Every ending is also a begining
Graduations are celebrations, but that doesn’t always mean that the experience they’re celebrating has been all good.
High school and college can be a rough time for people, and for them graduation is a celebration of a new beginning more than the celebration of a special few years of their lives. I would suggest that this spring is just such an occasion for WSU athletics.
To be clear, I’m not speaking of the athletes themselves, or any individual people at all-but rather a collective experience over the last year or so. Since the fall of the LA schools, the PAC12 has been in chaos and the reality is that ‘time of transition’ is such an undersell of what the last year has meant to our program that I hesitate to type it.
Thankfully, change is upon us. A graduation of a sort. Sure, we’re essentially moving back into Mom’s basement for a while but that’s still a forward-facing thing and that’s good. We’ve even got a job to pass the time while we work out what’s next, something to help us network and build some work experience. Sure the WCC and the MWC aren’t the job we want or deserve, but its better than the alternative and good work leads to more good work.
All of which is something to be celebrated. The last few years have seen our athletes deal with incredible adversity and deliver some of the brightest moments in our history. Women’s basketball won a conference championship. Men’s basketball returned to the tournament. Football played genuinely inspiring ball. We’ve seen school records go down, and athletic excellence on a routine basis. All while dealing with the reality of conference realignment, the brutal honestly of Name, Image and Likeness rules, and the Thanos Portal snapping teammates in and out of each other’s lives on a regularly basis.
While these things can feel like acid rain, our athletes have persevered because that is who they are and that is what athletics demands. The ‘real world’ can celebrate the aimless passing of time as an accomplishment, but athletics demand more. Accomplishment in athletics is transparent, measurable and obvious. So much so that everyone is humbled eventually, and successful athletes learn to judge themselves by their process-not merely their output. Less successful athletes go mad or stop being athletes.
This is not the path our athletic program has chosen. Which is worth celebrating in and of itself. We have schedules. We have opponents. We have students. We have athletes. We have fans. We *are* moving forward, and we must celebrate the clarity that brings.
For me, a football fan, this mostly means the clarity of a football season. There are games to be played, opponents to be conquered, questions to be answered and (hopefully not too many) hard lessons to be learned.
Most of that will be done (or not) by players and coaches. So what does the new beginning mean for fans? I think it means learning new opponents. Finding new ways to support our school and our athletes. It means learning more about ball (the fun part), and it means learning more about our roster. It means being critical of what isn’t working, but more so it means being curious about what is, and how things are meant to work. Success is a byproduct of systems, and in the last two years just about every single one of those has changed or will change in the near future. Before we judge, we must seek to understand. These endings have brought new beginnings, and in order to make those beginnings beautiful we ought to seek to understand them. Especially when that understanding is hard to grasp. This is the beginning of positive culture.
Culture drives winning, winning drives culture. Knowledge sticks to knowledge. Earned confidence breeds success and success earns confidence. It’s all a catch-22 that depends on momentum. Momentum that has to start somewhere.
So let’s let that that place be here, where our feet are. Celebrating the certainty we have*, not lamenting the past we no longer do, or pining for a future we hope might come. Let’s seek understanding, and lets embrace our present with confidence and curiosity.
*Such as Ol’ Crimson Legendary Lager
Like every Spring, this is the end of a school year. But in a way not true of must seasons, *this* spring is also the beginning of our future. Let’s go make it everything we can.
Go Cougs