Relative Success

3-13-90

Perspective: Relative Success

It was a pretty good week for Cobber sports. Several Cobber athletes received All-American and All-MIAC honors for their efforts over the past few months. And a very successful winter sports season was capped with the National Indoor Track Meet and the Lady Cobbers' loss in their NCAA basketball quarterfinal game.

The end of a our winter sports season came with a bit of a whimper, just when many were expecting a bang. As so often happens with the structure of sports championships, very good seasons ended with a loss.

Both of the Cobbers' season-ending events, the Lady Cobber loss and the National Indoor Track Meet, involved special Cobber athletes who were chasing dreams of an NCAA title. And within those Cobber teams were two of Concordia's best athletes, junior distance-runner Chris Fredrick and junior Lady Cobber Michelle Thykeson.

Both carried the mantle of being the "star" and both, despite having had outstanding seasons, saw their dreams end a little shy of fruition.

Both had a chance to be acclaimed "best-in-the-nation", at least within the 300-or-so colleges which make up the NCAA's Division III. And both came up just short.

Both will have another shot next year. But, for now, they will have to contend with the concept of relative success, something that requires a pretty solid sense of where and who one is.

Fredrick, an honor student and slender gazelle who seems to barely touch the ground as she glides around a track, went out East with the best time in the country at 1500 meters, 4:35.28. She came in sixth, running 4:39.40.

She earned All-American honors. But she didn't run her best. Her best would have placed her first.

Thykeson, at 6'2", is a rare combination of grace and strength, with a beautiful Cheshire smile, full of innocence and mischief and knowing. She will probably be named an All-American for her 18 points-per-game and 57% shooting and a host of other statistical accomplishments, not the least of which is her teams' stunning 77-10 record over her first three years.

But, at Saturday's game in Danville, Kentucky, Tyk recorded just eight points, played just 19 minutes and fouled out. Her team still came within two minutes of making, and probably hosting, the coveted Final Four.

Michelle, like Chris, looked at herself and wondered what might-have-been with a better performance.

In one sense, Chris' burden is more clear. She competes in a sport where there is no ambiguity and little room to quibble. Like a golfer, she must live with the number she posts.

If making the top-six and earning all-American status with that sixth-place finish was her goal, then Chris succeeded. If her goal was to win a national title and run her best at the national meet then she fell short of her goal.

But it was fundamentally her goal and her achievement.

The fact that she ran with a Concordia track suit was somewhat incidental. Track is like that. A quite solitary endeavor.

For Michelle, playing as she does in sport where teammates are so interdependent, her goals are part of a collective whole. And her failures affect others, others she cares about.

After Saturday's game, as the reality of the defeat began to sink in, Tyk pondered her responsibility in the loss, more concerned for those she felt she had let down than for any personal goals that were blown away. It was of little immediate comfort to her that the team would not have even gotten to the "Elite Eight" without her efforts in earlier games.

For Chris and Michelle it will probably take a while to sort it all out. Getting this close to "winning-it-all"

can be more painful than never having had a chance at all. Defeat in such circumstances can be a lonely affair.

People who have never felt such success are not prone to sympathy for those that have gone this far. And people who have won it all have a habit of arrogantly attributing too much of their success to virtue and too little to dumb luck. They tend to think that the late-round losers somehow deserve their fate.

Coaches want their athletes to hate losing. The more pain there is in losing the harder the team will work next time to avoid it. But such thinking only adds to the sense of isolation felt by the team-leader after a loss.

One needs perspective at times such as these, not mind games about second-best being the same as abject failure.

Loss of perspective can happen to the best of us. A few weeks ago, Minnesota's most famous writer, Garrison Keillor, was at Concordia to give a little talk. In the midst of spinning his yarns about life in rural Minnesota, filled, as usual, with gentle respect for the non-famous among us, his brain suddenly froze up. He somehow felt compelled to defend his decision to leave Minnesota for the bright lights and rich publishers of New York City.

He began babbling a series of rationalizations for his move and startled the crowd by saying, "New York City is wonderful because, unlike the Midwest, it does not tolerate second-best in anything."

Another seemingly-wise person had been sucked in by our nation's cruel social Darwinism, which says, "All praise to the winners and to hell with the losers."

Chris and Michelle, like many athletes at Concordia this winter, felt exhilaration and joy as they performed their artistry. They do not need to be fawned over. But they need to know that, at least here at Concordia, there are deeper measures of success than first-place trophies.

To the many track athletes who did so well, to the wrestlers who advanced to Nationals, to the Hockey team which advanced to the playoffs, to all the Lady Cobbers who played so well, and to the those Cobber athletes who struggled hard in defeat, thanks for a delightful winter and letting us share in your performances.

These pages are maintained by Jerry Pyle pyle@cord.edu . These articles are copyrighted © and may not be published or reproduced without the express permission of Jerry Pyle.

Return to Perspectives Index Cobber Sports Home Page Concordia Home Page