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Shining Stars – Guest: Ben Hassenger, Event Founder / The Diminutive Ukulele's Big Impact (Mighty Uke Day 16)

Stars on Sports – Topic: Factoring in the Toughness Factor

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Welcome to Shining Stars, Voices of Service, Hope and Change, a program dedicated to spotlighting the nonprofits and change makers who are transforming our communities. Each episode shares inspiring stories of the organizations and individuals turning compassion into action.

Thanks so much for taking a listen to Shining Stars. I'm Dennis, and today's guest is Ben Hassinger.

He is the founder of Muddy uk, a joyful community center event bringing people together through the world's happiest instrument, the ukulele. And it's ukulele, correct?

It's ukulele. Ukulele, yes.

I've heard you go on about this several times, so I should know.

Do you want me to go on.

About it real quick? I'm sure we will. Once again. Now, Ben's work is also connected with Music is the Foundation.

It's an initiative that uses music education and access to instruments to empower folks and strengthen communities through strumming and song. And Ben is helping people of all ages experience connection, belonging, and hope through this. So that's awesome. So welcome, Ben.

Aloha.

As long as I've known you, I have never actually had the chance myself personally, to sit down and talk with you. So this is a great opportunity for me and hopefully for you as well.

That's great.

Yeah. It's funny because we've known each other forever.

We have for quite a while.

Yeah.

Mighty UK Day coming up. But now, do you usually say uk?

So I would say uke, but I say ukulele. Ukulele. And that means in Hawaiian. In English. It's a Hawaiian word. Means what?

You tell me.

Jumping flea.

I did know that. And that's the funny thing is I forgot about it. But now I remember again. Muddy Yuk day coming up, May 8th through the 10th.

And it's going to be in East Lansing now, am I right? Most of this is going to be taking place at the University United Methodist Church.

Right, okay.

Right.

And then on Sunday, we have a concert at MSU's Community Music School.

Okay.

And this has been going on for quite a while now.

16 Years. 16 Years, yeah.

What originally got you going? You know what? I want to create this. I want to do a Mighty UK Day.

Came home. We started the Lansing Area Ukulele Group that fall. And then a couple of Toronto filmmakers made a movie called the Mighty Uke.

And they were looking for places to show it. So I reached out to them and said, hey, we've got a great ukulele group going on here in Lansing.

And I'm going, oh, this went so well. This is great. And people come up and they go, well, what are we gonna do next year? And I'm like, next year, what? What?

So little by little, we kept building it up into. Now it's one of the premier ukulele festivals in North America, showcasing just the finest of musicians playing the ukulele.

So it sounds like it kind of just happened by accident in a way, more or less.

And it grew organically. You know, it was just little steps, little by little, and just grew into.

What it is today.

So once you finally got to the point where you were like, okay, I'm gonna make this into an annual event. This is gonna be a thing. Who were you really wanting to try to reach with this?

Really? Everybody. I mean, the ukulele's always been kind of a underappreciated instrument.

Oh, it's, you know, it's a fun little happy songs, and, you know, you don't need to know much of anything to play it. And the more I've worked with it, I found the finest musicians in the world that I. I've ever heard are ukulele players. I mean, it's just amazing.

And to bring this accessible instrument to the broad public. Show them.

Yeah, you can get started pretty easily with it, but you can take it as far as you want to go and use it as an instrument to express yourself.

And do you feel like you pretty much kind of build up a whole ukulele community with this?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

When we started laugh, we were one of two ukulele groups in the state, and the other one, which was around before us but was kind of dormant. I think we're the. What do you call it? The. What do you call the Starter kitchens.

That.

All I can think of is the Betty Crocker.

No, I'm looking for the word that. Anyway, people would come to our LAUGH meetings because we're in the middle of the state, so you could come from Grand Rapids or Clare. Incubator.

That's the word. Yes, we're the incubator for ukulele. So people would come to Lansing and then they'd go home and they go, man, I really like doing the ukulele stuff.

It's like, well, start a group in Grand Rapids, start one in Clare, start one in Traverse city. Now there's 25 to 30 ukulele groups across the state.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Do you go to visit these other ones or not? I have.

Not all of them, but quite a few of them.

In fact, I've got my family homes in the Upper Peninsula and there's a couple groups up there that I always make it a point to go up and play some ukulele with.

It sounds like it does a great job, actually building a community of people that just all kind of come together for that thing.

That's the whole thing about the ukulele to me.

Yeah, yeah. So service, if I say that word. How does music, in your opinion, not just the ukulele, but how does music service people?

Well, music in general and the ukulele in particular, I think, brings folks together. You know, this is a time of a lot of division and to have something that everybody can put this and that aside, get together, make some music.

