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- Miracles In Lake Placid
Welcome To Together UP!
Curated insights shared with you to lead, build better teams, and do the little things that make a huge impact on performance.
I am a leadership and team development coach who believes that teams outlast and outperform when they look towards being connected together and are built from the bottom up.
I WOULD BE GRATEFUL IF YOU SHARED TOGETHER UP! WITH THOSE YOU THINK WILL ENJOY IT OR BENEFIT FROM IT!
The goal is to inspire. No matter what type of team you lead or what type of team you are on.
Now onto Edition #15! Pushed back a touch because of what you’ll read about here!
What’s Your Summit?
As I sit here on my balcony, overlooking Mirror Lake, in Lake Placid, NY there is loud thunder, heavy rain, and lightning surrounding the area.
I am supposed to be in the 2nd quarter of a lacrosse game right now. Yes. That I’m playing in.
LOUD Booms and HEAVY Rain.
Yet it doesn’t seem to matter.
This place still produces magic, 43 years after “The Miracle On Ice” and now annually for those who are lucky enough to make the trek with thousands of others to participate in the annual Lake Placid Summit Lacrosse Classic
Sure, it is throwing off everyone’s schedule, but it sorta doesn’t seem to matter because everyone is in it together. There’s a sense of camaraderie. Your team is scattered all around you, somewhere, and so many other teams are together, with you.
For 15 years now, I’ve trekked here to once again run around and be on the field with old teammates and friends, playing vs old teammates and friends.
Each year I leave with more people I can call “a teammate” and even better, new relationships.
There is just something magical about it all and this place and why we all come.
It checks every box:
Camaraderie
Competition
Family
Physical Excercise (some more than others)
Social
Spiritual
Engaging Strengths
Memories
Respect
Sportsmanship (some more than others)
Reunions
Traditions
If you have a box that I”m missing TELL ME!
It can be hard to replicate such an experience but we can try and take something from it!
Do You Believe In Miracles?
Most of you likely will attribute Lake Placid to the 1980 “Miracle On Ice”, where Herb Brooks took a group of random (at the time) college kids and won GOLD. Defeating the unbeatable Russians.
I swear the ghosts of that Miracle live on in these mountains and in this town.
Those men played together.
And annually, more men and women, many former teammates come here to be together again.
As depicted in Miracle, (2004, Where Kurt Russell depicted the legendary Herb Brooks with perfection) it was not until coach Brooks got the sense that the “kids” started believing that they were playing for something much bigger, a larger purpose, that he was able to move forward with the group.
Eruzione: “Mike Eruzione!! Winthrop Massachussets!”
Brooks: “Who do you play for?”
Eruzione: “I play for…. the United States of America!”
There’s something that seems to ooze into your psyche when you know that you’re experiencing something bigger than you.
It’s here, 33 years ago, in 1990 (10 years after The Miracle On Ice) that George Leveille, a frequenter of Lake Placid and a lacrosse person himself, had the foresight to see that teammates being together again in a setting in the Adirondacks is indeed special.
He knew that being together in such a setting is special.
He trusted that people would share the inspiration he felt in a place that meant a lot to him.
He was right.
There is just something about the camaraderie, the sense of competition, the togetherness amidst the mountains.
You’ll see college alumni-based teams who want to experience it all again - those locker room moments, one more connection on the field. A great save, a funny play, a signature move performed once more.
There’s a playful tilt to the team names, playing on the aging alumni who take part. Almost as a hedge, as if to say, we’re older, (gray, squeeky, rusty, are common descriptors in the team names) so don’t expect much.
Names like the “Black & Blue Jays” made up mostly of Johns Hopkins Blue Jays Alums.
The Creaky Gates (Colgate)
The Gray Danes (Albany Great Danes)
Ye Olde Quakers (Penn)
The Olden Flyers (Nazareth Golden Flyers)
There are many more.
Putting those colors on again for all of the participants adds a special element for them.
One of pride.
