Stars on Sports Intro: 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. 23 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 am joined by our assistant AD and baseball coach, Steven Cutter. And Steven, we're going to be talking about a myriad of topics as we record this podcast at the toward the end of our summer now actually here at LCC and a lot going on. Even though, you know, most people think they're downtime in the summer, you and I both know that it's, you know, summer is beneficial for many of things.

So as an athletic director, you work in the summer?

Yes, I do. I like the summer. The biggest difference in the summer is probably less home events or, you know, contests. But the summer is actually a lot of time to reflect on the past year and prepare for for the next year. But hopefully, you know, everyone needs some rest and relaxation. I actually went to a conference this summer and saw one of the coolest GIFs or slides up on the screen with a out of office email. And the first one was from like someone in a Scandinavian country which you know, they're known for taking time off and promoting vacations in four day weeks and said out of the office, be back in September. And then the next out of office was from an athletic department, said I'm getting a kidney transplant today. Here's my cell phone number if you need me. And it's true a little bit there is something, that's why they put it up there in an athletic director conference that you know, there's usually something always going on in our department. So you and I have talked about this summer about things that need to get done and we can spend this time talking about a review. But the thing that keeps coming to my mind is the broken window syndrome. Like if you leave things unintended, it just leads to things that getting worse. And the summer is a good time to address some of those things. We're in our new office now for a couple months now and getting a good feel of how that is. We've both been here a couple years now at LCC and It's important to us, you and I, to fix those windows or pick up something on the ground and such. So the summer is a good time for that. I'm trying to get a lot done, but prepare for the next year. We got a lot of exciting things we want to accomplish next year and we have a lot positive to reflect on the past year. What about you? That similar to coaching in your administration is what summer looks like.

Do you want to dive a little bit further into that broken window syndrome and what happens if you don't fix the windows?

I do. I again, that was going to be kind of the title of this podcast because the summer is an important time that and I have always talked about how life is maintenance. You know, I am, I have a mortgage, I don't own my house, but I'm, you know, I'm trying to buy my house and you own it. It's, it's, it's constant maintenance. You know, something, you got to fix something or you can let it go. It's up to you. And we see neighbors that do that and you get mad at them or you can be that person that takes care and make things look good and, and there's short term problems and long term problems and if you let something go short term, it becomes a long term problem. And that's true in your marriage, that's true in your job, that's true in other relationships. It's true with your teens. You know, if you let a bad apple continue to fester, it becomes more than one bad apple. And that's similar to a bushel of apples. So. And I'm happy at LCC, we have some good resources that allow us to handle some of the problem. You know, Lee, Jason, Doug and our maintenance department have been good. You know, Tim, the head of maintenance or facilities have been good to us and making sure to take care of things. But the city of Lansing, which you work closely with in dealing with facilities there, but you know, even in our day to day jobs of, you know, your emails get, you know, list getting way too long. I'd love to solve that one. You know, actually one of my personal things is I'm going through all my Gmail in the last two weeks and unsubscribing to all these emails that I don't need anymore, you know, that I thought I'd get or that I thought I'd read and it's refreshing. I'm probably down half the number of emails. I use my Gmail for personal use, but now I don't have as many a day to go through, and I can get through them quicker when I get home and go through A lot

of times those emails are actually good emails if you open them and read them. If they're growth, you know, mindset type of emails are trying to help you be more productive or whatever they are, but they also take time to read those. And then once you take that time, that takes away from time of something else that you should be doing.

And that's true. I get four or five personal growth ones and I have kept those at those solicitations of Land's End or. And they're not our sponsor today, but, you know, other ones that keep me from going through those, so. And even though I don't get through all of mine, so I should probably go through those and see which ones are more beneficial or productive to me. But I like that. I mean, I want to grow every day and spend time. So when I get home at night, I usually check my Gmail and it's been refreshing being able to go through 50 instead of 150. And you know, some of these companies send two or three a day, so. And it's difficult to unsubscribe. They make you work at it. So. But I've been diligent about making sure that I finish that process for the ones I don't need anymore. And some of them, you know, when you buy something, you sign up and, and you get them, but that's our life filtering through some of those things.

