The coach who taught me how to live up to your heroes by failing them

Winning is a meat grinder into which many college basketball coaches feed their players. That sounds terrible but I get it. For a long time, winning was my drug of choice. As a player I’d gladly sacrifice myself for a W – until the sacrifices became too real and too sad. Although I’ve won a lot of games and a few championships, 20 years after playing Division I basketball, the biggest lesson I learned comes from loss.

I learned it from Kathy Delaney-Smith, the coach who doesn’t like to be called “coach”, because she thinks too many people have negative associations (see: meat grinder). This March Madness will be her last, as she’s retiring after 40 years of fighting for equity, upending Ivory Tower norms, and yes – winning.

A blue-collar kid whose mom didn’t want her to interview for the Harvard job, Kathy became the winningest coach in the Ivy League, for any sport (men’s or women’s), and clinched one of the greatest upsets in NCAA history. Yet, winning misses the measure of the woman. She taught me:

You don’t really know a person until you let them down.

By this calculus, I’m uniquely qualified to tell you who Kathy is, because I’ve done nothing but let her down. Other coaches would regard me as a spectacular failure, a blight upon their records. Not Kathy. My relationship with her is strong not in spite of, but because of the ways in which I’ve let her down, which have taught me more about character and leadership than anything I learned from my philosophy degree.

At 6ft 4in tall and a New York state champion, I was a heavily recruited high-school student and valedictorian, and a shy, socially immature kid who had never tasted alcohol and was years away from my first kiss. Basketball was my life. I could have