For my first three years of high school football, we won two games. Total. Three years.
Then came senior year. Before the season even started, our coaches took us away to camp — three workouts a day, out in the heat, nowhere to hide from it. When we got back to campus, it didn’t get any easier. Two-a-days under a hot sun. Practices that ended with forty 40-yard sprints — not four, not fourteen, forty — legs gone, everybody quiet on the walk back in.
Down the road, the town pool was packed. Kids our age floating around having a good summer while we ran gassers in ninety-degree heat and ate dinner too tired to talk.
We went 7-0-1 that season. Tied for the division title. The best season anyone on that roster had ever been part of, after three years that gave nobody a single reason to expect it.
Nobody in the stands that fall knew about the sprints. Nobody watching us tie for a division title had any idea what it cost, or when it got paid for. But that’s exactly the point. The work that turned that team around didn’t happen on a Friday night under the lights. It happened in July, in the heat, while the rest of the town was at the pool.
I’ve seen the same thing from the coaching side, too — both ways.
The team that treats camp as a formality — shows up, goes through the motions, counts the days until pads come off — plays exactly like it practiced. Soft. A step slow in the fourth quarter. Undisciplined when the game gets close, because discipline was never actually built. Just assumed.
The team that treats camp like it’s the whole season — because it is — shows up in September with something the other team doesn’t have and can’t fake. Conditioning nobody can see in a highlight. Assignments that are automatic instead of remembered. A staff that already knows exactly how eighteen kids respond under fatigue, because they watched it happen in ninety-degree heat with no fans and no stakes.
The scoreboard in September doesn’t measure September. It measures August.
Rewarded in Public for What You Do in Private
Steph Curry shoots 500 shots a day. Not during the season, when there’s a game to point to and a reason anyone would notice. Every day — including the days nobody’s filming, including the offseason, including the mornings when there’s no shootaround scheduled and no coach checking attendance. Nobody’s in that gym. There’s no possession on the line. Just a guy who decided that the shooter who shows up ice-cold from thirty feet in Game 6 gets built in ten thousand empty-gym reps first, or he doesn’t get built at all.
Kobe Bryant ran the same math. The stories about him working before sunrise, drilling footwork nobody had asked him to drill, refining moves that wouldn’t show up in a highlight for another two years — that wasn’t extra credit. That was the actual job. The parts of his game that made him unguardable in the fourth quarter were built in gyms with the lights half-on and nobody keeping score.
Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky prove the same thing in a pool. Phelps trained 365 days a year for years at a stretch — including Christmas, including his own birthday — long before the world had ever heard his name. Ledecky’s mornings start before sunrise, grinding through sets in an empty natatorium with nobody in the bleachers and nothing but a stopwatch keeping score. Everyone wants to stand on the podium and get handed a gold medal. Few are willing to put in the work when no one is watching to earn it.
And you can see the other half of that equation every August, on every roster in the country. The players who took the spring off — who treated the offseason as a break instead of the point — show up to camp a step behind the ones who didn’t. It’s not a mystery and it’s not bad luck. It’s just math catching up with a choice that was made months earlier, when nobody was watching and it was still easy to skip.
You get rewarded in public for what you do in private.
That’s true in a gym and on a practice field. It’s just as true in a business. The leader who’s actually building something is doing it in the unglamorous weeks — the planning cycle nobody’s excited about, the hard conversation that doesn’t show up on any dashboard, the process work that never makes it into the quarterly deck. Then the results show up months later, and everyone in the room reacts as if the results were the event.
They weren’t. The results were the receipt. The event already happened, back when nobody was watching and nothing was on the line yet.
The Preseason Principle
THE PRESEASON PRINCIPLE
Every outcome you’ll be judged on this fall was already being decided this month, whether you noticed or not. Q4 numbers, a championship run, a promotion, a turnaround — all of it gets built or lost in a window before anyone’s grading you, while the pressure is still low enough that it’s genuinely optional to take the work seriously.
Most people don’t skip the big moment. Nobody no-shows for the championship game or the board presentation. What they skip is the unglamorous preparation that determines how that moment goes. The gap between the leaders who deliver and the ones who don’t is almost never visible on the day it matters. It was visible weeks earlier, to anyone who happened to be watching the empty practice field.
The uncomfortable part: right now, this month, you are either in your preseason or you’re skipping it. There’s no third option. The only question is whether you’ll be able to see which one you chose before the scoreboard tells you.
Building the Habit
You don’t get to choose whether your preseason happens. It’s happening right now, whether you’re intentional about it or not. What you can choose is whether you show up for it on purpose.
1. Name your preseason. Every season has one, in sports and in business — the low-pressure window before the thing that will actually be measured. For most leaders, that’s right now: the six weeks before Q4 begins. Name the window out loud. If you can’t say when your preseason is, you’re probably already past it.
2. Do the rep nobody will ever see. The film session with no audience. The hard conversation with a direct report that never makes a meeting agenda. The plan you build before anyone asked for it. Those are your two-a-days. Find one this week and do it, on purpose, even though — especially though — no one is grading it.
3. Track effort, not applause. Applause is a lagging indicator; by the time it arrives, the work that earned it is already finished. Keep a private, honest tally of the unglamorous reps you’re actually putting in — not the ones you’ll get credit for. That tally is the only leading indicator that matters.
4. Respect the empty stands. The moment a stadium fills up, human nature makes everyone play a little tighter, a little more self-conscious. That’s precisely why the empty-stands work matters more — it’s the only rep you’ll ever get where you can build the skill without also managing the pressure. Don’t waste it by treating it as optional.
The Line I Keep Coming Back To
The work you do in the dark, when no fans are in the stands and nobody’s watching, is what makes the difference when the lights are brightest.
Every leader wants the Friday night. The packed stands, the win, the recognition. Almost nobody wants the Tuesday in August — the empty field, the heat, the rep that no one will remember you did.
But the Tuesday is where the Friday actually gets decided. It always has been.
Somewhere this month, there is a version of your Q4 — or your season, or your next promotion — that is being built right now, in a window nobody’s watching and nothing’s officially on the line yet. Whether that version shows up in October has already been mostly determined by whether you showed up for it in August.
Where’s your empty practice field this month? Are you on it?
That’s the question worth sitting with before the lights come on.