One of re-connecting.
And with it, I think what so firmly engrains the essence of why this all matters comes not from the teams that win the most, but the teams that are clearly here knowing they won’t (or might not).
Some teams here just know that it’s going to be an uphill battle. They might go 0-4…. but….. it doesn’t matter.
Because you’ll also see those same guys, still wearing their team uniform (perhaps some hideous neon shorts and loud colors splattering a pinnie) out together later that day, laughing, hugging, breaking chops, and telling stories.
My guess is those same stories are not new. Not at all. They’re the same stories they’ve been telling since they met, whenever that was.
They didn’t come here to win, they came here to be together.
The tournament is a vehicle to do so.
It’s an excuse.
Admittedly, my teams, (Motive Pure, www.motivepure.com representing, and sponsored by my great teammate Jesse Hubbard’s electrolyte hydration product) come to try and win, and we’ve had some success annually, but in the absence of that, we really come to be together.
We come to experience something that can only truly be captured by putting on the same jersey as fellow teammates and stepping foot on a field with a collective goal.
Families take part in the annual event.
Wives, girlfriends, old teammates, new teammates, each year, the building blocks stack on each other to compound annually into something incredible.
Kids watch their dads.
Those same kids even build relationships with each other.
5 families are represented here, who met when they were 3 or 4.
Why It Matters
While I do believe this environment here brings something out in all of us, it doesn’t take mountains and amazing views for us to do the little things that bring us together.
At least it shouldn’t.
Why is it that when the stakes get raised, or when you flip the switch to your job, we seem to dismiss all of the little special things that bring us together?
Camaraderie
The benefit of the doubt
Focus on the purpose
Seeking connection
Togetherness
Surely everyone who reports to whatever job they have has been a part of some group in their life prior to that - an athletic team, a band, a group they connected with.
And I’m sure everyone has also experienced at least one group where one person or many people have completely forgotten everything that made those experiences great.
Why do we cross over some imaginary line and lose sight of it all?
In the great teams & groups you’ve been a part of, people tend to work together, play their role, support each other, and build trust and camaraderie.
Yet cross that line into your job, and it can be forgotten.
Is it ambition?
Is it the competitiveness of having others succeed?
Were you hiding things while being a part of that team that are now coming out?
These experiences only serve to prove to us just how important it is to be together.
What Experience Does This For You?
What Is Your Placid?
Summit Lacrosse Ventures (the host) tagline is “Find Your Summit”
This is taken right from their site, in their Summit Society Crest.
What is your Placid? What is your Summit?
What experience reminds you what is important to you?
What serves to check all of the boxes in your life?
Whatever it is, here is a challenge.
Identify ONE thing you experience in that setting that you could add to your everyday.
Inspire yourself and inspire others to make things better around you.
What do you do when you’re in that place in your life when every box is checked that you don’t do when you get back to your daily grind?
It is probably a strength and/or a need that you have that you are not engaging regularly.
Take 15 mins today And ask yourself, even write it down.
Why don’t you do it? What holds you back?
Why is it important when things are great, and not important when things are just “normal?”
Are you doing something that doesn’t ever allow you to check ANY BOX? Why?
Are you inspired the way you are inspired when all of the boxes are checked?
What is the one thing you could do to lead by example in your organization or on your team to instill more of the “good stuff”.
What is that one thing that could bring you together?
IT SHOULDN’T TAKE A MIRACLE.
THANK YOU LEVEILLE FAMILY AND THE SUMMIT LACROSSE VENTURES FAMILY!
Only after finishing the writing of this, did I go and dig into the Summit Lacrosse Ventures “About” content, and I’m not surprised by what I found.
They have core principles that are reinforced by their own symbol, below.
Words like Camaraderie, Competition, Respect, Trust.
Unprompted in my intro, I shared the boxes that were checked up in the Lake Placid Lacrosse Summit annual experience.
Their mission was accomplished.
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Link To Motive Pure
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