AAGS 2021

43 That’s in the preparation and that is meticulous. At the event, there has to be immediate crisis management, how do you go about that? I’ve never believed that playing at a really high level, performing at a high level is a switch that we can just turn on and off. We have to be able to do it regularly in training, in other competitions and not just expect that something’s going to happen, and we’ll peak. When it comes to crisis management, it’s the same concept. We’ve had plenty of experience at that. It might be a 45-hour trip from China to Argentina involving three or four flights and having to play a few days later. How do we as a staff and how does the team as a group handle that if we staff or if I, as the coach, model panic, that’s what I’m going to get. There are so many studies that show that it’s really easy to infect people around us in just a few thousands of a second with whatever we’re displaying as, as an emotion or a response. If we respond with evenness, with poise and with constantly talking about expecting things, we’re always going to have a plan A and we’re almost never going to be able to execute that plan A because things are going to come up and force us, and the opponent or enemy has a huge say in that equation too. Especially with COVID and lockdowns, we just have to be prepared for anything, absolutely Anything. Here’s something that surprised us. We would have loved to have had this information before we got on the plane to Tokyo, but we only learned after. Everybody needed to test immediately before either the people involved in the Olympics went on to the Olympic village or whether non-Olympic civilians just went on to their next flight or entered the country of Japan. What we learned is that Japanese government regulations stated that if somebody tested positive, everybody in that row and the two rows behind and the two rows in front were considered tainted by contact. That’s something we didn’t know, and we had a coach get caught up in that web of contact tracing. We had to figure out a way to work, basically with her locked in her room, 22 hours a day for the next 14 days, we lost a key coaching member of our staff in her normal capacities. We had talked about that so much and done so much pre-planning both as a staff and as a team that we were prepared for it, that was something that we do regularly and did to a whole new level this year with COVID. That was what we call a pre-mortem looking at an event, pretending hypothetically, that it went very wrong. The wheels fell off the bus and we came far short of what we wanted to accomplish. What are all the possible reasons why that could happen? It becomes a fun exercise in planning because you just madly list down what are all the things that could go wrong. We had our athletes do it, that was one of their weekly homework assignments. They gave us some new ones; they were really helpful in helping us plan. And then we came up with a plan A, to avoid any of those things that could go wrong and B, if they still went wrong, how to actually mitigate and manage it. Those would be examples of a ton of work going in so that it wasn’t just flipping a switch when things actually went wrong as we knew they would at some point, at many points during Tokyo. You were diagnosed with cancer in 2017. You did not let on to anyone in your team have that condition even right through the Olympics. Why did you take this approach? I told our staff about it, but I explicitly said, look, I don’t want to worry our players about this. I had a mild form of chemotherapy, just an oral pill that I took. Two weeks on and two weeks off over a six-month period. What I wanted to do was first play a competition without our team knowing about it but with our staff knowing about it so I could show them that I could be exactly the same for them. I could bring the same energy level, the same focus, the same everything. At some point I knew they might find out and I’d rather them find out from me than from others. I did inform the team after we played that competition. I was happy that they were surprised, stunned, that they knew nothing was going on and they were very supportive. It drew us a little closer together, but I did not want to make a big issue out of it. I didn’t want the focus to be on me. Beyond the team and coaching staff and my family, of course just never really talked about that. Then it came out again during the Olympics. Maybe I would change my opinion a little on how I didn’t think it was important to make a big deal about it. I didn’t want to draw attention away from our players and our team and what they were doing, I don’t want the attention on me. The positive is I’ve actually had over 20 people reach out to me and say, you know what? I heard your story. I’m far beyond the age of 45 at which people are encouraged to begin screening for colon cancer. I’m far beyond that, I’ve been lax on that. I’m going to go in and get my test. So, there is a benefit to that I missed in just not wanting to highlight.