The cosmos is a brilliant teacher. Through all of life’s suffering, pain, joys and sorrows, I believe that in the end the universe is guiding us toward happiness and freedom.
Even though I’m at an age where I regularly get flyers in the mail offering me discount cremation services, at heart I’m still a bright-eyed sports culture geek.
It was the late 1980s when I became interested in studying what sets successful sports teams apart. I was a distance runner, and I thought the principles that helped sports teams succeed might help me find the success and joy I was seeking.
On Sunday afternoons, my ex and I would don our San Francisco 49ers caps and nibble popcorn while we watched the Niners demolish the best teams in the NFL.
The secret of the Niners’ success is revealed in the story of how coach Bill Walsh transformed a team that, in the words of 49ers center and guard Randy Cross, was “the worst 2-14 team in the history of the NFL.”
It took Walsh just three years to lead the 49ers to their first Super Bowl victory. He achieved this by creating happy players, a happy team, and a happy organization. His goal from the start was to create a positive, optimistic, cheerful atmosphere that would permeate every nook and cranny of the culture, from the ticket sellers to the coaches and players on the field.
His focus was deeply fixated on the individual. Walsh had his coaches help every player to improve at his own level – even those who had no chance of succeeding in the NFL. He knew that improvement is addictive. Our small successes give us joy, and happiness spreads rapidly when all of the players on a team are having daily victories.
The 49ers organization quickly became the envy of the league, to a point where other teams were vying to hire the Forty-Niner coaches away. It’s how the San Francisco “West Coast Offense” spread throughout the NFL, then gradually to the college and high school levels.
Walsh’s system was based on efficient use of energy. In the past, football had prided itself on being a smash-mouth game where the biggest and strongest players would dominate smaller, weaker teams.
Walsh adopted a style of football that was based on a more efficient way of advancing the ball. Instead of trying to overpower the other team by slugging it out on the line, the Niners threw short, high-percentage passes. To make his plan work, Walsh signed quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young, who had the skills to execute his pass-heavy offense.
Bill Walsh’s ideas on football gave me hints of how I should approach my running.
My spiritual teacher believed that we cannot claim we truly understand something until we can express it in clear, simple terms. When it comes to sports, I think I’m ready to say what sets happy teams like the Bill Walsh 49ers apart. It’s simple: they are focused on the inner game as well as the outer game.
By creating an upbeat, positive, happy culture, starting at the level of the individual, Walsh built a successful team.
Similarly, I realized that I could find happiness and success if I would accept myself exactly as I was, a hilariously untalented plodder, and take joy in my own small, happy accomplishments, as often as possible.
In time, I found that the subtle, calm feelings of my heart were telling me, at any given moment, how I could train for maximum success and enjoyment. I only needed to commit to the patient discipline of paying attention to those feelings and doing what they suggested.
Now that I’m nearing my mid-eighties, I’ve found a resource that helps me further my study of sports cultures as an observer. For $14 a month I can watch the nation’s top-ranked high school football teams on the NFHS Network.
I find high school football more enjoyable than the college and NFL varieties, if only because at those levels a typical game involves just 15 to 20 minutes of actual play, and three hours of advertising, replays, penalties, mind-numbing commentary, and standing around.
Even so, while many of the best high school teams inspire me, I’m not always entirely tickled by what I see.
I’m tiptoeing on dangerous ground here. First, because I don’t have a PhD in football. Second, because I’m aware that there are thousands of wonderful coaches and players, even on less-talented teams. Finally, because I’ve never felt much enthusiasm for writing as a social critic. Instead, I’ve always felt guided to steer clear of fighting against, and instead to fight for – never to denigrate, judge, or criticize, but to highlight what helps us improve.
Still, I have pondered why some high school teams are more fun to watch than others.
It seems to come down to the culture. The teams where the coaches are concerned with helping young people grow are more fun than the teams whose mission statements brag about how they prepare their players to receive scholarship offers from Division I colleges.
I don’t find the high school leagues that are obsessed with recruiting for dominance nearly as inspiring as leagues where there is more parity, with fewer blowouts and closer scores.
Talent, of course, is inspiring – it suggests the best we can aspire to in our lives. But there are factors that can erase the inspiration: if, for example, an athlete is less than uplifted in his attitudes and behavior.
The teen years are a time when young people feel powerfully driven to mold a strong self-identity, based on actual accomplishment. Adolescence is a time when they they long to be inspired by a sense of life’s positive meaning and joyous possibilities. Being a teenager is about preparing for independent adult life, and teens want to develop the strength, wisdom, and maturity to be successful when they leave the nest.
For these reasons, it’s important to create venues where they can flex their powers of will, intelligence, and heart. And what a gift it is to be able to use sports as a classroom to show what works in the real world, and how they can use body, heart, will, mind, and soul to find the greatest happiness and success.
The best high school teams, regardless of their win-loss records, are the ones that do the best for the individual player, like Walsh’s 49ers. The best teams in all sports have cultures of individual growth. It’s how great sports cultures are made. When every player is improving and having daily success experiences, the culture becomes saturated with positive feelings.
Biff Poggi currently serves as the interim head football coach at the University of Michigan. Previously, he coached at two high schools in Baltimore, Maryland: Gilman School and St. Frances Academy.
Poggi was no stranger to recruiting, but he was also deeply invested in building a positive culture.
From Wikipedia: “The (St. Frances Academy) football program was founded in 2008, with one initial $60,000 contribution coming from Gilman School coach Biff Poggi.”
St. Frances quickly rose to national prominence and has remained there. In December 2025 they were ranked second nationally, of approximately 13,000 high schools with varsity football teams.
From an article I posted some years ago, “Upbeat Running – A Revolution in the Making?”:
Biff Poggi ran across a news item about a rival coach who ruthlessly drove his players to see which ones would break and “who’ll stand up and be a man.” He brought the article to a St. Frances team meeting, where he read it aloud to the players, then chortled happily:
“We ought to get a lifetime contract to play against this guy. We’d beat them every time we’d play, because he has no idea what he’s talking about. You understand? Fifty boys together, fifty boys that love each other and that are well affirmed and well loved by their coaches, will smack those guys anytime, in anything. Being a father. Being a son. Being a football player. Being a doctor. Being an astronaut. Being a human being. Being anything.”
(From Jeffrey Marx, Season of Life: A Football Star, A Boy, A Journey to Manhood, Simon & Schuster, 2003.)
As athletes and people, what lessons can we glean from the best team cultures? I believe it’s simple. We need to get good at the inner game. We need to accept ourselves exactly as we are and grow gradually stronger. We need to use our five “Tools of Maturity” – body, feeling, will, mind, soul – in ways that give us increasing health, love, strength, wisdom, and joy. We need to prepare, step by patient step, to inhabit the most healthy, loving, strong, wise, and inspired version of ourselves.
You can read Biff Poggi’s story in a fine ESPN article, “How a football coach saved a program while losing his opponents.” It’s an engagingly human, inspiring account.
