What are you willing to do to achieve your dreams? How hard are you willing to work?
Mia Hamm is one of the best soccer players to ever play, and she played for one of the best coaches and in one of the best college programs in the history of the sport when she played for coach Anson Dorrance at the University of North Carolina. When she was at North Carolina, they won four consecutive National Championships, and her team only lost one game of the 95 that she played on the team.
You don't become the best without hard work. Coach Dorrance says:
"The final measure of athletic greatness is not what you do in the training sessions with your peers and teammates - it's what you do on your own."
In the video below, Coach Dorrance shares his favorite story about Mia. He was driving to campus one day during Mia's senior year early on a cold, late winter morning. He said he stopped and saw Mia going through their grueling fitness exercise alone in a cold park. She was running through a cone drill where she had to sprint 5 yards and back, 10 yards, 15, 20, and 25 yards and back. In between sprints, he said that he could see her bent over with sweat flying off of her.
He was so impressed that when he got to work, he wrote this note for her:
"The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when nobody else is watching.”
10 years later, Mia wrote a book and put the words from the note in the book. Coach Dorrance said that this was the most heartfelt gift that he had received from any of his players.
If you want to be the best, you have to be willing to do the toughest, hardest drills that your coach gives your team, by yourself, in cold weather. If you don't, there is a Mia Hamm out there who will.
SOMETHING(s) TO THINK ABOUT
1 - What is your biggest takeaway from this story?
2 - Are you willing to do what Mia Hamm did to be great?
3 - What are you willing to do outside of practice so that you can become the person you want to become?
For a printable PDF version of this post, click here: Mia Hamm: The Vision of a Champion
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