It's time for Stars on Sports! A podcast-radio show dedicated to sharing stories about our athletic program at Lansing Community College. LCC athletics has a strong tradition. 24 national championship wins! Over 170 All-Americans! 19 MCCAA All Sports trophies! Stars on Sports will introduce you to individuals that have contributed to our program success and give you the backstory on what it takes to develop it. We'll also dive into and break down the topics and issues facing athletic departments across the nation and right here at LCC. This is Stars on Sports!

Hello and welcome to another episode of Stars on Sports. I'm joined by our assistant athletic director, Steven Cutter and our producer, Daedalian Lowry. And gentlemen, today we're going to be talking about I don't even like to use the word but failure because in our world and even in my office, I use sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. So, you know, it seems like our office uses the word learn more than we do failure. But failure is a big part of our job and a big part of life and it has a, a negative kind of tone for many people and it leads them down paths of, you know, we'll even talk about risk taking because again, I think that's where we started. Last one of our previous podcasts, how we just touched on failure and even as a motivation in sports, but and how often it happens and how much is it focused on. So what do you think when you think of the word failure? The positive, negative, what do you think?

I think that it really determines how much frequency you have for how impactful it can be. But I think in the sports world you typically hear things like failure is feedback.

I'd say I typically will try to approach failure with a learning thing, but it's hard not to get lost in that sometimes. Sometimes.

So that's kind of where the frequency comes in again, a lot of it. It's super challenging.

And you know, there's two quotes that have come out in public recently that I think really hit on the word failure. And one was by Michael Jordan, one was by Roger Federer, who are two of the best in their sport all time. And I don't have it in front of me, but Michael Jordan talks about how many game winning shots he missed, how many free throws he missed, how many games he lost. And in the end, though we remember him for the game winners he hit, the number of points he did score. And the same with Roger Federer had even a better one about he only won like 50% of his points, but he was still one of the best all time. The other example that comes up a lot, I think I listened to one of your podcasts with one of your student athletes who talks about, you know, three out of 10, the hall of Fame career in baseball of hitting the ball three out of 10 times. So you failed seven times out of that. Again, I'm a math genius here for figuring that out quickly for you guys.

But the difference is, though, sometimes when you're looking at the professional athletes is they keep going, they keep playing. And because they're providing action, you can see that they do have some successes beyond just the failures, where maybe not in the professional world. A lot of times you experience failure, it becomes a stopping point, a fork in the road, and sometimes that's a U turn and you don't keep going. But in sports with the professional side, they do keep going. And so they may miss shots, they. They may strike out, they. They may fumble the ball, but they. They get another one and they may score a touchdown. And that's the kind of the difference between the sports and the real world because they keep providing the action, where oftentimes when we experience failure, it becomes pretty detrimental, and we don't want any more of that.

Well, especially back to your point of frequency, and if you get in a slump or if you fail too many times, you could lose your job or lose your position, and that even can impact your performance, playing tight or thinking about that. And I know in your program you do a lot of visualization of successful things happening, and I think, you know, that's becoming a trained attribute of more programs because of the importance.

But you're not. You're not only trying to visualize successful things happening. You're trying to put yourself in situations where they're going to be tense and they're going to be some. You're experiencing failure because if you're just Visualizing sunny in 75 all the time and it's not, then you're like, why isn't it sunny in 75 right now? I don't know what's wrong. What am I doing wrong? You have to put yourself in situations of experiencing the other side of the coin.

And we talked about that before, about trying to practice those situations, and it can be hard to duplicate. But I want to go back to your point of. One of the best quotes I've heard was it's hard to beat someone that doesn't give up. And when you really think about that, in sports, we have innings or score clocks, and we've seen teams that just ran out of time that were catching up to the team. But to your point about pro athletes, just keep on going. Even we've seen where that can overcome talent is by doing it over to keep going at it. And I think that's so important. And you, I know you've done podcasts on perseverance before, but I think it's even more important in failure because when you experience failure in something, it, it can change your mindset, as we talked about at the beginning. But one of my favorite cartoons is like a guy digging a tunnel and it's a long tunnel and he quits. And if you pull back, he's like two feet away from getting through to the other side. And how many people quit when they're that close to success because they've experienced their share of failure? And I think that's true in a lot of teams and individuals in sport participation, that the frequency of failure could prevent them from continuing in how close they are to success.