And you can filter even further than that, because if, I mean, you touched on something, you know, maybe the neighbors got a, you know, we're talking about broken windows. Neighbors got a broken window. And that bothers you. And a lot of times you just kind of got to go with the let them philosophy. Focus on your own broken windows or your, your circles, families, teams, whatever, whatever broken windows you might have, focus on those and let everybody else's broken windows just be what they are. Because if they're fin with their broken windows, then it shouldn't matter to you. You know, if you focus on your circle and your stuff and what you're doing, that's the most important thing that you can do. Because once you're doing that, then your circle will start to grow and start to influence more and more people. And so we, we spend a crazy amount of time worrying about what other people think about us or, or thinking about what other people are doing. And, and there's. There's a philosophy out there that's just Basically called let them. And that doesn't mean if somebody's breaking into a bank that you're just going to let them. But it means that with certain things you're just going to let them focus on what's important. And so that kind of goes back into that broken window thing where, you know, maybe you should focus on, on your roof and not your neighbor's roof or maybe you shouldn't focus on what your neighbor's, what kind of car they're driving, or how sweet their mower is or, you know, whatever it might be and, and focus more on what you have. And there's a certain piece of happiness that comes out of that too, because you're not in, you know, comparing so much.

And that's a great point. And I looked at it a little differently. Like I always look at when people mow their lawn like, you know, I want my lawn to look sweet. And I'm the first house in our neighborhood. So I try and be the like, if my neighbor mows there before me, partly a contest too, I get mad. But if I see a neighbor that hasn't mowed their lawn in a long time, maybe something's wrong with them, maybe they need help. Maybe I should go over, over and offer to mow their lawn. But to your point of, again, I don't care what other people think of my lawn or you know what, I don't care other people think of me. Everyone does a little bit, but it's more my pride, you know, that's the nice thing. A couple of nice things about mowing the lawn is one, I get an hour to myself where I can listen to music and just no distractions. And then also usually I get compliments when it's done of the line, do

you have a rider?

I don't. I have a push electric mower.

And so what happens when your battery dies? Do you have to go charge it? And like in the middle of mowing,

I have not had, I can mow my lawn and weed eat my lawn with, with the one battery. So I have a smaller lawn and they make riders that have four or five of these batteries, but it's nice and they charge within a half hour too. So I mean, I could go right back out and work at it. So it serves me well. I have a smaller yard and they make snowblowers with this thing too. So it's so quiet I can mow at 8 o' clock in the morning and my neighbor wouldn't even know I'm mowing. So Impressive.

It isn't going to that whole thing. I think I kind of subscribe to the coach cut view of this because there's a neighbor behind me. I tend to be pretty. Pretty good with mowing my lawn, and he's not so good at it. And every once in a while we'll get into conversations where he's like, man, I really need to be mowing the lawn more often. I gotta figure you're looking back here and going, man, is he ever gonna to mow his lawn? And I'm like, I don't care.

It's your lawn.

I don't ever care.

And I don't care either about their lawn. But I want our neighbor to look nice. Back to the broken window. If our neighborhood doesn't look nice, it could lead to, you know, more people not taking care of things. And I almost subscribe to. I laugh at the lawn mowing in the US like, we water our lawn, we fertilize our lawn to mow it, you know, so we're. We're working against ourselves. And it's just grass in the grand scheme of things. I mean, they're the topic now of no mow may or whatever to help with the bees and other things.

So I also joke that I'm pretty much mowing weeds. So the grass never catches up with the weeds. It's just weeds that I'm all.

But. But that's okay, right?

That's fine with these green. Right?

Do you need to have, you know, some special grass and.

Not at all.

And it looks. Maybe it looks great for those three days that I mowed it right afterwards.

