Mount Vernon High School

March 1, 2024 Claim Your Ticket In 2018, the University of Virginia men’s basketball team entered the NCAA Tournament as the #1 overall seed and the favorite to win the program’s first national championship. They opened tournament play as a 21-point favorite over a small school most people had never even heard of, tiny UMBC - the University of Maryland at Baltimore County - the lowest overall seed of the 68 teams in the tournament, and a seemingly certain sacrificial lamb on its way to slaughter. The final score of that opening round game? Tiny UMBC 74, #1 Virginia 54. It was the first time in the history of the tournament that a #1 seed had lost its first round game, something many experts predicted would never happen. Thoroughly outplayed and embarrassed by their inferior opponent, it was a shocking and in many ways humiliating loss for Virginia head coach Tony Bennett and his team. Coach Bennett handled that loss with class and dignity, and then, like each of us are required to do in our moments of (sometimes unexpected) challenge and adversity, he had to decide where he and his team would go from there. It was the kind of historic failure that had the potential to define him and his program forever, if not destroy them completely. It had to have felt like rock bottom. But despite the frustration, disappointment, and even embarrassment he must’ve been feeling in the aftermath of that defeat, Tony Bennet chose to see something beyond the challenge. In the midst of that difficult experience, he also saw an opportunity. Bennett recalled a quote his wife had heard and shared with him from a 2014 TED Talk she had attended by a former Methodist minister named Donald Davis. The talk was titled, “How the Story Transforms the Teller.” In it, Davis explains an important lesson he learned from his late father, a successful businessman known to those in his tiny Appalachian town as “Banker Joe” Davis. As a young boy, “Banker Joe” suffered a debilitating injury when he accidentally buried an ax in his kneecap that nearly cost him his leg. Ultimately, as Don Davis’s dad explained to his son, that major setback that easily could have defined him forever - if not destroyed him completely - actually gave him the opportunity to become someone he never could’ve become without it. Unable to work on the family farm, Joe Davis went instead to business school, and eventually became the successful banker his son knew him to be. “It is never tragic when something bad happens to you,” the father told his son, “because if you can learn to use it right, it will buy you a ticket to a place you couldn’t have gone any other way.” Click to download printable PDF Those powerful words became a mantra for Tony Bennett and a driving force for him and for his team’s response to their historic failure. They got to work examining what went wrong and where they needed to get better. The pain of that experience brought them closer together. It made them hungrier than they’d ever been to get back in the arena and give it another shot - this time more prepared for success than ever before. The very next year, in 2019, the University of Virginia men’s basketball team returned to the NCAA Tournament, once again as a #1 seed. Together, that coach and those players marched their way through the bracket, winning six straight high-pressure games on their way to the program’s first ever national championship. Following their historic achievement, Coach Bennett talked about how their challenging experience from the year before played a major role in buying them a ticket to their national championship victory. “It didn’t ruin us,” Bennet said of their previous failure. “It strengthened us.” Because they used it the right way, the adversity they experienced help make them champions. So the question for you here today is simple. What part will adversity play in your story? Will you allow your failure to define you, or will you allow it to refine you into the kind of person that winning requires you to be? Will you waste the opportunity, or will you use it the right way, and in doing so claim your ticket to a place you never could’ve gone without it? Will your challenges ruin you, or will they strengthen you? "Banker Joe" Davis made his choice many years ago. So did Coach Tony Bennett and the Virginia men's basketball team. What part will adversity play in your story? The answer to that question is up to you. -Travis