What are the PIVOTAL PERIODS in your life?
Do you have a moment or certain period in your life that you look back at as being especially pivotal in determining the path you ultimately followed? Are there certain times that, with the benefit of some hindsight, you can look back and realize how crucial they are to where you’ve now landed in life?
For me, as someone who chose to pursue my love of sport and competition, I have a couple of PIVOTAL PERIODS that I now look back on and see the tremendous impact they had on me, even though they were nothing special at the time. Each of these PIVOTAL PERIODS happened to be over the summer break from school and I don’t think that is a coincidence.
SUMMER 1988
I was about 5’8” in the summer between grade 8 and 9…and showed very few glimpses of becoming a player that would even make my grade 9 high school team next season…let alone be playing professionally 17 years later. For one reason or another, my friends and I decided we wanted to go to a week long UBC T-Birds Basketball camp at the beginning of the summer. The camp was great. It was lead by my future coach Bruce Enns (to whom I owe so much of my basketball career to) and gave me some much needed fundamentals to work on.
However, the reason that this became a PIVOTAL PERIOD in my life is the decision I made after camp finished. Whether it was inspiration from Coach Enns, boredom from a long summer, or just a little maturity, for some reason I decided I would take what I learned at camp and start working on my own every day at a local outdoor hoop. I don’t remember a lot from that summer. I know I took a lot of shots…but am pretty sure my technique was woeful. I thought I worked hard but hindsight probably tells me I didn’t really know what that meant at the time.
The fact of the matter is though, that I started to take responsibility for my own improvement and got a little bit better every day I chose to go and work on my game. By the time the summer was over, I could feel the progress I had made compared to my friends who weren’t out every day, and that felt great.
SUMMER 1992
By the summer of 1992 I had just graduated from high school and committed to going to UBC in the fall. While I was now just over 6’6” and had a breakout high school season, I wasn’t on the path to be playing basketball at UBC. After all, just 3 months earlier UBC had lost in the National Finals in Halifax and had been the top ranked men’s university team in Canada for most of the previous 3 seasons. As much as I had improved, I wasn’t a top 20 recruit in Canada, which is the type of player UBC was bringing to campus in the fall of 1992.
However, then (as now) I had a bit of a stubborn streak that doesn’t like hearing I can’t do something….so even though nobody at UBC had shown any interest in me as a player, I decided I would make the team…EVENTUALLY.
I was stubborn, but not unrealistic. I decided that, since I would be going to UBC for the next 4 or 5 years, I’d have some time to gain the necessary speed, strength and skills, I just needed to put in the work. A LOT of work.
This attitude set up my second PIVOTAL PERIOD for 7 weeks over the summer of 1992. I hopped a plane to a small town (Jonquiere) in the middle of Quebec as part of a Canadian government language study program. Here I would live on my own in a College (CEGEP) dorm, study French for 3 hours each morning and be free to train basketball the rest of the day. The idea was NO DISTRACTIONS…no friends, no girlfriend, no job, no parents, no cooking, no obligations. I had 22 hours a day to train…and boy did I train.
I spent every afternoon in the gym working on my own game. After the gym closed, I’d grab dinner at the cafeteria before going to the park for a couple of hours more shooting and dribbling. I did it every day for that whole summer. I improved more during that summer than I would have in a year back home with more distractions and excuses.
It was definitely a PIVOTAL PERIOD for me. A couple weeks after flying back from Quebec, I walked into the UBC tryouts. Despite the fact that there were more than 70 dedicated young men in the gym hoping to make the team, and most were bigger, older, stronger and faster than me, I felt a real confidence. I knew I had worked harder than any of them this past summer and I knew, even if I didn’t make the team that year, I could outwork them the next year, and the year after that as well. I felt confidence knowing I would eventually reach my goal.
As luck would have it, Coach Enns saw this as well. He gave the very last spot on the team to me ahead of 2 provincial team starters and a returning member of his previous year’s UBC team. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for the PIVOTAL PERIOD in the summer of 1992.
SUMMER 2021?
If you think basketball could possibly play an important role in your kid’s future, consider signing him/her up for our Summer Small Group Training. Think of it as much improved versions of those vital summers I set up for myself.
Your child will get some great instruction and mentorship from coaches who have been through this journey themselves and who are good human beings. Twice a week they will be pushed by the coaches to develop new skills and work habits on the court. Hopefully they will find inspiration in these sessions to start working on their own on other days of the week.
Although we can’t promise it will be a PIVOTAL PERIOD in every player’s life, we can promise everybody will work hard and have fun outdoors with friends in a safe, supervised environment.
“The summer is when the real work gets done to become a complete basketball player. Being in a position to guide our athletes to keep pushing themselves to be better is something I’m grateful for, especially with the difficulties associated with Covid. Looking forward to another fun summer!”
-COACH CAM YATES
