Life lessons

When I started my graduate assistant position in the athletic department at Indiana State University in 2014, I brought with me a few years of experience from a Division III school at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and the grittiness of growing up on a dairy farm.

Growing up, it was all farming and sports, and the life lessons both can teach you. I think a lot of my experience in sports came from the basic principles I learned on the farm. When a problem presented itself, like dealing with a defensive lineman who was bigger than me, or a tie game in the bottom of the last inning, or calves needed to be watered but the well was frozen, what were we going to do? Were we going to sit down, play the “woe is me” card and lose, or were we going to figure out a solution and get the job done? That wasn’t even a question, it was always figuring out how to take care of business.

Back to Terre Haute. I was beginning my first baseball season as a graduate assistant sports information director. My job duties were scoring the game on a laptop, making hits and error calls, running social media, writing a postgame press release and working with a photographer for images to use in graphics.

We were hosting a neutral site game in Indianapolis. We were at a facility that hosted a lot of high school level competitions. So, there was a definite difference between a typical Division I baseball setup and a high school travel ball facility. I got up to the press box area, where my usual perch for games was, and I saw there wasn’t a table. My options were to call my boss and complain about the lack of resources or figure out a solution.

That brought me back to my sports and farming background. No one is going to sit around and feel bad for you. Your job is to figure out how to make it work. I could have called my boss and complained about it, but what was that going to solve? Nothing.

So, I looked over in the corner, saw an extra chair and set up a makeshift desk. I stood during the game to make sure I could see the entire field and did my job. That’s just what you did on the farm, and when you were in the field, be it a hay field or a ball field. You found a way to get the job done because someone was counting on you. In the hay field, it is the cows and your family. On the ball field, it is your teammates. After working through the initial problem, you can reassess and find a better solution later, but you have to keep moving forward.

When my boss called me to see how my first game went, I told them that there were a couple of plays that had me second-guessing a hit vs. an error, and honestly, no matter how many games I scored, it felt like there was at least one game that did that. But overall, I said it went well, we won, and that was the important part. I had my chair desk, and it all worked fine. He stopped me there and he made me explain what I meant by chair desk. It was strange, he was surprised that I worked through the problem and did not call him about it.

Now I understand how small of a problem not having a table to sit a computer on is in the grand scheme of things. It is nothing like trying to thaw a waterer in negative-degree weather, or replacing a sickle section on the haybine in the middle of chopping, or figuring out a case of mastitis. The same principles apply. The agriculture business doesn’t just sit around and wait for you to call to complain. You identify the problem and find a solution. Now the chair desk wasn’t the most optimal solution, but it worked. And that night I had time to get over to the store and find a small table I could use the next day. Solve the problem, reassess and improve as time allows.

This is just one example of how life lessons learned on the farm continue to carry over in life, lessons that I am grateful for every day.