I call it the most folk of folk instruments because it brings folks together.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

How long have you been a musician? And was ukulele always a part of what you did or.

No, no, no, no, no, no. I was, you know, the typical parents had me play piano, which was fine. I was a teenager.

I'm getting an electric guitar and we had some pretty crazy bands. One that got arrested in the cafeteria here at lcc. That's a whole nother story. But, yeah, I played a lot of weekend warrior bands.

That might be the after show conversation.

That's right. But of course, I was aware of the ukulele. Did get hooked on it after that trip to Hawaii. It was just like, man, this is it.

Everybody's having a great time. They got smiles on their faces. They're all playing together, you know, like the beginning.

People that just picked it up to people that have been playing it for years. And it just captivated me.

Very cool. And you've recorded a couple albums, haven't you?

Yeah, we've got a trio called the Ukulele Kings, and we've recorded one album. We're trying to get another one done, but you know how hard that can be.

And then, of course, for years I was in a band, Mystic Shake, and we had three or four really fun albums, a couple of which had a little ukulele in them, too.

Getting back to the reason you're here is Mighty UK Day. I feel like you're not just creating an event, it's an experience. So tell us, what can people expect from this? What is it all about?

It's all about the people and the ukulele. So what we do is we start off Friday at noon and we have a group strum.

So a group strum is where you get a group of people together and you all play songs together. So that's the way we kick it off. That'll actually be in the Trowbridge Plaza at noon on Friday the 8th.

And then during the afternoon we have workshops, and then we'll have another group strum. And then at evening we'll have a concert featuring three of our featured performers, our teaching artists and performers.

And then Saturday, everything goes totally crazy. We start off with another kickoff strom. We have workshops all day long. We have a lot of kids activities, including the 10 pound fiddles.

Fiddle Scouts is going to be part of Mighty UK Day this year. A lot of free things like beginning lessons and strums and then the workshops, the concert, you know, which you pay for.

And then on Sunday, we have something called the Acoustic Afterglow, which is kind of the time to sit back and let everybody just informally kind of jam together as far as our teaching artists. And there's some incredible collaborations at that. And I just can set up a small PA and just sit back and enjoy it.

Oh, and the other cool thing is too, in the evening after the concerts are over at the Spring Hill Suites Hotel, which is our official hotel there in East Lansing, everybody gets together and plays ukulele until the wee hours of the morning.

Very cool.

It's crazy.

And I heard you mention kids. I heard you mention the performers I heard you mention.

I mean, it sounds like this is pretty much open for anybody and everybody, even if you've never even played the ukulele.

Absolutely, absolutely.

You know, we have packages which include all the workshops and concerts, but we also have a lot of free activities that certainly we encourage donations.

But.

But I like to get people who are just kind of thinking, well, I kind of heard about the ukulele. I don't know if I can play well, you know, and they can come and enjoy it without any commitment, you know, and then I get them hooked. Right?

Yeah, there you go.

You know, you kind of mentioned getting kicked out of the LCC cafeteria, and I really do want to hear that story, but because we're talking about money UK Day. Give me a story. What's one of your favorite Stories about mighty ukules. Ever since you've put it together.

Well, there's so many different ones as far as, you know, just all the incredible artists we've brought in. One thing that really struck me, I mean, here again, I'm deep into the ukulele world. But we had Peter Luongo, who's Canadian. He's the one that.

Actually, I saw him lead a group of, like, a teenage high school choir playing ukuleles. And this festival in Hawaii.

Well, I've had him come and play at Mighty UK Day with an adult group that does very sophisticated arrangements of songs like Toto's Africa and things like that.

Wow.

And people just aren't used to this. They'll go, wow, I didn't know you could do that on an ukulele. It just really opens their eyes to the potential of this little instrument.

Yeah.

Yeah. That is cool. I think probably Uncle Iz, of course, is somebody that you're probably familiar with.

And that's how I became probably, like a fan of it, of the sound.

Yeah.

Because it was just. It became popular. The song did Somewhere over the Rainbow. Yeah, it was really cool.

Yeah. I mean, what happened with that is, you know, the ukulele became kind of a joke.

Tiny Tim, bless his heart, he was a total musical historian, and he did faithful versions of those songs.

Yeah.

But he was a little odd.

And so when Bruda Is did that Somewhere over the Rainbow, which really was totally improvised, it was over the Rainbow, Somewhere over the Rainbow and what a Wonderful World, he didn't really know all the words, but he went in the studio and it was just beautiful. It's so beautiful. Everybody's heard that.

