The Making of Champions

I'll make you a national champion. That's what Lt. Elrod said. Very first time I saw him in the spring of 1989 as he marched to the microphone in an auditorium full of high school freshmen. Orange Park Junior High. He said, join in jrotc and I promise you before you graduate, you will win a national championship. I gotta tell you, that sounded really good. I'd won a few individual awards, some academic contests, some essays, but I gotta tell you, our team sports, we did not have a history of victory. We were just not very good at very many things. And on the athletic field, I managed to garner quite a few second places. But I didn't win. And I wanted to be a winner. I really wanted to feel like I was the best at something. And here he was saying, I can do that for you. I can make you into a winner. You just have to trust me and join up. So I did. And it was not easy at first. Nothing we did seemed to be good enough. I remember spending a week polishing my shoes. I mean hours, good old fashioned spit and polish. Getting them looking what I thought was amazing. Only to stand in a uniform inspection the following week to be told that my shoes were not even close to being up to standard, to keep working. And I'm gonna tell you the truth, that was true. It didn't matter how hard I had worked on them. They weren't the shoes of a national champion. But I didn't know what that looked like. It's really interesting because I would work really hard and get really proud of the work I'd done. And those shoes looked better than any shoes I'd polished ever before. And if I'd been left on my own, I would have quit. And many times I did. I said they were good enough and those shoes were better than most shoes that I saw. See, I grew up in a Navy town full of other Navy officers. And I looked at their shoes and my shoes were better, they were more polished. My uniform was neater, I took more care. My ribbons were straight, my name tag was straight, my gig line was on. There were no loose threads anywhere in my uniform. I still wasn't passing inspections, I wasn't getting perfect scores, far from it. And every week it seemed like my first year tenant would look at those shoes and say shoes, which meant a gig, which meant they weren't up to standard. So I kept working. I was determined to pass. I wasn't alone. There were a lot of us that weren't up to standards at the time. Some people were passing So I looked to them, and that's so key, right? You start looking around for people next to you, find out who's having success, where you're having failure. What was their secret? What did they know? How are they doing? What were they doing that was different? A few of them taught me a couple of tricks, and then I talked to some of the older cadets and asked them what they knew. And I got the shoes polished, and I never had a problem polishing shoes again. I still don't have any issues polishing shoes. That's not to say that's something you want to brag about, that you've got national championship level shoe polishing. But it was the piece, the foundation for what the LT was teaching us. Because we approach the same level of discipline, we built the same systems around our routines, the way we studied for our academics, the way we trained physically. There was, okay, there was what the rest of the people were doing, and then there was will LT approve? Because, see, to get past lt, it had to be at the national championship level. And quite often our first, second, and third attempt just wasn't at that level. And we needed the LT to hold us accountable. He was one of my early coaches. I didn't call it that at the time, but now that I am a coach, I recognize it. He was the third party. He could see what we did, we couldn't see. But he also, he knew where we could go. He knew the path. We just had to trust, didn't have to be fun. We didn't have to enjoy all the. All the tough moments and the harshness. But he made a promise. We'll lift the national trophy. And I'll tell you what, winning is so much more fun than losing. I'm gonna be honest. It was great. When we go to a competition and we'd sweep. And we would just demolish our competition. Now, the interesting thing to know as well is honestly, the second best program probably in the nation was our rival high school right down the road. And that helps too, when your rival is right in your proximity and you can see them training, training, trying to knock you off your game, trying to catch you. You learn to not relax, not take it for granted, not take any of your success. Because when you're the best, people are always trying to catch up with you, and they're innovating as well. And we did, too. I. I learned that the lieutenant passed away yesterday. It. We won those championships. I hosted our first national championship trophy, 91. Then we did again in 92. And I think I'm even prouder that we want to get in 93. And I wasn't there because I knew that meant that it wasn't just us. It wasn't just me and a group of really talented young kids because my class was full of some really special kids. But they won the year after we left. And after a short misstep in 94, they want to get in 95. Which tells me that's the systems, right? That we could go and tell. That we could go tell any kid that you can be a champion, That success leaves clues. And Lieutenant taught me that anybody could be a champion. Champions are made from normal people that commit to mastery, willing to work hard, follow a proven system, and get help. The biggest thing about it was recognizing that until you've reached that level of success, you're often going to be fooled by thinking what you're doing is good enough, because it's probably more than you've ever done before. And that feels good. And you shouldn't be ashamed of your success to that level. You really shouldn't. You've worked hard and things are better, but that doesn't mean that they're not where they could be, that there's still so much further you can go. God, you just have to know. You just have to know that's there for. The Lieutenant did that. He took a group of middle class, if you'll call us that, maybe suburban kids in Navy town, and said, I'll let you do something special, something that'll set the foundation for the rest of your life. Yeah. The Lieutenant. The Lieutenant taught us how to win, how to live, how to be successful. He'll be missed, but I hope that his lessons carry on through me and ultimately on to you today. All right? Until then, I hope that you find a lieutenant for you. I hope that you listen when they say they can make a champion. I hope you hear them. I hope you believe them. And I hope that you give yourself a chance at least once in your life to just see. I want you to see if you can see how great you really could be. Yeah, that's it. That's really the lesson. You owe it to yourself for once, at least one time, to see how great you can be. You don't have to settle for good enough. There's a champion in there. You gotta let them loose. If not for yourself, for the legacy. That's what the LT did. I'm not lt, but there's a part of him that lives in me. And if you need somebody in your life to remind you that you're capable of championships. I hope you'll join us. And success auditors. I hope you'll get around another community, just like I had back then and the one that we're creating now, where we'll look at your shoes and tell you, keep going. There's more in there. You got more in you. There's better in you. It doesn't mean you're not working hard, but there's just a level of success that you haven't reached. There's a system for success can be learned. There's ways of thinking about the world that lead to better, better results. Just are. There just are. And you don't know. I didn't know. I didn't know, sitting as a freshman, what those systems were. But I left with him as a senior, and we've been able to pass them on, and that's his legacy.