Behold the Ant

As a coach, it was one of those days. The sun was stifling, competition was stiff, and my athletes were mentally defeated. How many times I was to see slumped shoulders after a missed shot, racquets tossed down in frustration, hands held high in supplication to the higher power who was guiding the opponent's shots where we weren't. Attitudes on the court stunk. The prevailing thought was that we were supposed to lose, so lose we would. Out of our eight slots, only two won their first-round matches, guaranteeing at least a fourth place finish. The others would have to win the rest of their matches to secure fifth place, and that didn't happen. Some of the best tennis players in the state of Oklahoma were there today. It was a tough tournament and it seemed nothing went right.

By three in the afternoon, most had played their first two matches, and having lost both, they sat in wait to play for seventh place. I wasn't satisfied with their results, and I am pretty sure that they weren't satisfied either, but many of them had accepted the results and laughed as they joked about getting blown away, losing leads, and the like. No conversation was had about strategy, and nobody thought to put together a game plan for their seventh-place match. Instead they just joked. I too was defeated.

I separated myself from this so that I wouldn't say something I would regret later. After all tennis is a civilized sport and cooler heads must prevail. There would be a time and place. And when the gentlemen took to the courts, they were again outmatched. Their defeat wasn't a mathematical certainty, but for their morale it might as well have been.

So I sat and pondered this as I helplessly watched the inevitable. Specifically, I ponderd how I had failed them. Each player I had personally given one-on-one attention in practice in the past few weeks, throwing little nuggets of wisdom at them as if I were writing tennis' version of The Book of Proverbs. On changeovers in the matches today, I would call them over and tell them what they could improve upon, also pointing out their opponent's weaknesses, but nothing worked. Then I saw the ant.

Truth to be told, one of the parents I was sitting by, a good friend to me, saw it first. It was a fire ant, the size of a grain of rice. It was trying with all its might to drag a chunk of granola bar the size of a marshmallow. The bar was three or four times its size, and no matter how impossible the odds might have been, the ant refused to give up. Millimeter-by-millimeter, it dragged the boulder across the sidewalk towards the grass. As if this weren't tough enough, things got even tougher.

Two other ants, instead of helping their teammate, climbed aboard and the first ant dragged the extra weight without hesitation. It took nearly ten minutes of physical exertion from the time we first noticed it to when the ant took it to the grass, and who knows how long it had been struggling before we noticed. But when it reached the edge of the sidewalk, the granola monolith became stuck between the sidewalk and the neatly edged grass. For the next fifteen minutes the ant tried and tried, never budging it. When the matches were over and I left, the ant was still hard at work. The application was obvious.

Roger Federer is the best tennis player in the world. There can only be one of him. Same can be said for a school's valedictorian, the President of the United States, and on and on. You get the picture. Does that mean we quit trying to achieve our goals? This goes far beyond tennis. Life applications abound. I'll let you put your own struggle to this test:

Victories can be counted in many ways, and the only time we lose is when we give up. I've put our poor showing in its proper perspective, ceding it to greater tragedies in the world, but I will still come back out tomorrow ready to try where I've failed, as a coach, as a teacher, as a servant. In all walks of life. My athletes will too.

As for that "poor" ant, I'm sure he will too.