Have a Mentor

There are pictures that mean more after enough time has passed.

This one is of Coach Ernie Peterson and me on a tennis court, with a young lady named Morgan standing between us. At the time, it was just a moment. A court. A visit. A child smiling between two men who had spent a lot of time around tennis. But when I look at it now, I see something else.

I see a line.

Coach Peterson was not just a coach to me. He was a mentor, a friend, and in many ways a surrogate father. In 2003, he was named the U.S. Olympic Committee Developmental Coach of the Year for tennis. By then, he had already spent a full decade pouring himself into me.

So when the award came, I did not have to wonder what kind of developmental coach he was.

I already knew.

I knew it because I had been on the receiving end of it. I knew it because he had never treated development as if it were only about teaching forehands and backhands. He cared about tennis, but tennis was never the whole point. He cared about the person being formed through the game.

That is what stayed with me.

He had lived enough, seen enough, and cared enough to tell me things I could not yet see for myself. Some of those lessons were about the court. Many were not. They were about work, responsibility, money, discipline, family, and the kind of life you build when other people are counting on you.

And while he set a high standard, he himself was never too busy for me.

That may be the part I understand differently now than I did then. Recognition can make people distant. Accomplishment can become a wall. Coach Peterson had every reason to be hard to reach, but he remained close enough to keep shaping people in real time.

One of the things mentors do is shorten the distance between experience and understanding. They do not remove the work. They do not protect us from every mistake. But they can help us avoid paying the full price for lessons someone else already learned the hard way.

That matters because we often think we have time.

Time to figure it out. Time to mature. Time to become more intentional. Time to learn what matters after we’ve stumbled through enough of what doesn’t.

But the young people around us may not have that same time.

They don’t pause their development while we get clearer. They don’t stop forming habits while we decide what kind of coach, parent, teacher, or leader we want to become. The kids standing near us are absorbing standards, patterns, language, priorities, and limits long before we realize they’re watching that closely.

That is why mentorship matters.

It is not only about having someone older around. It is about having someone close enough, honest enough, and invested enough to interrupt your drift before your drift becomes someone else’s environment.

Coach Peterson did that for me.

And in this photo, with Morgan standing between us, I can see the full weight of it. I was not the only one affected by what he poured into me. The young people around me were affected too.

Coach Peterson passed away more than fifteen years ago, but some mornings I wonder if the reason I still wake up early is because some part of me is hoping for one more pre-dawn call.

“Get up, boy. You can’t make no money in the bed.”

Have a mentor.

Not because you’re weak.

Because someone is watching what you build with the time you think you still have.