I hate to be the pessimist in the group, but at the same time, you've got the other side of the coin. What if the guy keeps trying to dig but doesn't seem to ever get to the end? Which is some stuff that I've dealt with in my life where I'm like, I know I've got to get, I'm going to get there, but I just don't. But in that we got Thomas Edison's quote, I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Love it.

So I guess if you look at it from that viewpoint, there's some success in knowing what not to do.

I use an example like when we have our share of rain in the spring in baseball and softball, LCC and we use diamond dried or some drying agent to put on our field. And I always joke, like, surface, surface, yeah, Turface. And what a plug for them. Thank you. Sponsored today by. But anyway, we have it in our budget, but it can be an expensive game if you use a lot of turfist to spread on the field. And at some time, to your point of that digging, you almost put too much on and it might not work, but you're past the point of, well, we've already put too much on. Well, we have to keep going. And the key is, I think the key to success is knowing when or when not to stop. And that's, you know, probably earlier in that decision. But you know, we talk about stop, go, continue in our office and choosing your battle because going too far into something and Wasting that. Like, you know, Brian Kane said before, if you're hitting the ball 100 miles to the left, but the holes to the right, you're not going to be successful no matter how far you hit it. That knowing when to stop or knowing when to accept failure and either pivot directions or change sports is a key factor in being successful, too. So I agree, perseverance is huge. But you're right, if you're digging a hole the wrong way and you keep going, you're never going to get there.

I mean, I'm trying to think of some personal projects that I've done that, but I know I've experienced that where it just does not seem like I'm going to get to the end of that project, whatever it is.

My wife would give you a number of them for me.

Still working on the gutters then, huh?

Yeah. I got a temporary solution for the winter. My wife helped me and we did a nice job of patching that. She had some good ideas. We don't always work well together and trying to solve it, but we did get that one accomplished. So. Good example. Well, now we're hitting on lattice failures. You start with yours, but you go straight to mine. You couldn't think of any of yours, but you thought one of mine. Just like that. You want to talk parking today, too?

I'm a producer. I'm supposed to throw it over to you.

Thanks. Well done. Touche.

How is the parking going? Better.

A lot better. But frankly, the last week I've struggled. I don't know if my depth perception's getting bad, but I've been mad at my parking the last week. But up until then, I've been doing pretty good. And I have a wider car now. Even so, it's very important to me. But there you go. Keep working on it. But I failed in many ways in parking and home improvement projects that I'm not very handy at. But. And even at LCC, I mean, we're. We have a strong tradition of being successful here, and I think we focus a lot on those. But when you look back, I mean, our teams haven't gone undefeated or they haven't necessarily won certain championship, but we still look back as having successful seasons. I mean, in the end, if you're going, and we've talked about the scoreboard before, one team gets that success on that last game compared to the other hundreds of teams that are participating in that sport. Even when you go to a national tournament, there could be eight to 20 teams there. Only one's going to Win it so that it a failure for some of the other ones. And I didn't have this on my notes today, but there's been some good talk about this in life. The Milwaukee Bucks Giannis had some, you know, they won a championship a couple years ago and haven't really gotten real close again. And so they keep asking him about failure. And I think he's had some good answers about that hasn't defined us that, you know, we are, you know, we didn't win it all this year. And then the Tennessee baseball coach, Tony Vitalo, had a great. I have it somewhere saved on a picture about, you know, when you look at just one game, it could be a failure, but there could be a lot of wins within that game. You know, when you look at a national championship, that's one game in a season, but you still could have a lot of. Of wins in that season. So there's, there's even, you know, as we talk about microscopic views or telescopic views on your season of. Everyone focuses on that one at the end, even the last play of a game, you know, we focus on that. But there could have been a lot of good things that happened during that game that were successful. But we get so focused on maybe one attribute where there were a lot of other successes in that story. One kid could have had a great game, that game which he alluded to, you know, like someone stepped up even though we lost. So it's all perspective, too. And in sports, we focus on the statistics of win losses or points or, you know, there's other statistics we could look at being successful. Like, you know, our women basketball coach who's had a nice successful run, has really worked on defensive stats, how we've been top five in defensive stats in the country, especially blocked shots over the last year. And she emphasizes that one of the. This will be another podcast down the line because this is my kind of the quote that hit me over the last week, and I think I talked to you about it, that what is praised is repeated. And back to when you win or do something good, that kind of fits into that phrase, that you'll continue to do that where if you fail back to Thomas Edison, that's a way not to do it and back to learning from it. But for some reason, failure has such a negative connotation that it can be very impactful on your performance.

