The warm side
Dispatches From Inside the Fire: Part 3 of 10.
Down one with three minutes left. One seed vs. two. Sunday afternoon in Minnesota, a long way from wheat fields in Kansas but not as far as you’d think.
We won by eight.
I won’t walk through the final three minutes. If you’ve coached or played or even just watched, you know what a 180-second, nine-point swing feels like.
After the game, after the medals, after the team photo, a dad pulled me aside. Said I was the best coach his son ever had. All his kids. All levels.
I talked to a LinkedIn guru last week who would tell me to put that on a banner.
Like, for realz?
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Not that long ago, I wanted to be anywhere but here.
The career ended. Mom died. The details are in the first two pieces of the series and more that will follow. I’m not re-walking the hallway for The Warm Side.
Short version: Fifty-two, a legal settlement, and a very strong impulse to get in the car with Jordy and drive south until the geography matched the distance I felt from everything I used to be.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. I won’t.
I’d love to tell you there was a moment. A phone call, a sign, one of those scenes where the guy is about to leave and sees something and turns around. There wasn’t. I just didn’t go. Because most of my world is in Minnesota.
I stayed because I couldn’t leave.
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Basketball is a good sport for a man having a bad year.
You have to show up. Not when you feel like it. The gym is booked and the players are coming whether your career is flying high or upside down and inside out. The ball doesn’t care about your resume or the automated tracking system. The kid who can’t figure out a pick and roll doesn’t care that you used to be a VP. He cares whether you can help him get better at basketball.
That’s clarifying. When everything else is fog — the spooky AI, the job market, the legal settlement, the 2 a.m. jam sessions with a language model that shares a name — a kid who needs help getting open is clarity.
I coached through the worst of it. Practices the week Mom was in the hospital. Games the month I was negotiating a settlement. Film sessions on the laptop next to the terminal where I was building a consulting practice.
The fire was burning. White. Hot. In parallel, I was running a high octane 1-2-2 zone called Dagger with teenagers asking why we wouldn’t just scrimmage. Both things were true at the same time, which is how most of life works and nobody puts it on a banner or a bumper sticker or under a byline.
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I’ve spent two dispatches telling you what I built from the wreckage. Ten projects. A method. A book. The receipts.
Some of the best things I did the last fifteen months I didn’t build at all.
I just showed up.
Showed up to practice. Showed up to games. Showed up to a gym full of kids who don’t know much about AI or media or the fire and don’t need to. They need someone to run the drill again and tell them when they’re wrong and tell them when they’re right and mean it.
Coaching isn’t building. It’s being there. The un-scalable thing. One gym, one team, one season. No leverage. No platform. No content strategy. Just a man with a whistle and a whiteboard and a reason to leave the house on a Tuesday.
After the tournament, in a cold and snowy parking lot, my family and I had a conversation with one of the officials from the game. I’ve known him for years. He told my family the sport needed more coaches like me. When my wife asked what he meant, he said coaches who push when pushing is necessary, encourage when encouragement is necessary. Ask questions and don’t scream accusations. Have amazing energy but aren’t maniacs.
Something along those lines. It doesn’t matter exactly what he said. It mattered that he said it at all. Didn’t have to. Did. Felt good.
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I think about mothers and grandmothers and sisters a lot.
The ones who sit with you when it’s hard and don’t say much. They don’t fix it. They don’t optimize it. They don’t turn the difficulty into a LinkedIn article. They’re just there. You know they know. They know you know. And sometimes that’s more than enough.
My grandfather CW — the farmer/railroader/moonshiner from Oklahoma, the one I named my company after — he didn’t talk much either. The Dust Bowl. The Depression. Getting a draft card. A son he buried. The 10 kids he raised with Vernie. Trading race horses for work horses. He lived a hard but good and full life. Didn’t see the point in talking about it or writing it down.
Sometimes the bravest thing you can do in the fire is not talk about the fire.
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I had a kid on the team. Quick. Talented. Loves the game. But he’d get in his own head every time the score got close or when he made a mistake. Down two and you could see it in his shoulders — the look of a kid who’s already calculating whether he’s about to be the reason they lose.
I pulled him aside around week six. Didn’t give him a speech. Didn’t hand him a framework. Just asked him: Do you like playing basketball?
He looked at me like it was a trick question. “Yeah.”
Then play. The score’s not yours to carry. Your job is the next play. And to have fun playing a game you love. That’s it.
He wasn’t always the best player on the court. He didn’t have to be. But his shoulders were fine. The joy returned. And he made a lot of great plays on Sunday, including one when we needed it most.
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I can already see the LinkedIn carousel. “Five Coaching Lessons That Apply to Your AI Strategy.” Slide one: Show up. Slide two: Simplify. Slide three: Something about vulnerability. Hashtag leadership. Hashtag authenticity. Hashtag coaching.
lol, no thanks, for realz.
Some things just happen. A team worked hard. A season ended with medals. A guy who wanted to run stayed and got to be in a gym on a Sunday watching kids he coached celebrate.
That’s the lesson.
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The fire doesn’t always burn. It doesn’t always build.
Sometimes it’s just warm enough to keep going.
I don’t know when the next dispatch is coming. The outline from three weeks ago was trying too hard to be smart about things that don’t matter. They need the showing up part. The fire is real. But the fire isn’t all there is.
Sometimes the fire is a gym in Minnesota. The warmth comes from the work, not the crisis. And it stays because you earned it. Rep by rep. Tuesday by Thursday by Sunday. Season by season. Rinse. Repeat.
The porch light is on here. It always was.
Keep going.
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Derek Simmons is the founder of CW Strategies. He has won more basketball games than LinkedIn followers and considers that a win. He writes Standard Correspondence because some things are worth saying out loud.