The phone rang on a hard day.
I knew who it was before I looked. A young woman I coach — I’ll tell you about her later. She wasn’t calling for plays. She wasn’t calling for advice. It had taken me years to understand what calls like this one really were.
She was checking to see if someone was still there.
I didn’t give a speech. I didn’t offer five steps. I said what I’ve learned to say:
“I’m glad you called. Stay here. We’re going to get through today.”
Not next year. Not forever. Just today.
And when I hung up, I sat there thinking about a truth it took me fifty years and a lot of scars to learn:
Sometimes people don’t need another expert.
They need someone willing to step into the trench with them.
I know something about trenches.
I was a boy nobody was watching. I’ll tell you that story too — the armor, the wounds, the therapist whose tears finally made me see it. I built a school that saved lives and watched it die in a courtroom. I buried a nineteen-year-old point guard whose last words to me were a plea to get him out. I moved my three teenage sons and everything we owned in a U-Haul and started over from nothing. I sat alone in a hospital room during COVID with a heart that was quitting on me, shaking too hard with fear to stand, held up by a nurse’s kindness and the mercy of God.
None of that made me an expert.
It made me a witness.
And here is what I witnessed, in gyms and classrooms and courtrooms and hospital rooms, over thirty years of coaching, teaching, counseling, and crisis work: Every environment where people are shaped is a trench.
A basketball court is a trench. A classroom is a trench. A counseling office is a trench. A church is a trench. A living room is a trench. A hospital room is a trench.
Every day, coaches, teachers, parents, counselors, pastors, and mentors step into places where people carry invisible wounds, hidden fears, broken dreams, and untapped potential. We often meet them on the worst days of their lives.
For years, this book existed as a basketball manual — practice plans, culture, accountability, how to build a program. But the more life I lived, the more I realized those pages were pointing at something much bigger. So let me be clear about what you’re holding.
This is not a basketball book. It’s not a parenting book. It’s not a leadership book. It’s not a counseling book.
It is a field guide for anyone entrusted with another human being.
And it is built on one conviction, earned the hard way, that you will meet on nearly every page:
People become best in safe relationships.
Not relationships without truth, accountability, or challenge. Relationships where grace and truth walk together — where people are known, challenged, forgiven, corrected, and loved. Environments where growth is possible because fear is not in control.
In these pages you’ll find my stories — the real ones, told with the bark still on them — alongside what I’ve learned from psychology, neuroscience, attachment research, and most importantly Scripture, which has been teaching all of this far longer than science has been measuring it. God has always been in the business of restoring hearts before changing behavior.
The question is not whether you’re making an impact on the people around you.
You are. Every day. Every interaction.
The question is what kind.
Welcome to the trenches.