Thought for the Day – Coach Ray Treacy and Taking Care

I contributed the Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Ulster on Friday 21 August.

You can listen here, or read it below:

Coach Ray Treacy and Taking Care

During my summer breaks from university, I returned home to Maine to work as an intern in the sports department of the Bangor Daily News. In a largely rural part of the state, school sports were front-page news. Professional teams were hundreds of miles away, so the achievements of local boys and girls mattered deeply to their communities.

As reporters, we got to know the coaches well. Most were generous enthusiasts who gave countless hours to helping young people grow, not only as athletes but as people.

But there were others. One of the senior writers had a memorable description for them: “the credit-takers.” They seemed to enjoy standing in the reflected glory of talented young athletes just a little too much.

At the same time, I was a student-athlete on a running scholarship at Providence College in Rhode Island. Our cross-country team had won the national collegiate championship, and our coach, Ray Treacy from County Waterford, had every reason to bask in reflected glory himself. He had represented Ireland at the World Cross Country Championships and knew what it meant to compete at the highest level.

Yet Ray was the very opposite of a credit-taker.

Before we headed home for the summer, he handed each of us two calendar pages, with every day’s training written carefully in his own hand. There were long runs, speed sessions and recovery days. The word easy appeared regularly, underlined twice.

Those double lines have stayed with me.

Ray understood something that younger athletes often struggle to learn, especially those striving to compete at the highest level. We rarely need encouragement to push ourselves harder. What we need is someone wise enough to remind us that we have limits, and that respecting those limits is part of becoming stronger.

The scriptural tradition of Sabbath teaches the same lesson. Sabbath was never simply about stopping work. It was about remembering that our value doesn’t rest entirely on our achievements. And it was about remembering that even when we work hard, it’s not right to take credit for the gifts God has given us.

I still think about those two lines beneath the word easy. They remind me that growth comes through rest as well as effort, and that there is a difference between taking credit and taking care.

Image: The 1995 National Collegiate Championship Cross Country Team, Providence College.