And then soon after that, a young man, Jake Shimabukuro, did a version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps in Central park that went viral, and that really took it to that next level. So the instrument that used to be a joke is now the most popular instrument in the world.

Really? Very cool. A lot of the times, anything like this requires volunteers. Am I correct?

Yes.

Yeah, I've heard that.

Yes.

So are you still looking for volunteers at this point?

Right now, we don't really need volunteers. We've got a good group, the PD Strummers senior group that I run, about 35 people strong. We get a lot of volunteers from them and others.

And I've got a good core group, of course, which we all need when we're organizing things like that. But I would ask people, just come out and see what the ukulele is all about.

Okay.

So what if they weren't able to attend? Is there other ways they could support what you're doing?

Yes. They could go to themightyukeday.com website, look for the Music is the foundation page.

And we have ways for them to chip in online if they'd like to. And.

And all the money from Music as a Foundation goes not only to support Mighty UK Day, proceeds from Mighty UK Day help support Music as a foundation, but then those funds go to establishing ukulele programs in local schools, in libraries, senior centers. We've sponsored over 40 programs with music as the foundation. Yep.

Do you want to elaborate any more on that?

We had some extra money left over, and we thought, well, what are we going to do with this?

And a friend of mine, Larry Cooley, and I thought, well, why don't we start a nonprofit that helps support ukulele programs in schools, libraries, things like that. So we started this small nonprofit. It's grown little by little.

And like I said, over the years, we've done programs in schools, libraries, senior centers. We've supported musical theater programs in the summer. Anything music related, music education related, we like to support.

The beauty of it is, I mean, if you expose a child to like music early on in life, it can kind of change their trajectory as to where they're going in life.

Absolutely can. And it's such a shame that music programs are sometimes the first things to get cut from budgets of schools.

But, you know, if you're kind of at risk, kid, maybe kind of, you know, right on the border there of dropping out or getting kicked out or whatever, music is something that can really make you want to stick with it.

Right, right.

And it can give you that sense of confidence, a sense of achievement, sense of pride. You know, your. Your buddies are like, hey, that was pretty cool. You're up there playing the ukulele.

And then what I love with the kids is peer to peer teaching. He's learned three or four chords. He can teach the kid next to him that's just learned.

Yeah, yeah.

And then combine that with intergenerational learning with the adults.

It was a bonding experience.

Yeah, it really is.

Yeah, it really is.

You know, since we're on the topic of kids, you know, like, as far as them attending Mighty UK Day, have you got any stories to share where you went, oh, wow, this is fun.

Here again, I think the absolute wonder of it all, like, a lot of the kids maybe over Covid. They started learning the ukulele online and they've never really played so much with other people.

Yeah, you know, there's a lot of YouTube stuff out there. Some great. Some is like. Yeah, but so they get in a group and they see all these people playing ukulele together. It's like, oh, this is really cool.

And they just jump right in and they can sit with, you know, like their grandma or something and play. And every year we try to do something a little fun. These last three years, we've had a mascot now.

So the first year we had Frets, the ukulele playing dog, which was a Jack Russell terrier. It wasn't a real dog. No, Just to tell you. And then last year we had Melody the kitten and we had Pete the cat come and represent Melody.

And this year we have Back Beat Bunny, who's a hip hop ukulele player.

Very, very smooth.

Very smooth. So we have custom ukuleles with their image on them and everything, and we sell those to help raise money for the foundation as well.

Well, it sounds like you're really encapsulating the goal of this show, and that's taking compassion, turning it into action. You're doing a great job with that. A lot of people feel intimidated by music, myself included.

So how do you create a welcoming space in this situation?

There's really no pressure, no judgment. You know, the ukulele is an instrument. If you have really no musical background, you can pick it up and learn to play a chord or two fairly quickly.

Like I said, you can take it as far as you want. Some of the most incredible musicians I've ever seen are ukulele players. There's not much of a steep learning curve to get started on it.

The instrument itself is quite accessible. It's small, easy to carry around. You can get a decent ukulele for a relatively low price. Eighty, eighty bucks or so.

And it's easy to play, easy to carry around, easy to get started with. And you play with other people. I think that's.

Oh, there it is. I did bring it. I brought mine. So I've had this for quite a while. A good friend of mine gave it to me and it's just kind of hung on my wall.

And kind of like I was telling you, I feel intimidated by playing any instrument because I love music so much. I want to inherently just be able to do it, and I don't seem.

To be able to.

You're going to try to teach me to do the ukulele?

Okay.

The ukulele Ukulele. The ukulele. All right. You ready to teach me how to do this?

Of course.

Because I have no clue. Okay. You got, like, a big old. You. You.

