The most successful athletes (and any successful people) separate themselves from the crowd because they develop high levels of sense of urgency.
A sense of urgency helps you leverage the time and resources you have available.
My humble definition of a sense of urgency is a superior state of focus to the tasks, activities, drills, and execution of what you are supposed to do every time with or without supervision.
Athletes with a sense of urgency don’t cut corners and preach with the example. Athletes with a sense of urgency are aware that they have to work hard because their opponents are also working hard. They might not know whom they’re going to play, but they know that their opponent is getting ready for the fight.
I love watching high-promoted box fights. I remember when Miguel Cotto and Manny Pacquiao fought for the WBO welterweight championship on November 14, 2009. That was a fantastic match between two legendary boxers. But what fascinated me was the training camps they made. Even though their preparation was different, they both established the best strategy. They worked insanely hard to prepare for the fight.
If you want to become an elite athlete, you must beware that you are already losing when you cut corners. I keep telling this to my athletes. That’s why I can see how challenging a game will be just by watching the opponents prepare for the game. As soon I get to the court, I make an inventory of what we needed to win a game. I can create my inventory by watching the opponent’s fundamentals, athleticism, and IQ.
The beauty of elite sports is that many teams prepare to win. The higher the level, the tighter the games are. That is why in pro sports, you see a “low-ranked team” beating a top team. There’s no such thing as relaxation in elite sports. The early you are aware of this, the better.
Why do you need to develop a sense of urgency?
There’s no age to start being serious about your stuff.
In my volleyball coaching practice, I train athletes ranging from 8 years old to college players and adults. From time to time, I stumble with an athlete that is badly serious about becoming an elite player.
If you are a high school volleyball player and you are not aware you need to be serious about your whole development, it’ll be uphill for you to play at the next level.
If you’re this type of athlete, you can even be a threat to your team. Unengaged players can ruin a team’s chemistry in seconds.
If you enter your high school years without a sense of urgency, it might be too late for you to pursue playing DI – DII college. It’s too late, not because you don’t have the talent, it’s too late because there are thousands of athletes like you that want to play in college.
In The USA, there are around half a million high school athletes. Only a tiny percentage of those athletes make an NCAA roster. If you want to scale to Pro, that statistic gets even tighter. I’m not trying to discourage you with the stats I’m about to show you but I want to make sure you know the number of athletes competing with you to make a college roster.
I hope that if you are pursuing playing DI – DII college, you have to develop a sense of urgency to use your time, talents, skills, and resources wisely.
Below is the most recent study of the odds of a high schooler making a college and a pro team.
Odds of High School Athletes to Play in College
Playing with a sense of urgency is not the same as playing with a sense of emergency
Acting with a sense of emergency means that you’re living in a reactive way. When you act in such a way, you act in desperation because you can’t control what happens to you and around you.
When a catastrophic event happens like a car accident or a natural phenomenon (a hurricane, a tornado, an earthquake), people around that even are in an emergency state.
People living in an emergency state are governed by stress and panic because they can’t control the events in their environments.
That’s what it means to live in a state of emergency.
You might also be approaching your volleyball career in an emergency stage, constantly reacting to what happens to you. You react because you’re not prepared for what the game demands. The higher you play, the more the game requires you.
As you play at a higher level, things will turn more demanding. The only way you can cope with those demands is to prepare yourself. As you upgrade your category as a player, you have to prepare better. Preparation is what gets you the separation from other athletes.
As you move upwards in the elite pipeline, you must be more skillful, faster, stronger, wiser, and emotionally balanced.
So, to answer your question, how do I become an elite athlete if I have all the support I need to succeed? I have to tell you that you have to create a sense of urgency so that you don’t have to be in an emergency mode.
When you are playing defense and don’t have any clue of where to position yourself. you’re playing in an emergency mode. This might mean that you are not engaged in the play or not obeying your team’s defense system.
Contrary, if you are playing defense and you start tracking the play since the passer passes to the setter, then you turn your eyes to the setter, and after you read the set you turn to the hitter and see her hitting the line and her intentionality of hitting, then you are playing with a sense of urgency.
Simply explained, playing with a sense of urgency is to diligently take care of the game every single touch.
Playing and practicing with a sense of urgency is not an easy thing, especially if you’re a high school athlete dealing with team practices, homework, schools activities, friends, or even a job. But it’s necessary that you act that way if you want to be part of the tinny number that makes it to a college roster.
I hope this article can help you understand the importance of practicing and playing with a sense of urgency.
If you want to know more about how you can be an elite athlete download my guide Elite Athlete Pipeline to help you build your road to becoming an elite athlete
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