Life Lessons from the Winningest Coach in College Sports | Paul Assaiante

Paul Assaiante (0:00)

So the answer is, when you're faced with something that makes you uneasy, go at it.

Go right at it. What you're gonna find more often than not, is it's a toothless old lady. You're gonna find more often than not, that the monster, the hairy thing you have in your mind, insurmountable crisis, is really not what you think it is. Go at it.

Michael Gervais (0:34)

Okay, welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and by trade in training, a high performance psychologist. And today, oh boy, we're in for a good one today. I am really excited to welcome Coach Paul Assaiante as our guest for this week's conversation. And I don't use this word lightly, Paul is a legend. He's a two-time Olympic coach of the year.

He is the winningest coach in college sports history for the United States. He was inducted into the US Squash Hall of Fame.

And he has won 17 NCAA championship titles at Trinity College, where he is still the head coach of the men's squash and tennis teams today. So you might recognize Paul's name from his first appearance on Finding Mastery back in 2016, episode number 47, how about that? If you want to check out that, I highly encourage you guys to check it out. So just to get us started on round two here, Paul, how are you?

Paul Assaiante (1:36)

I'm doing great and feel blessed to be back on the line with you, Dr. Michael.

Michael Gervais (1:42)

Ditto, ditto. Okay, so when we were reconnecting via email to set up this conversation, you wrote something in an email, if it's okay that I share, that really stood out for me. You wrote, I am very concerned about where we are headed as a society with regard to preparing our children to succeed in a competitive world. We are not giving them ownership of their own journeys.

So let's start there. What are some of the challenges that you're seeing in how children are being raised in today's society?

Paul Assaiante (2:17)

So I've been coaching for 45 years and it all started for me at West Point, where I came upon a plaque on a wall of a quote from General MacArthur.

And what the plaque said was, on the friendly fields of strife are sown the seeds that on later fields will bear the fruits of victory. And what that meant to me was you learn about yourself in athletic fields, the lessons that will help you be successful later in life. Things like learning how to strategize, learning how to adjust on the fly, learning how to win, learning how to lose, learning that emotion is not your friend.

And we're seeing this more and more relevance in our society today. The thing that I'm concerned about is I've seen a dramatic shift in the young people that are coming to our doors these days.

And in this regard, they look more put together than they've ever looked before. They present beautifully. They're polished. And the first time they face adversity, they fall into a million pieces because they haven't learned that it's okay to fail. They haven't learned that actually losing is the playground of success. They haven't learned the value of that. You know, as I tell my children, you cannot exhibit bravery if you aren't first afraid. And it's the same thing with resilience. You cannot demonstrate resilience if you haven't first failed. And that, this is a tough life. The world is not kind. You've got to be able to get off the mat, knock down 10 times, get up 11 times. But we're not, we're doing everything we can to make sure that they don't fail. And then we wonder why we're seeing more cheating today than we've ever seen before on the college level. Because failure is not acceptable.

And I talk to my players all the time, guys, you would never play a double bounce on the court. You would never do that. But why would you even consider the possibility of cheating on an exam? It's not okay. Take the F. If that's an accurate measure of your knowledge, take the F. But if they've not been raised that way, and I get it, I do get it. It's hard. It's hard to let your child fail. It's hard to, it hurts. Your heart hurts a little bit.

But one of the things I noticed, it happens at a very young age. You watch your son, he's 14 now. When he was a teeny one, he'd be walking down the hall in his diaper and he'd fall and he'd look at you. And if you went, he'd start to cry.