This is a Kamako ukulele. It's made in Hawaii, and it's pretty. It's made out of koa wood, which is a native wood to. To Hawaii. And this costs about $2,000.

Wow.

Yeah.

I don't imagine mine cost that much.

No, it doesn't. Even though it says Diamond Head on it, which, of course, is a famous band.

Yeah.

Hawaiian.

All right, what do we got?

So. So the strings. So we have four strings, and from our head to our toes is G, C, E, and then the up string. A bad joke, but good children eat apples.

That's a good way to remember it.

Good children eat apples.

Yes. So if you want to play the first chord to play, you can play with just one finger on the strings.

So if we take the string closest to our feet, which is. What string was that again?

A.

Okay. And if we take our left hand, we count up 1, 2, 3, and get our ring finger right by the third fret on that A string, you should have that note.

That's a C note. So if you strum across all the strings, we can play a song. This is a song.

Now, you traditionally strum with your thumb, correct?

I strum with my index finger. But most people look at you. You've been sandbagging on me here. So here's a great song I wrote. I don't know if you've ever heard it before.

It goes like this. Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream. Big finish.

There you go.

You know, I have heard that you can't really play ukulele without smiling, and that is true. I was smiling through that whole thing. I was smiling.

You were? It showed. Even through on the podcast. It did.

All right, we got a little time left, so let's revisit the LCC story. What happened?

Well, I mean, for you to get.

Kicked out of the cafeteria.

No, we got arrested. Oh, you got arrested? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So what happened was my buddy Eugene Hayhoe and I, we had a group called Utter Chaos.

That's U, D, D, E, R. And, you know, we were a little mischievous back in the day, and we thought, well, what if we went in the cafeteria and played, quote, music, unquote? So we decided we put posters up all around the Gannon Building and said, utter chaos. Live in the cafeteria at noon.

So we brought in an accordion and a trombone, neither of which we knew how to play. Eugene, this was the day of platform shoes, you know, the disco era.

So Eugene, he made his own platform shoes with some two by fours nailed to his tennis shoes. And we got up and we played. It was amazing. So we walked in the cafeteria. We had a whole bunch of friends there.

And there were also six Lansing policemen there. And they said, are you utter chaos? And we go, yes sir. Well, if you play, we're going to have to arrest you for disturbing the peace.

Really?

Yeah. So he said, oh. So of course we played and we played. We did Smoke on the water in animal sounds, you know, like.

But they let you play like.

Well, they didn't arrest us right then.

Okay.

And then we played Sweet Jane, the Lou Reed song.

Okay.

And then they arrested us. Now they didn't handcuff us or anything, but they brought us downtown and to the police station. We had to fill out all this stuff.

And then it became a cause celeb of the LCC lookout. We were in the paper like all the time. And then it got picked up by the college newspaper press. So it kind of spread around the country.

And then we had to go to court. So we had a list of about 20 witnesses that said we weren't disturbing the peace, that, that we are contributing to the cultural.

Cultural vibe of the cows.

That's right. That's right. So they set a court date and every time it would get canceled.

And finally after about three or four times, it became kind of a part time job for our friends because they'd all get gas mileage for coming to court. But finally the court date arrived. We get in front of Judge Giddings, which this was kind of early on in his career here.

And LCC presented their case, we presented ours.

We had Zoltan Ferency as our attorney and Judge Giddings looked it all over and goes, you know, as a judge here, I have a lot of really important cases that I have to decide and this is not one of them.

And he dismissed it.

Dismissed it.

So basically you were punished through a lot of paperwork and time.

It was a lot of fun actually.

Did you do it again?

No, we didn't. How are you going to top that?

Right, right. Is there anything we didn't hit on that you absolutely would want to talk about before we go?

Well, one of the things you had asked before is if you were going to describe Mighty Yukte, one word you could use. And my word is aloha. Aloha. Yeah. And aloha is this whole feeling of love and togetherness and peace.

And I think that's what the ukulele really encompasses.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Saying hello and goodbye. Right.

And it means hello and goodbye as well. Yeah.

If you want to get more information, MightyUkenDay.com is where you want to go. It's going to be taking place May 8th through the 10th. Various locations, but primary at the University United Methodist Church.

And I do have one more question I almost forgot because it's been so long since I've actually done this show. If you had the ability to strum a chord and put one thought into the collective consciousness of the entire human race.

Wow. No pressure.

What would it be?

I would say peace on earth.

All right, strum that chord. Peace on earth is always a good thing, isn't it?

More than ever. All right, Ben.

Aloha.

Aloha.

