Chapter 21: NEVER LIE – ROOKIE: Surviving Your Freshman Year of College Soccer

When you report for your first season, you have several unblemished character traits, and one of them is your credibility. It will behoove you greatly to protect it.

Here’s the thing… when you lie to your coach, you may solve a short-term problem. But if he ever finds out that you lied, your credibility is annihilated. And the chances of him finding out are excellent, even if he never actually tells you that he found out. Remember that you’ll be living in a bubble, and word travels through that bubble with breakneck speed, particularly when a student-athlete is involved. For whatever reason, people love telling coaches about their misbehaving players.

Incidentally, word doesn’t necessarily need to make it back to your coach for him to know that you’re lying. Despite what you think, your coaches aren’t idiots. They were once college students themselves and, as hard as this might be for you to believe, they still have pretty clear memories of those days. They know the types of situations you can get yourself into and they know the lies you might tell to save yourself. Most of the time they’ll see right through your BS.

When you’re sitting in the coach’s office and the conversation is a tense one, I beg of you to tell the truth. At some point during that conversation, your coach is going to ask you a question about a possible indiscretion that you were a part of or aware of. Believe me when I tell you that he almost certainly knows the answer before he poses the question. He’s just testing you. And if you fail that test once, you’ve failed it forever.

Since the day you were brought into this world your parents have been tell- ing you not to lie. That’s not by accident. They understand that the short-term consequence of telling the truth outweighs the long-term consequence of lying. You should take their advice.

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