#5 Creating Moments for People Who Don't Expect Them
Who needs YOU to make a Moment for them today?
Steve Steele
6/1/20267 min read
Dinger and the Wristbands
Every week during football season, our offensive wristbands (kind of like a wearable playbook for football players) go through the same process. I design them on the computer. Everything must match our gameplan - plays, formations, signals. Then they need to be printed, cut, laminated, and then cut out again. It's over an hour of work. Pure arts and crafts. My least favorite subject in kindergarten, and not much higher on the list now.
For a long time, that hour fell on me. Not because it was intellectually demanding or because I wanted it done a certain way, but because it had to get done. So, I did it.
Then one day while working a table during an event, an English teacher, who affectionately became known as Dinger, told me he would like to volunteer for our team. He wanted to help however he could. He didn't care about title, glory, or mentions in meetings. He just showed up and started finding things that needed to be done. The wristbands were one of them.
I want to be honest about something. I don't think I ever thanked Dinger the way I should have. I did tell him I appreciated it. I even said it more than once. We made sure he felt he was a part of the family that is our coaching staff, but I'm not sure I ever sat down and helped him fully understand what that hour meant to me. Doing that task wasn't just a task checked off the never-ending list for me, it was time given back to me to spend with my family. One hour a week, across a full season, is a genuine gift. And it came from someone who never asked for anything in return.
Dinger is exactly the kind of person this post is about. He wasn't a coordinator. He wasn't on the depth chart. He wasn't going to make the highlight reel. But he made our program better every single week, quietly, without waiting to be noticed. When he moved south, he knew we appreciated him, but once again I want to say, "Thank You, Dinger!"
The Player Nobody Expected
Cord Ellis didn't play much until his senior year. Even then, he wasn't sure he'd crack the lineup headed into the season. Our Defensive Coordinator Lewis and Defensive Backs' Coach Thorson never gave up on him. They never stopped finding ways to keep him connected to the team and never let him believe that limited playing time meant limited value. They kept coaching him hard and holding him accountable to the expectations they had for him.
In the 2022 semifinal against Yankton to say we were the underdog would be a severe understatement. They had beaten us by 28 in the regular season. To this day, it was one of our program's greatest victories and Cord made three of the biggest plays of the game. He blocked the extra point kick attempt on Yankton's first touchdown, saving a point. He broke up a two-point conversion after their second touchdown, saving two more points. Then he had the game-sealing interception. Three plays. Three moments when the game turned, and Cord Ellis was the reason. After his interception, our sideline erupted into mayhem. He launched the ball up into the air in jubilation.
A week later at the dome, after the final whistle, our hug on that field was one of the most memorable I've had as a coach because of what I saw in his face. I was so proud of him for sticking it out through the tough times. He was happy. Teary. Both at once. If you knew Cord, you knew that didn't happen. But it did, and it happened because our staff refused to let a young man believe he was invisible.
Chip and Dan Heath get this exactly right in The Power of Moments: the people who most need a moment created for them are almost never the ones asking for it. Stars signal their own value constantly. The stat sheet does it for them. It's the Cords of the world, players grinding away at positions nobody celebrates. It's them wondering if anyone even notices, who need the intentional act of being seen.
Our coaching staff didn't manufacture a moment for Cord in a grand gesture. We built it across three years of daily choices to keep him in the fold. The hug in the dome was the payoff on an investment that started long before anyone knew it would end that way.
The Coach Who Almost Hung up the Whistle
One of the most powerful stories from our run in Pierre isn't about a player at all.
Magic had become one of my best coaching buddies. I had tried for quite awhile to get him to move to Pierre. He was a phenomenal coach stuck in a tough situation, to the point it was eating at him. He seemed close to walking away from coaching the game entirely.
Eventually, he agreed to join our staff and move to Pierre. The years since have been some of the most gratifying experiences of my coaching career, not because of what it produced on the field, but because of what happened to a person.