Thank you so much for listening to Shining Stars, Voices of service, hope and Change. If you'd like to recommend an organization or an individual to be featured on this program, I'd love to hear about it. Please let me know.

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You can listen to this episode of Shining Stars along with other programs featured on the LCC connect network@lccconnect.com thanks so much for listening and sharing your time with me today. I'm Dalian and remember, we can all contribute something good to this world. A simple smile, a kind gesture.

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It's time for Stars.

On Sports, a podcast radio show dedicated to sharing stories about our athletic program at lcc. Past and present.

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Will introduce you to individuals that have contributed to our program's success and give you the backstory on what it takes to develop it.

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I'll have a real good time. Hello and welcome to another episode of Stars on Sports.

I'm joined today in our air conditioned studio with Steven Cutter and our producer Dadalion Lowry.

And gentlemen, I joke about air conditioning but I just came from our office space and it's, it's really hot up there today for some reason mainly because the air condition from the gym is not moving up to.

We need to balance that out because it gets really cold down here. Yeah, it's the basement of the TLC building and there's a lot of electronic equipment so they keep it pretty cool down here.

And I forget I get in here in a short sleeve shirt and after a while I'm kind of see I.

Wear a pullover every day because normally our office space is cool because we do get the air conditioning from the gym that blows up into our office but for some reason it's not staying as cool. Which leads us to our topic today because it just seems like over the last week all I've dealt with is is it too hot?

And so my premise is, are we getting too soft in sports or have we just misunderstood what toughness really means? And I'm glad we got Coach Cutter here today, because a lot of it has to do with mental health.

But we've also learned a lot over the last 25 years of what really is toughness in sports. And, you know, it used to be suck it up or, you know, play through an injury.

And, you know, some of the biggest memories in sports are, you know, Kobe Bryant playing with a torn Achilles or Michael Jordan in a flu game. But that's not everybody. And there's a story for everybody.

And I think that's one of the biggest premises of toughness, is knowing your student athletes. And also, science has helped us a lot, too.

You know, we have lightning policies, we have heat indexes, because there have been far too many heat illnesses and heat deaths in our country, which are all preventable with the right resources available. And I've experienced.

I remember one time we played a soccer game on a Saturday and it was really hot, and we kept checking the heat index, and we had a kid that we had to get an ice bath real quickly because his body didn't handle the heat like the other 45 kids there. It was scary, you know, but he's not weak or, you know, we weren't being too tough to play that day because we were monitoring and following the.

The policy. But being under a lot of scrutiny, being that old school mentality. Are we getting too soft, Coach Cutter?

Absolutely.

I think in general, and when I speak in general, I'm not talking about everybody, because certainly there are the situations where you're dealing with extreme temperatures, whether they're extremely hot or extremely cold, that you have to be very, very cautious. And we're talking about individuals because everybody is going to be a little bit different whether it comes to cold or the hot. But when we're.

We're talking about mental toughness. I think of a story that I just heard recently, and it was about this gentleman who took a flight to spend a week in Alaska.

And on his flight, he left his home, packed his bags, and he was going to spend 30 days in Alaska, very remote area, and he was going to live off the land. He said on his flight that it was really cramped and they were playing the same old movies that they always play on those flights.

He said it was a little bit hot on there. The air wasn't, you know, what he was normally accustomed to.

And he said when he finally got to Alaska and He spent that 30 days there he was stripped of all the modern conveniences that he had. And this is a gentleman that is.

His name's Michael Easter and he created Substack and he's, he's not some high performing former military, you know, person. He's an average Joe that is worked himself into high achievement in life. And he spent those 30 days there and everything was taken away.

And he said when he got on that flight to go home, he appreciated how comfortable the seat was and the climate cooled air that was being blown into the cabin and how much he appreciated the ability to have a screen and see something else besides nature. And so the point of that story is most of our things when we talk about mental toughness are because of perspective.

When we feel it's too hot, we think about people that are acclimated to the south, they're used to it. But when southern people come to a northern climate and experience 40 degrees in March, they're not liking that at all.

Well, we're used to the cold weather all the time.

A 40 degree day in March, we typically have short sleeves on and you'll see people in shorts because that's relatively warm for what we've experienced.

So most, most of it, when we talk about it, whether it's in our program or anything else, we talk about perspective and that that's a big piece of it.

Yeah. And very interesting actually in a different direction than I thought we would head because I was worried more about defining soft.

But you know, just being acclimated to those clients and that comes down to preparation and practice. You know, I was watching the College World Series championship game and the pitcher was undefeated all year and didn't have his best outing.