If you're using it a lot and you're out there bare feet and you got, you know, maybe some kids or parties or whatever, you know, that grass might be important in those situations, but in a lot of situations, you're. You might not be using it at all. And you're literally just going out once a week or depending on how much it rains here. There's not a lot of irrigation in mid Michigan, especially coming from the west Michigan area a few years ago, and spend a lot of time up there. There's a lot more irrigation in lawns and a lot of greener lawns with fertilizer than there is down here. That being said, if you're not really using it, what's it matter? You're just going out once a week and mowing it, and nobody's seeing it. It's in the backyard, you know, whatever.

But it's mine. It's my Pride. I want to take care of it, if that's important. And I do like walking in my grass and bare feet, and I have weeds. I just. I actually fertilized this year for the first time in years. But. But you carry that over into our field, you wouldn't want that for the bait. You know, when we've talked about how. How important all these are, part of the process, fertilization, weeding. I don't aerate my home lawn, but we do aerate our. Our facility.

But I golf courses. I take care of a baseball field, which is. Is very large, and the grass is really nice, and it's edged and it's fertilized and it's watered. But my home lawn is not fertilized. It's not watered, but it is mowed. Unless it's baseball season, then it doesn't get mowed about once a month. But that being said, it's. It's just mode, you know, because we're. We. We don't use it really that much. So it's. It's that perspective of what's important. So for me, it's. It's the field. It's. It's the pride in. In our recruits seeing the field, our players seeing the field, our community, our. Our fans, you know, the college, everybody else seeing what that looks like. But all those people aren't seeing what my backyard looks like. Cut.

Have you had some situations where you've gone to another college where you just, like, these guys are not fixing their broken windows? Really? Yeah. Where it's like, pretty much weeds out in the field.

There's so many stories. Yeah, so so many stories. And they're in all different ways. You know, gates broken that you enter and, you know, just different things. So you can see how much people care about whatever it might be. And that doesn't necessarily mean that it's wrong. It's just like somebody that has a great backyard and then goes in, you know, somebody else's backyard, and it's not very good, and they're like, holy smokes. But it only matters to that person that thinks having a great backyard is super important. And so the initial point was you got to be really careful about how much time you spend thinking about, you know, what's all these other things, what's important to you, what's important now, and focus on that stuff and don't get all wrapped up into, you know, other people's stuff unless you feel like that's important. Maybe you can help them. Maybe you can mow their grass. If they need it or whatever it

might be that's a point of and applies to sports and in life is you put time in where your priority is. Like if you use your backyard, your backyard might look nicer than your living room, but if you're using your living room, your backyard might get neglected. And you can't solve those problems for everything. It's more of what is important to you and what you take pride in. And you know, I try and take pride in everything that I do, whether it's my home, my job, my email, my baseball field. And it takes a lot, but. And you can't do it all. I mean, on our way over here we were talking about saying no to some things and that's hard for me to do, but it's important if you want to be successful because if you say yes, you're going to spread yourself too thin, you're going to get frustrated, you're going to wear down, you're not going to do things well. So it is, you know, again we're using the yard example as, you know, analogy or summary of things that apply to our jobs and in our sports teams. And my neighbor has a watering system so his is green and fertilized or, and no weeds. But I still will work hard to make, you know, without that resource. And we talked about the different resources you need to be successful. And there's different ones for grass, there are different ones for gates, there's different, different ones for email, there's different ones

for scheduling games, basketball teams, you know, softball teams, the whole nine yards. Yeah.