In the 2022 State Championship, soon after the clock expired, I went to find Magic. The TV broadcast caught it: a fifteen-second clip of a coach who, twelve months earlier, had been almost ready to give up coaching football, getting attacked by a crazy coach on the sideline, so happy for him. There was a smile on his face and a tear he would never admit to.
The Heaths write about this kind of connection as one of the four pillars of a defining moment. What they mean is that the most powerful moments deepen a relationship. Moments that say, in the clearest possible terms, I see you, and you matter here. The hug in that moment did that for Magic, but so did every conversation in the months leading up to it. Every practice and every game where we showed him his ideas were valued and his presence was essential. Little did we know that he would be an even bigger help in being the voice of reason many times in tough situations that arose later on.
You don't always know you're building toward a moment like that. You just keep showing up for the person, and one day the moment arrives.
The Brother's Letter
Before any of this, before the championships, before any of the stories in this post; I was a 22-year-old Graduate Assistant in Madison, South Dakota. I was living alone in a tiny apartment I had rented online without ever seeing it.
My (very old) brother John sent me a birthday present that year. Inside was a Boise State jersey, and with it, a handwritten letter. He didn't get me the jersey because I was a fan of the team. He got it for me because, to him, I was Boise State. The underdog. The one who wasn't supposed to make it. The one chasing a dream that looked, from the outside, like it probably wouldn't work out.
I stood in that apartment and read that letter, and something inside me shifted. Not because of what it said about football but because of what it said about being seen. I was truly seen by someone who had watched me my whole life and believed in what I was becoming.
John didn't know the letter would mean what it meant. He probably wrote it in twenty minutes on a random afternoon. But to me, it is one of the clearest memories I have from those early coaching years, because it arrived at the exact moment I needed someone to tell me I was on the right path.
That is the whole argument of this post in a single story. You rarely know when you reach out to someone, what they are carrying that day. You don't know whether they are on the verge of something great or on the verge of quitting. You don't know whether your letter, your phone call, your ceremony, or your hug on the sideline is landing on someone who is fine, or on someone who needed it more than you could possibly know.
This is why a Momentous Leader doesn't wait for an obvious opportunity. A Momentous Leader looks for the people nobody else is looking for, and acts.
Who Are You Not Seeing?
Think about the people in your world right now on your team, your staff, your students, your family. Who has been contributing quietly, without fanfare, without a stat line, without anyone stopping to acknowledge what they bring?
Who is your Dinger? Someone waiting for an invitation to be a part of something.
Who is your Cord? Someone grinding away, wondering if anyone notices.
Who might be your Magic? Someone who is one good reason away from staying or leaving.
The star players will be fine. They have the scoreboard. They have the crowd. They have each other.
It's everyone else who is waiting to find out if they matter.
Go find them first.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Think of someone in your program or organization who contributes consistently but rarely receives public recognition. What would a five-minute acknowledgment of their work look like this week?
The Heaths argue that we leave most of the defining moments in people's lives entirely to chance. Who in your life has been waiting for a moment you've been meaning to create but haven't yet?
Cord's coaches spent years investing in him before the payoff came. What long-game investment are you making right now in someone who may not see the field much? How are you showing them they belong?
When was the last time someone reached out unexpectedly and made you feel seen? What did that cost them and what did it mean to you?
Some opportunities for moments are easily seen and easily created. The star player makes the game-winning catch. The team wins the championship. The recognition is obvious, the audience is ready, and the moment almost creates itself. A leader shows up, says the right thing, and everyone goes home feeling good.
That's NOT what this post is about.
Some of the most powerful moments happen for people who never saw them coming. People who had convinced themselves, often over years, that the spotlight wasn't for them. People on the edges of rooms, in the background of team photos, doing work that nobody was tracking on a stat sheet.
Creating moments for these people is harder. It requires something the easy moments don't: you need to be looking for someone the world isn't looking for.