And part of me wondered it was the hottest day of the year if the sun impacted him. And I don't know this, no one talked about it because every player was out there in the same weather. But about acclimizing and also about preparing.

You know, I know coaches that if they're going to play in the heat or I know you do toward the end of the season, you sometimes play two games at different times. You practice at those times and help you.

It's a huge thing because even like in our baseball and softball programs, we're going south during the super cold season where we're at.

So if we're able to get outside, maybe we don't have a lot of snow and we're able to get outside, we're still practicing in 30 some degree weather typically.

And then all of a sudden we go on Our spring trips, which baseball and softball do, and we go on those spring trips and we're playing in 75 degree weather typically or sometimes hotter. Well, those student athletes are not acclimated whatsoever to those temperatures.

And that's where like our nutritionist has done a great job of making sure that she stacks certain things that they need to make sure they're having and taking that they haven't taken in months or even thought about. So that when you, when you speak about acclimation or I speak about just perspective, those are really similar things.

Not to dive too far into the weeds, but I want to know a little bit about what does she recommend?

Things like tart cherry juice, liquid iv, that kind of stuff. Because a lot of times you're sweating. Not in your lifetime, but I'm talking in months.

Yeah, you're just not used to it.

And so you can get declared dehydrated. You don't recover very well because you're just not prepared.

Things come into like cramping, stuff like that, you know, all these things that you just weren't used to when it was colder.

Interesting. Yeah, sorry, I didn't want to do. I just.

I'm not writing anything down. So I got to remember. But perspective is part of it too. I mean, look at us.

Even with 30 degree weather at the beginning of the season, we think 30 degrees, this is too cold. By the end, we're saying we're playing in this because we got acclimated to it.

But to her point, resources have helped out even to your person that went to Alaska of liquid iv, the protein bar, the gel caps. Although there are more weather specific that help with the heat and the weather that we deal with. But injuries are included in there.

And one of the things I learned from you in our discussions is when you think you're spent, your mind's only at its 40% capacity, that you still have more to go. And I think that is one of the most telling things about being soft or not is to the point. I mean that's a great example.

On the way there, he was complaining. On the way home, he's appreciated because his mind realized that there is more there. And I think that's something coaches have to learn.

And how student are you hurt or.

That just so there's plenty of studies out there that also talk about that. We. Everybody knows what is pretty solid for you. Everybody understands that taking the steps versus the elevator is better for you.

But we kind of, we kind of move away from that. Everybody knows that, you know, you Don't. You don't have to park in the front row. Park, you know, a ways out and get, you know, an extra 50 steps.

Everybody understands that's better for you, but we tend to shift away from that. And that's why you only see when they do these studies that it's right around 2 to 5% actually take the steps versus the elevator.

That is such a small number, but yet everybody knows that it's better for you.

So that's kind of where the mentally weak or the mental toughness or the softness that you speak about, that's the stuff that is the real piece of it. We do know about it. We do know what it takes. We do know what we're supposed to do, but we don't always do that.

But our society, and it has impacted sports, has moved into convenience. Even. Like, I laugh and get mad at people come to a sporting event and they get mad when there's not enough parking or they have to park far away.

And you're at an athletic event. Walking should be a part of that. And, you know, my family gets mad. I do like actually parking far away.

You would blame it on my parking, I'm sure, but I like it. Any way I can add steps to my daily routine?

You actually hit on two things that I did yesterday. So yesterday I went to the elevator and I went, you know what? I'm gonna take the stairs today.

So I took the stairs, but then I went to go buy a card for a friend and I went, well, I could go to Meijer. If I go to Meijer, I gotta walk all the way up and, you know, I gotta park somewhere.

So I ended up at the family dollar because I was lazy enough that I didn't want to go do that.

And that's our society. And I joke one of my. It's not my favorite movie, but when I talk about what our future holds, I tell people the movie Waldo.

Have you guys seen the movie Waldo? It's where Earth. He's a robot that, like, cleans Earth. Oh, Wall E. Wall E. Wall E. My bad. Wall E. Exactly.

And the Earth is trash that we built this base station and everyone lived on the space station, but they're all on, like, rafts. They don't even walk, so they're obese. And robots bring them everything.

And I just think, man, that's what our future is going to look like because of the things we talk about. It's that fine line of, you know, even as a parent, being too tough on your kids, yet trying to Help them get to a standard of grow and develop.

And I truly believe sports is, you know, we talk about it being a microcosm of society, but in this point particularly, it really is scrutinized. And we probably have been on the side of being too tough, but not swinging that pendulum where we become too soft and doing the research.

It's about defining toughness. And, you know, is it. You know, we think about, is it pretending you're okay when you're not? Is that being tough?