Are a lot of the broken windows that you deal with over in athletics, are they dependent on other people to like when you walked in here today, you noticed that our lobby has been kind of, it's in disarray at the moment as we, as we talk. And I'm very dependent on other people to help me fix the broken windows that I have. Do you find that that's the same thing over in athletics here it is,

it comes down to resources and manpower and some school, like our baseball and softball coach do a lot for our fields and helping the city and you know, coach Gutter spend days out there making it look good. And some people don't, aren't allowed, don't have the time or, or the money or the resources to do that. But it's common. You know, in the end, you know, the, the first thing we try and do as athletic administrators is health and safety of the facility. We always worry about the well being of the student athlete. But the facility could lend to the health and safety of the student athlete. Or the hole or a rock or something that's on the field or a broken board in the gym. So I'm not a handyman. My wife actually the handy person in our family. But. But, you know, in this job, you learn to fix everything. And I pay attention when people come and fix things so that I can do it. I mean, I was. I fixed a scoreboard at my previous job. I would go up on a ladder and change the processor because if it broke in the middle of the game, by the time I called somebody to get there, you know, you're delayed significantly. You got to be a problem solver.

Yeah, you got to be Bob the Builder. Can he fix it? Yes, he can. You know, you're literally in that mode of trying to be a problem solver, and you do need other people to help you with those things. When you have outdoor facilities in sports, things like baseball, softball fields, you. The things that come up are a lot of times things that people don't necessarily think of. You know, you're thinking of weeds or. Or holes or whatever, but then you have things like moles. They create a huge problem on fields. And then you have things like what we just experienced where we had a large storm come through the Lansing area. It blew down a piece of our fence. It took out trees. And so there's all this storm damage at our field, including some flooding. And what do you. What do you have to do? You have to rely on some other people to cut up trees. You have to rely on some other people to fix fences. And then you have to rely on yourself or your team to be able to clean. Clean up the rest of the stuff and fix those things. And so a lot of times there are a ton of broken windows, and you just have to have a little bit of help and some good people around you to be able to solve a lot of those issues and fix those panes of glass.

And that's the same indoors. Like in our basketball Philly, we had a leak in the roof that warped the floor or if the power goes out or the scoreboard's not working. And those are electrical things that I don't have a back that an electrician would. We would rely on to take over if a basket broke.

But where you started was, what happens when you don't take care of that floor when it's warped, and what happens when you don't take care of the fence or the trees that are down? And that's what Kind of ends up making things worse along the way. We just experienced something with the softball field. We had a pergola or something up on the top of the. Forget what. What it was actually called, but because it was not fastened properly a long time ago, the storm that I was just talking about blew that off and it smashed to the ground. Well, once they started looking at it more, they realized the, the whole entire roof was rotted because of flashing not being put up around it when it was put up 20 years ago, you know, and so that broken pain never got fixed. And then 15 or 20 years later, it causes a lot more damage. And that's the same thing with a warped floor or a broken gate or, or something else, or a bad apple on a team or an issue at your house that you don't, you don't take care of or an issue with your family or with your boss or whatever it might be. And it's the same. These are all metaphors, but it's extremely, extremely a large part of what success looks like. And then also what failure looks like. And in failure, in life or in, in sports, a lot of times it's not one big thing that happens, especially in a sport like baseball or softball or these sports that take an hour to. To complete the competition. It's usually a lot of little things that lead to what happens. It's usually not one big thing.

And that's true with a broken window. If it's broken, it could lead to water damage, it could lead to air damage, it could lead to a cut or something. So it is a metaphor for life. And even in sports. And sometimes managing time is one of the talk about having someone that can fix a window or the time to do it. But if you don't take care of it now, it could lead to even bigger problems, which we're realizing at our softball facility with the roof and, and the same with people or our daily tasks that we need to get done every day. If we don't take care of those little things that they can become big things.

Good. I think we should go fix some broken windows.

I guess you got me actually thinking I need to fix my broken window at my house.

So let's do it. This podcast might be more self improvement than because I'm a better parker now. You know, now we might be fixing windows. Your Gmail's all in order. So hey, we might have to change the theme of this, but again, what a great conversation regarding how a broken window impacts our lives on the field and off the field. Which is again, what we believe educational athletics is all about, 100%. Thanks everyone for joining us. Hopefully you take something away from this. And until next time, Go Stars.

Stars on Sports Outro: Stars on Sports is recorded live at the WLNZ studios. Engineering and production assistance are provided by Daedalian Lowry. 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!