Well, ultimately we just get kind of stuck in those situations where we dwell on the failures. And I would imagine that's got to happen at the plates. Somebody who's just in a slump. Is that what they call it?

Yeah, that's what. That's what they call it.

Or they get that negative mind process in their brain. And so as a result, they just continue to fail when they get up to that step, up to the plate.

And most of the time, it's not that they've forgotten how to hit, it's they've forgotten what success looks like.

Yeah.

And there are two other things I'd like to hit on. That is one, the other person is having success. Like when you think of, like, the batter strikes out, well, the pitcher struck him out. So that is success for possibly somebody else. And the other is how you handle it, which we've talked a lot about, is I think failure gets a lot of negative connotation in sports because people come up with excuses when they fail. Instead of making it, switching it, and figuring out how to move forward and make it a positive situation and owning up to it. Because that's why I don't always use a scoreboard, because I want to be the best team. But sometimes that team could be better than us. And if we play our best, you know, that still can be something we build on.

I'm also thinking about my golf game. As always, anytime we get into these.

Conversations, you're all parking and handyman.

As I think about it, I can definitely tell you the more I focus on some of those bad shots, more of those bad shots occur.

So I think golf's a great example of that. Like in baseball, in there, the swing is so intricate that usually when you don't think about it, you. You have a nice motion where thinking about going back slow, going back straight, hold, keeping my arm straight. And I think that makes you lose focus. And I'm the thing that will help you be successful. And I'm sure you do a lot of that in baseball.

Overanalyzing the situation.

We just talk about keeping things simple. If you're gonna run a race against somebody else and they. They say go, and you take off, you're not going to be thinking about what your right arm's doing or. Or what your left leg's doing or how hard your feet are going into the ground, you're just running. And I think the. A lot of what you're saying is. Comes down to effort and action. And if you can put in extreme amounts of effort and action. And what teams are typically looking for is. There's two words. There's conditional and unconditional. And what you will see from. We'll say Middle of the road teams is they'll put in conditional effort or conditional actions, and those conditional things will be based upon what the scoreboard says those conditional things would be based upon maybe if they're a starter, if they're a second string, third string. And the great ones put in unconditional effort. And it doesn't have to do with those extrinsic things. It's. It's an intrinsic thing. And so you'll see the great teams put in a lot of unconditional.

Well done, Mr. Cutter. Well done. Because that leads me to a couple of things. Yeah, that preparation and planning can help with that failure. And I like the word intentional, as I've shared with you, intentional. And I saw it firsthand in our cross country team this fall at the national championship. You know, some teams did start out fast to try and get that lead. And we tracked our team and they were third at the first mile or first kilometer, second in the middle of the race and first toward the end, and then finished first. And they had a plan and they practiced it and they worked it. And that led to probably less failure than being in a tense situation and going out and letting those emotions catch you and go out and run fast. Another example. So preparation, I think, is a big part of that. I was going to send this to you last night, but Dan Campbell, who at some time we're going to talk about on this podcast, which we have already, he's the Detroit Lions head football coach. And he really intrigues me with his style and I embrace it, but I just want to know if it works or doesn't work. Well, it has worked to the highest level, but he came out last night and the thing is that, you know, talking about quit making excuses for all the injuries they have, you know, he worked at, talked about how success can lead to complacency, which leads to failure. And these injuries are them getting punched in the mouth, which is a podcast that we have used before. And you know what, suck it up. I mean, persevere. We know what we're dealing with. And the best thing that happened to us, he said that, was losing, because now we'll go back to. And he compared it to drinking, eating flamingote, to eating bread, that they started with bread and now they've experienced filet mignons and now they're back to bread. And this will make them hopefully work harder. But failure can do that. Some coaches, you know, when you ride a long winning streak into the postseason, some want to kind of lose right before that to Maybe refocus. I don't ever want to lose, but the intent is that because of, you know, winning a lot can lead to complacency or that experience failure can help you refocus.

