The night of win 200, I sat in the truck in an empty parking lot longer than I told anybody.
Everybody else had gone home. My phone was lighting up. Texts, calls, the kind of night you’re supposed to feel ten feet tall. And I did. I want to be clear about that part first, because what I’m about to say isn’t a complaint about winning. I was grateful, all the way through, for every kid who put two hundred wins on that number, for the years it took to get there, for getting to do this job at all. That gratitude was real that night, and it’s real right now, as I write this.
But underneath the gratitude, something else showed up that I wasn’t ready for. Not sadness. Not doubt. Just tired, in a way winning was supposed to fix and didn’t.
I sat with that a long time before I could name it. What finally came out was a sentence I wrote down that night and haven’t been able to shake since: I am responsible for zero percent of those victories. That’s not me being down on the win or on myself. It’s the most grateful sentence I know how to write. A hundred kids over a decade did the actual work, and every one of those two hundred wins belongs to them before it belongs to me. I just got to stand next to it and call it mine on a scoreboard.
That’s not the story I expected to tell about a milestone win. I was thankful. I was also wrung out. Turns out both were true at the same time, and I hadn’t planned for that.
The Win That Should Have Been the High Point
If you want to see that same pattern somewhere with a lot more at stake than a baseball game, go read 1 Kings 18 and 19 back to back. Most people read only one of them.
1 Kings 18 is Elijah’s Mount Carmel. Israel’s been in a three-year drought, the prophet’s outnumbered 450 to 1 against the prophets of Baal, and he calls down fire from heaven in front of the whole nation. Fire falls. The altar, the water, the stones – all of it – gone. The prophets of Baal are finished. The drought breaks. It is, by any measure, the single biggest win of Elijah’s career. If Elijah had a stat sheet, that’s the game they’d retire his number for.
Turn the page to chapter 19, and you find him a day’s journey into the wilderness, alone under a broom tree, asking God to kill him.
That’s not a typo, and it’s not two different men. Same guy. Same week. The biggest win of his life is chapter 18. The worst day of his life is chapter 19. And there’s no losing streak in between to explain it. Jezebel sends one threat, and instead of standing on the fire he just called down from heaven, Elijah runs.
The Win Doesn’t Protect You From the Crash
Here’s the turn I want you to sit with, because it’s the one most of us get backward.
None of what follows is a knock on winning, or on being grateful for it. The win was real. The joy was real. I’d take win 200 the exact same way again tomorrow. It’s just that the feeling a win gives you was never built to hold you up long-term, no matter how big the win is or how thankful you are for it. That’s not the win’s fault, and it’s not a flaw in you for feeling it fade. That’s just what feelings do, even the good, earned, deserved ones.
We plan for the crash after a loss. We know what a bad week does to us, and most coaches have some version of a routine for it, even if it’s just gritted teeth and time. What almost nobody plans for is the crash after the win. The adrenaline that carried you through the biggest moment doesn’t just switch off once the moment’s over. It drops off a cliff. And whatever you’d been running on fumes to ignore before the win – the exhaustion, the strain at home, the thing you kept telling yourself you’d deal with after the season – it’s all still there waiting on the other side of the high, and now you don’t have the adrenaline left to keep outrunning it.
Elijah didn’t crash despite Mount Carmel. He crashed because of it. He’d spent everything he had calling down fire, and the second the emergency passed, there was nothing left in the tank to meet the next threat with. Jezebel’s message wasn’t even that dangerous compared to what he’d already survived. It just landed on a man running on empty, and empty doesn’t hold up to much.
What God Does First Is Almost Insultingly Simple
Here’s the part of this story that changed how I think about my own worst days, including the good ones that turn into worst days.
God doesn’t show up under that broom tree with a lecture. He doesn’t say, “I just sent fire from heaven for you, and this is what breaks you?” He doesn’t quote Elijah’s own sermon back to him. An angel touches him and says one thing: get up and eat.
And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, “Arise and eat.” And he looked, and behold, there was at his head a cake baked on hot stones and a jar of water. And he ate and drank and lay down again. And the angel of the Lord came again a second time and touched him and said, “Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.”
1 Kings 19:5-7, ESV
Read that again. God’s first move for a man who just asked to die is a nap and a meal. Not a vision. Not a rebuke. Food, sleep, food again. Twice, because once wasn’t enough. Only after all of that, after Elijah’s body has been cared for before his soul was ever addressed, does God finally speak, and even then it isn’t in the wind or the earthquake or the fire. It’s in what the text calls a low whisper, after everything loud has passed by first.
That order is the whole lesson. Body before voice. Rest before revelation. If God himself didn’t skip the physical on his way to the spiritual, I don’t know what makes me think I get to.
Where I’ve Gotten This Backward
I’ve stood in that parking lot more than once, tired in the exact way winning was supposed to fix, and instead of eating and sleeping, I went looking for the next fire. Scheduled the next thing before I’d let the last thing land. Told myself the tiredness was weakness instead of what it actually was: a body and a soul asking, plainly, for the same two things the angel handed Elijah.
That’s the Faith panel of the framework this whole month has been built around. Player, Coach, Faith. The coach only has something left to give the player if something outside himself is filling him first, and the part I keep having to relearn is that the filling isn’t always a verse or a prayer walk. Sometimes it’s embarrassingly physical. Sleep counts. A meal counts. Sitting still long enough for your body to catch up to what your soul already survived counts, and skipping that step doesn’t make you more spiritual. It just makes you the next guy under the broom tree, wondering why the win didn’t hold.
What To Do This Week
Name your next Mount Carmel, whatever it is. A milestone win, an opener, a tournament, a big recruiting weekend, any moment you already know is going to demand everything you’ve got.
Then do the thing that feels almost too simple to count as leadership: block off the twenty-four hours after it before you block off anything else. Not a celebration. Not the next film session, the next call, the next fire. Sleep. A real meal, not one eaten standing up between two conversations. Quiet, long enough for your body to catch up to what your soul just went through.
You are allowed to rest after the win. You are allowed to rest, especially after the win. God fed Elijah twice before he ever asked him a single question, and if that was good enough for a man who’d just called down fire from heaven, it’s good enough for the rest of us running programs a whole lot smaller than a nation in a drought.
The whisper comes after the meal, not before it. Eat first.
Greater Together
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