Happy Lord’s Day!
It is good to see you guys. Hope you’re doing well. We’ll be in Romans 6, so you can turn there now, and we’ll jump in in a few minutes.
Some of you know me a little bit now, and some of you know that I’m a baseball coach. That’s my day job. I’ve been in and around the game of baseball my entire life. I think from the age of four to thirty-three, I haven’t missed a season as either a player or a coach. It’s been my world. Every team that I’ve ever been a part of has had an identity, what they call in sports, a culture.
I’ve been on some pretty awful teams. I’ve coached some pretty bad teams as well. And usually, there comes a time in the season when the culture becomes “let’s just have fun,” and then you realize how hard that is when you’re getting killed every game. I try to coach teams now with an identity and focus on playing the game the right way. We can’t necessarily control the wins and losses, so I want our culture to be about working hard, executing, and doing things right.
But there was one team I played on that had an identity and culture unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and that was when I was in college at the University of Oklahoma. There was one thing, and only one thing, that mattered at OU, and that was winning. Winning was everything. We had practice shirts that had the number 540 on them, and we would touch a sign on the wall every practice that said “540.” Because Norman, Oklahoma, was 540 miles away from Omaha, Nebraska, where they hosted the College World Series. This was the goal. Everything we did was focused on this one thing. It defined us. It was the air we breathed. It was our culture.
For example, my senior year, we started the season 16-0. We were number one in the nation. Things were going well, and then we lost one game to Arkansas Little Rock, 16-1. No big deal, right? Wrong. After the game, we met in the clubhouse for over an hour. Chairs were lined up, and the coach just berated us. I mean, he would go one by one, and sometimes objects were thrown. Clipboards were broken, and everyone’s self-esteem was crushed. But the main message after that loss was that our performance on the field was not a reflection of who we were. We needed to wake up. That was his message. “You don’t lose to Arkansas Little Rock. You just don’t because you’re much better than them.” That’s what he told us. “Be who you are. Play better.”
Now, looking back, I disagree with a lot of my coach’s philosophy and how he communicated and treated us. But he wasn’t wrong. We were a much more talented team than Arkansas Little Rock, and we didn’t play like who we were—the better team. We were not playing out of our identity.