Yes. Complacency is a large thing in teams, and it's a word I despise.

I saw you over there.

But it comes down to stay humble, stay hungry.

Yeah. Yeah. And again, even doing staying humble and hungry, you could still fail. But back to our. One of our premises of this podcast is how you respond to failure. And that is something we in our athletic department, LCC, have tried to use it as a learning thing instead of as a result thing. And even though we've had our share of success and we look back and even in our byline, we talk about all our successes, not our failures, but a lot of, usually a lot of failure goes into being successful. So. All right, I think that's a good. Little shorter, but a good place to end. And so I have kind of two questions for you. And the first question is, is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

Bruce Willis.

Yeah.

I'm gonna say no. I've actually had this discussion before. Every time I think about it, I'm like, yeah, I don't think so. It just takes place at Christmas.

That's it.

That's just me. That's the way I feel about it.

I've heard a lot of discussion lately on it. I've gone back and forth. And most recently I am considering a Christmas movie because it does take place at Christmas and they have. It's not centered around Christmas is what some of the people that premise saying. It's not a Christmas movie. Yeah.

I mean, compared to Elf, that is not anywhere near Christmas movie. I mean, that's all I'm saying.

You know, I've watched it probably twice in the last couple weeks. I love the movie. It's a great movie. It is a great movie. And you know, again, it has a lot of Christ. The holiday party at the place of work. Not that we're.

But if I was to put out a bunch of DVDs that I say are Christmas movies and Die Hards in that I just, I'm not feeling it. You know, it doesn't.

I get it.

Miracle on 34th Street. Die Hard.

You put it like that, coach. Cut. You got any thoughts on that?

I think Daedalian's contagious proximity is extremely strong. So I'm going to follow him and say no shot.

No shot. Okay. All right. Well, I'm used to being on the Short end of this. So then let's go into what is your favorite Christmas movie?

Oh, that is a good question. I have a couple, actually. Grinch is always going to be my favorite, and I'm talking about the classic cartoon version, but other than that, not.

The Jim Carroll version.

I am a huge fan of Christmas Carol, so you could pick almost any version of that, but I'm always still gonna be. The Bill Murray Scrooged version is gonna always be my favorite. Go to.

Okay. Okay. Coach Gutt, you got anything to add to that?

I think the first thing that comes to mind is National Lampoon's Christmas.

That is a big one. On another podcast. That was huge. That's not one of mine, but. Okay, good.

No, that'd be in my top three. Easy. Okay.

Any others?

I don't think so.

And it's. It's got one of my favorite holiday tunes in it, too. So the. The one by Mavis Staple. I think that's who does it. It's. It's the beginning.

Okay.

Yeah, just. Christmas Vacation is the name of the tune. What about you?

You know, it's hard because you go back to, like, the older, traditional ones, like Miracle on 34th Street's one of my favorites for some reason. You know, when you have kids, it kind of switches perspective. Like, I think some of my kids love Elf, as you mentioned, and it is a good movie. Some love Polar Express. You know, this year seemed to see Christmas with the cranks a little bit, which I like Tim Allen, I like the Santa Claus. So I love Christmas movies, actually. So it would be hard for me. You know, the one we didn't mention, that seems to be on a lot of people's list at the Christmas Story, but that's not one that our family has really rallied around. It would probably be Elf and Polar.

Express, It's a Wonderful Life. I was trying to think. Oh, yeah, the other classic classic.

Yep. Yeah.

I don't know why, but my brain would not even go there. I could think of George Bailey, but I could not think of the movie. Yeah, that's a great movie.

It is. And there, again, it's a great time of year. Hopefully people are, you know, happy and giving and a lot to be thankful for as we talk about words. You know, gratitude is a big one in our office. So until then, go stars.

Stars on Sports is recorded live at the WLNZ studios. Engineering and production assistance are provided by Daedalian Lowry and Jereny Robinson. You can listen to this episode and other episodes of Stars on Sports on demand at LCCconnect.org to find more information about our athletic program, visit LCCstars.com thanks for listening. Go Stars!