By James Kay
At this point last year, the Hawkeye volleyball team was sitting with an 11-9 record and had just lost seven-straight games against its conference opponents. This year, it sports a 15-5 record and has emerged as one of the elite teams in the Big Ten — with virtually the same team.
It wasn’t until Joshua Medcalf, the author of *\Burn Your Goals, visited the Hawkeyes when the team really started to click.
“We have really focused on [the book’s concepts] all through the preseason,” said senior Jess Janota. “[Medcalf] has really helped us explore what we are capable of as a team.”
One of the concepts that Medcalf discusses in his book is setting mission statements and trying to become a better person each day. The players tinkered with this idea on their own before they got the opportunity to Skype with Medcalf at the beginning of the preseason.
“[Medcalf] has an interesting outlook on life and keeps you accountable,” redshirt sophomore Kasey Reuter said. “He wants you to find your purpose in life and have you apply that to sports rather than having your sole identity be about sports. It’s definitely different from what a lot of teams do.”
Iowa head coach Bond Shymansky first heard about the book from his assistant at the time, Danielle Carlson, two years prior to Medcalf’s visit. Carlson and Shymansky read the book together and began to work with its concepts.
“We bought the book and sort of had a small, nerdy book club for a little bit,” Shymansky said. “We began workshopping on how we could apply it. There are a lot of profound pieces in it that we knew would have really good practical application for where our program was and what our team needed but also for what we believed in as coaches.”
Two years after the impromptu book club, Medcalf came to the Iowa campus to talk to Iowa’s softball team about his experience as an athlete and human being.
The Hawkeye volleyball team got a chance to meet Medcalf and was immediately taken with his story.
“[Medcalf] has led a very different path than the traditional path, and he is very inspiring,” Reuter said. “He has gone through a lot of adversity, so he knows how we are feeling. He’s played Division-1 sports, so he gets what it’s like to be in our shoes.”
After Medcalf’s visit, the team followed his words of advice. Shymansky read excerpts from the book to his team, and the Hawkeyes eventually carried into the preseason.
The team has also bought into a mindset that centers on taking on each challenge day by day instead of thinking about future goals.
“The thing we clearly got distracted by last season was the end goal, whether that’s the scoreboard at the end of the match or figuring out what it takes to go to the NCAA Tournament,” Shymansky said. “All that stuff is future forward, so we are trying to keep our group dialed in and serve each other. The book has really had a positive benefit on our group, and it has been a great challenge for us as well.”