And, like, even being sick, you know, I don't like taking sick days, so I come to work when sick. And I think Covid taught it that, you know, you should stay home if you're sick or something. Even student athletes, we expect them there every day.

But it's toughness. More about showing up consistently, even on the hard days. It's about being coachable. It's about being accountable.

It's about self awareness and the courage keep going.

I think the other thing that I've learned is some of the toughness is actually being able to admit when you are.

And I think that biggest thing. It's okay. Yeah. That we. I agree.

I think that the biggest thing, actually, that we've learned to understand that we are vulnerable, we can get hurt, and that it is okay to say, I think the new definition of yeah. That you are not okay. And we've had athletes do that in the past. Kevin Love in the NBA, Simone Biles in the Olympics.

Taking it off because their mental health, because to perform at the highest level, as we talked about, it takes a lot of things coming together. Luck, not being hurt, having skill, the opponent. But it's also being in the right frame of mind or.

One of my favorite things, and learned it through Covid, when there, you know, a lot of anxious things going on, is it's hard to take care of others when you don't take care of yourself. And, like, if you're anxious or dealing with something, then if something else happens, you can't help them.

That you got to be in a good mindset to be able as leader, to help somebody else out. And I think that's very important as a coaching staff.

Yeah. Whole oxygen mask on a plane analogy there.

Yeah. Or, you know, like, you know, there was a small timeline where I was, like, anxious to fly. And on our flight, we had, like, a medical emergency.

And I pride myself in, like, stepping up when things go wrong. That's my job every day. But at that time, I was anxious about flying, that I couldn't. I was Worried about me. I couldn't help them.

And I've worked hard to get over that. You know, read some good books and now I don't mind flying, that I would be able to help that person on the flight.

And again, I don't think that applies to the coaches too much, but coaches have to understand that. And. And, you know, I don't like the word old school. I mean, that's used pretty prevalent in our business.

I think there's some gender biases in our business. Of what? You know, back to your point of it. Is it easy for males to say that they can be okay or not okay? And it should be for everybody.

It's, again, it's an individual thing, but it's a tough thing. I mean, even back to, you know, having camp this week and should we take breaks and it's a fine line and there's research.

I mean, we have a heat index that we can follow. Like if the temperature this much, the humidity this much, we need to stop or.

It's tough, though, because even the heat indexes don't apply to everybody. They affect people differently. So it's one of those tough things I also think about when you're talking about sports. I think if you're.

We speak in phrases like raising children, if you want to raise children that are resilient, you're going to put them in sports because sports will teach them what resiliency looks like. Things are typically not always going to go their way.

They're not going to, you know, make every shot or maybe get the playing time that they always want to get. And so the resiliency is built in there. And of course, in life you need to have a lot of resiliency. And.

And so the same thing goes for the mental toughness. It's one of those things that if you want to build mentally tough people, you have to work on things.

You can't just pave the road for somebody that you're trying to teach. They're not going to get the adversity and they're not going to gain the edge of being mentally tough.

Yeah. And I think the other phrase that gets used a lot as a parent or as a coach is tough love. And what that definition.

And again, a fine line I probably used mostly with adversity or an injury, which again, we experience regularly.

I always joke that the trainer is in a tough position, athletic trainer in our business, because you got a player hurt and you got a team that needs that player probably back as soon as possible. What's best for the team and what's best for the player and balancing that.

And even the person hurt really doesn't know if they, unless they've hurt themselves before, like how much they can push it or how hurt they really are.

And, you know, you go to certain doctors and they, you know, prescribe breasts right away if they don't, you know, aren't specific sports injury specialists.

But, you know, that competition factor brings a lot into it because of trying to get back to compete or being part of a team and fulfilling your role in that team. And it's always been frowned upon if you missed or if you were sat out as an injury or if you got sick.

I think Covid actually helped bring us a long way in a lot of those things.

But defining tough love as a coach, I think has become more difficult and again, gets you labeled as a new old school coach or a new coach that I don't even have the definition. And I've been in this business a long time. So most of my career was with the tough love and fight through the injury or kind of a thing.

So it's a change in mindset, as you mentioned, of practicing, of finding resources to help you overcome it and get through it. And to my point, of redefining what toughness is, because, I mean, again, it was funny. Your first example, when I said, are we getting too soft?

You were right on it right away, thinking, we are.

In my notes, I. I had to pull it up. But a gentleman by the name of G. Michael Hopf. I've heard Tony Robbins say it a lot, but it wasn't his.

His quote, it says, hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. So it's a cycle. And it starts with I. I really have two stories.

Pretty quickly, you're good. It's a cycle of us as parents that want to make things easier for the next generation than what it was for us.

