Responding to Adversity

This year's Royal Way message, Reflect, Accept, Adapt, Respond, resonated deeply with me as a student-athlete. These four words are the foundation for how athletes should approach their games, matches, or competitions. Reflection is how we learn from what happened. In both wins and losses, reflecting on our performance is crucial to improving. Accepting what happens is one of the most difficult things an athlete must do. No one likes to lose, and sometimes accepting the actual outcome of the competition is harder than the game itself.

Adapt is the word that resonated the most with me. As a transfer student, I had to adapt to everything thrown at me: a new school, team, classes, environment, and everything else that goes into transferring to a new college. It's no easy task. Being able to adapt also helps me as a basketball player. In such a fast-paced, quick-moving game, you must be able to adapt to anything that happens. With a long rebound or an overthrown pass, you must be able to react quickly to help your team succeed. Adapting and responding quickly to both the good and the bad is what helps us improve as both people and student-athletes.

Respond is the final theme and the one that holds the most importance among student-athletes. Adversity is something that every single student-athlete will face, whether they like it or not, during every season they play in. Whether it be an injury, a close loss, falling short of a championship, or not reaching team or individual goals, adversity comes for us all. It is how we respond to adversity, however, that truly shows who we are as student-athletes. Some people may sit there and let adversity walk all over them without doing anything about it. Others will take adversity as a form of constructive criticism, use what they learned from it, and let it propel them into a better season.

The fundamental values of The Royal Way message, Reflect, Accept, Adapt, Respond, are four words that all student-athletes should live by. It is a mentality, a thought process, and an overall way of living. By carrying these values with us every day, we give ourselves the best chance to grow through every challenge we face. More importantly, we become better teammates, better leaders, and better representatives of what it means to live The Royal Way.

Matt Lyons, Men's Basketball