I never necessarily thought of Tom Crean as an insightful man.
I do follow sports, I have for years — hence my position as sports columnist — but I always thought of all coaches as the same.
“Sport win men! Play ball well!”
Perhaps I’m over-exaggerating. But if you arrange those words into a real sentence with a subject and a verb, you’ve got a pretty typical presser response.
So when I’m doing my usual browse of iuhoosiers.com and the headline “Coach Crean Gives Speech at IU Police Academy Graduation,” comes up, I’m thinking, “Oh, this’ll be good.”
It was.
We’ve all sat through commencement addresses, keynote speeches at conferences, speeches from someone of vague importance at leadership retreats. After a while, all those speeches tend to blend into one trite message: believe in yourself, and nothing can stop you.
OK, well, believing I can have all A’s and be a national champion bowler hasn’t gotten me that far, so try again.
Crean, thankfully, doesn’t tell the graduates of the police academy verbatim to believe in themselves.
He encourages them to continue pursuing their passions and not to let anyone get in the way.
As someone who considers changing majors weekly, that really said something to me.
If you’ve made it through four years at IU without once reconsidering your major or actually changing it, good for you. But a lot of us reach the point where we just can’t know for sure if what we’re doing is really right for us. And when one professor says one thing that’s slightly negative, those self-defense sirens in our head scream, “Danger! Get out while you still can!”
We forget our passions because we were at one time told we weren’t good enough, or that we won’t get a job, or that we can’t handle it.
Tom Crean, though. Tom Crean believes in us.
OK. Maybe he only believes in the new IUPD officers. But his points still stand, and many of us really, truly need that positivity in our lives.
Crean believed in himself enough to take himself from an admittedly mediocre high basketball player in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, to a Top-25 level college basketball coach at IU. He had nearly zero background to be where is, and now Crean is one of only a handful of Division I coaches who didn’t play college basketball.
Of course, Crean used his ability to name-drop some people who he casually texted to get inspirational quotes from — an LAPD captain from the Hollywood division, Indianapolis Colts Coach Chuck Pagano and Crean’s brothers-in-law John and Jim Harbaugh, coaches of the Baltimore Ravens and University of Michigan football, respectively. Crean was even able to swing a message from Gov. Mike Pence.
But he also made sure to tell the audience of new policemen and policewomen what he thought were two crucial bits of advice: to understand what they can and can’t control, and to not forget to breathe.
A year ago, before I came to realize my true Indiana self and before I had even watched a basketball game, I would have laughed at my current self. Writing about a basketball coach who says inspiring things? Good one.
But maybe I’ve finally cracked the code of how to be the Big Ten Coach of the Year — inflate your players with positivity. (The whole inflating thing is his terminology, not mine.)
Crean might not pen the next great American novel anytime soon, with his 3,500+ word speech that honestly could have been about 1,500, but he might want to look into the self-help book industry after retirement.
jzega@umail.iu.edu