And by making it easier, you create weak. I also think about when I was at the high school level in coaching high school baseball.

I had a teacher that had been there for over like 25 years, and she was really involved in athletics. And I remember speaking to her a ton during our first season.

And she, she was telling me about the kids and we got into this kids these days and you know, all that kind of stuff.

And she was talking about how much things had really changed in the teaching world because of the fact that a lot of times when kids would struggle, when she had started the Kids would get in trouble at home for not putting in the effort to do well with their class or classes. And she said that that parrot. There was almost a paradigm shift at some point where it stopped being their fault and started being her fault.

Yep.

Yeah, I noticed that, too, being in education too. Like. Like when I grew up, if I got in trouble at school, I was more afraid at home what would happen than at the school.

And evolved over time is when a kid got in trouble, they were calling their parent and they were on their way up there as their lawyer because they're afraid of what might go on their record or hurt their future scholarship, that they would come and argue. And there's two things there. And this is. Wow, this is crazy. Where we go. Which is why I enjoy these podcasts. He's. One is accountability, that.

Now I lost my train of thought on both of those issues because I wanted to talk about both at the same time. But that respect for authority to that second issue of change, that. And then the other one was the American dream, where we do want. I'm a parent.

I do want my kid to have better than I do. And that does lead to some softness because we do things for them or we provide resources for them that we don't have.

One of the interesting things I saw in a history class was like, superpowers, how long they last. And it's pretty much the same cycle you just mentioned.

You know, you grow as a country, you fight for what you have, and then you develop a democracy or a government, and then you become affluent, and then you become soft, and then you start. Someone else comes to take your spot, and it starts all over. So it is a full circle. And I think.

And I don't want to get in the definition of defining too soft, but I think we are trending that way, that it is something we have to keep in the forefront, address, and make sure we are handling. And thankfully, we got technology and sports science that really can help navigate us.

I think ultimately it's understanding that there's a cost for the theory of leaving it better than we found it.

Yeah, agreed.

Agree. And that's a good way to end it. So, all right, so we can carry on about softness in the future because we can die.

That went a totally different direction than I thought it was going to go. So let's head to our.

We do have to mention that Greg does not have papers today.

Very impressive.

He came in with an iPad and it went okay.

I was a little worried. I needed to write something down.

No, Longer old school.

There we go. See, I can change. That's a tougher thing. That's not soft.

And I will say I am old school. I still prefer the paper, so I'm.

On board with you. I was worried today about how this was going to good. I thought this might get scrapped, so. Okay. We're in the heart of summer.

We've talked about how hot it's been the last week. So is there anything in the summer that you like, you drink or eat that you don't do the rest of the year?

So watermelon.

Wow. Interesting, man. He surprises me.

Yeah, that kind of threw me off a little bit.

I. I was where he's gonna say pizza again.

But I will not ever eat watermelon.

So I'm not a big watermelon. My kids love watermelon at all. Ate watermelon.

Muskmelon, mini melon. I don't like melon.

I don't mind it. I don't like seeds. I don't. Again, I'm picky in my e. I don't want to have to fight for my food. So if it got seeds in it, then you're fighting.

But my kids live. We have eaten a lot. My wife yesterday. My floor sticky because of all the watermelon we've been eating in the house.

Well, that went a different direction. Dalian.

Nothing's coming to mind right away, but I will say that. But on occasion when the ice cream truck is rolling down the road, I will. I will grab something, so. So an ice cream treat of some sort.

And I agree. I like ice cream. Which rounds.

Yeah. So I'll eat it, like in the winter, but, like, it's different when you got ice cream on a stick.

I guess.

Yeah. I like trying more variety, like an ice cream truck. Like a drumstick or a fudge bar.

Yeah, something.

I wouldn't normally have snow cones because we'll get ice cream all the time at the local ice cream store, but. But I do agree ice cream is significant. And the other one I'm surprised is a slushie. You know, I like summer.

All right.

You know.

Okay.

Yeah. I'm combining the two. So it's a Mountain Dew slushy. I'll do that from time to time.

You drink slushies Cut?

Not at all.

Wow. He is the. Okay, well, next time we're gonna have.

Slushies and we're gonna bring him in. Watermelon, slushie.

So interesting. All right, until next time. Go stars. Stars on Sports is recorded live at the WLNZ Studios.

Engineering and production assistants are provided by Dadalion Lowry, and you can listen to the episode and other episodes of Stars on Sports on demand@lccconnect.com to find more information about our athletic program, visit lccstars.com thanks for listening. Be sure to join us next time. For more Stars on Sports,.

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