVE ATHLETE

Issue 8--How Do You Combine Personal and Competitive Goals?

If you've been an athlete most or all of your life, it may never occur to you to think of yourself as anything else. But sometimes sports isn't the best way for you to satisfy your personal goals. In fact, sometimes sports might even be preventing you from satisfying them.

Therefore, it's a good idea for you to set up a mental checklist of everything that is really important to you. Then make some effort, either now or in the future, to incorporate these personal goals into your life. Sports and personal goals can be achieved simultaneously when they are compatible and when they work together to enhance your personal development. But if they are not compatible, you might want to at least insure that you can achieve both over the course of a lifetime.

According to career counselor Barbara Sher, "As your total life design unfolds, it will include many goals of different kinds, sizes, and shapes " (1) Her approach is to remind you that there are a variety of ways to reach your goals and satisfy your needs:

1. You can work toward one goal at a time.

• Pro volleyball player Gabrielle Reece started out as a model. But once her sports career took off, she shifted her focus. "[Volleyball] is why I modeled in the first place. It wasn't a dream, it was an opportunity. I ticked a lot of people off in fashion because I couldn't do something because I had a ball game. They didn't understand that." (2)
  
  
• Chuck Roseberry played high school football and then spent the next 29 years as a prison guard and a policeman. He returned to college and at age 46 made the Kurtztown University football team, a Division II school. "If I get knocked on my butt, fine. I can always say I played college football." (3) He then made history as the oldest man on record to have played in a NCAA football game.
  
  
• Skater Kathaleen Kelly Cutone managed to continue her training during her years as an undergraduate at Harvard. She even qualified for her first the national championships in 1988, during her junior year.

She continued to compete for two more years, but quit to attend law school. She married, graduated from law school, passed the bar exam, went to work for a law firm. and stayed involved with skating as a judge.

Deciding that she could still be competitive, she resumed skating--spending her lunch hour and several evenings a week in training. In 1995 she made it back to the national championship and finished in eleventh place, her best finish ever.

2. You can work toward several goals simultaneously.

• Skater Debi Thomas was training for the 1988 Calgary Olympics, while also a pre-med student at Stanford. Some people point to the fact that she ended up with only the bronze medal and a B- to C+ average in school (instead of straight As) as proof she spread herself too thin.

But she did get to the Olympics and she did get accepted to Northwestern University medical school. "A lot of people underestimate what they can accomplish. I'm going to go for the big thing. If I don't get the big thing, at least I get the next thing down from that, rather than not really trying for much of anything." (4)

• Paul Wylie attended Harvard while skating competitively. The result: he ended up with an unexpected Olympic silver medal at the 1992 Albertville Olympics and was accepted to Harvard Law School (which he chose not to do in order to pursue his professional skating career).
  
  
• Chance Henderson attended the Air Force Academy while also competing as a professional rodeo cowboy. "It's been a lot of work, but it keeps me focused on both school and rodeo. I'm doing the two things that I love doing. It doesn't get any better." (5)
  
  
• Dave Seoane is both a professional snowboarder and a filmmaker. "If you snowboarded every day you'd burn yourself out. If you shot film every day you'd burn yourself out. It's just good to balance it out." (6)

3. You can alternate goals.

• Softball shortstop Dot Richardson wanted to be a doctor and also play in the Olympics. During medical school, Richardson still played competitive softball during her summers, sometimes commuting by plane on the weekends from the University of Louisville in Kentucky to Stratford, Connecticut where she played for the Raybestos Brakettes. "As a doctor you learn to sleep when you can and in any position. Softball let me transfer the stress of medicine into competition." (7)

But in anticipation of softball's first appearance as an Olympic sport in Atlanta in 1996, Richardson decided to take a one year leave of absence from her orthopedic residency program at the University of Southern California. "I'm $140,000 in debt, but there's no price you can put on making the Olympic team."

She and her teammates won the gold medal.

4. You can combine goals.

• Diver Mark Bradshaw, who went to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, coached at the Upper Arlington High School in Columbus, Ohio while training for the 1996 Olympics.

"Coaching is going to be my career when I'm done competing and while this isn't exactly coaching at the elite level, it does require some administrative know-how and some cohesiveness with athletes. It's also a source of extra income that helps me out a lot.

"I'm lucky that I have a really good employer that understands my position as an athlete training for the Olympics and the time constraints that puts on me." (8)

Bradshaw finished fourth at the trials and did not make the team.

• A number of the members of the 1996 U.S. women's gold medal winning Olympic soccer team have also been coaches. Joy Fawcett is head coach at UCLA. Carla Overbeck is an assistant coach at Duke. Mia Hamm was an assistant coach at George Mason University.

Carin Gabarra had three jobs during the time leading up to the Olympics. She served as a forward on the U.S. women's soccer team; she worked for Diadora sporting goods company; and she was the women's soccer coach at the U. S. Naval Academy. "We're the first generation of players who could play at a competitive level our whole life. Coaching is something most of us want to go into." (9)

• Wrestling is yet another sport where competitors also serve as coaches. Three who competed at the 1996 Olympics were Tom Brands, an assistant coach at the University of Iowa (he won a gold medal in Atlanta); two-time Olympic gold medalist Bruce Baumgartner, head coach at Edinboro College (he won a bronze medal in Atlanta); and Rob Eiter, an assistant coach at Clarion University.

5. You can focus on one major goal and experiment with meeting several others.

• Reggie Rivers, who played football for the Denver Broncos, decided to put his college major, journalism, to work writing a book with teammate Vance Johnson. What was supposed to be a one-month project took seven months. But he found that his athletic training helped him follow through on the writing. "In the NFL, you keep your body in shape, you study film, you keep your skills sharp so you can be effective on Sundays. When writing a book, you also have to be disciplined. I had to be willing to go to the basement, sit at my computer and write even if I was not in the mood." (10)
  
  
• Gwyn Coogan, who finished 13th in the 10,000 meters at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, worked on her Ph.D. in math at the University of Colorado at Boulder and also trained for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. "In some ways, this Ph.D. is more important to me as a person than going to the Olympics. I want to get this Ph.D. If I can get myself through that, it's something I'll really carry with me for the rest of my life. Having gone to the Olympics, it's a label I'll carry with me for the rest of my life, but not a skill. It's not the only thing in my life." (11)

Coogan finished fourth at the women's Olympic marathon trials and did not make the team, but continues to run competitively.

• Joan Benoit Samuelson won the first women's Olympic marathon in 1984. A month later she married. When her children were born in 1987 and 1990, she cut back on her racing and looked for ways to combine training with motherhood. For example, she would sometimes run to appointments in a neighboring town rather than drive.

Before the 1996 Olympic women's marathon trials (where she finished 13th) she said, "If I don't make the team, I'll just resume my place with my family and the rest of society. I've got plenty of things to do." (12)

 

1 Barbara Sher, with Annie Gottlieb, Wishcraft (New York: Viking, 1979).

2 USA Today, August 2, 1993.

3 USA Today, September 14, 1994.

4 Rocky Mountain News, November 10, 1991.

5 Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, August 6, 1995.

6 Heckler Magazine, 1996 (posted at heckler.com).

7 The New York Times, July 24, 1995.

8 USA Today, October 5, 1995.

9 USA Today, October 5, 1995.

10 USA Today, October 14, 1994.

11 Boulder Daily Camera, April 10, 1995.

12 Runner's World, February, 1996.

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