Thankfulness and the Threads That Hold Us Together

There is a particular kind of gratitude that comes from watching someone carry a piece of what you gave them into their adult life. It is not pride exactly. Pride suggests ownership. This is something quieter. It is the recognition that you were allowed to participate in something larger than yourself.

That is what I felt today, looking through old photos.

Not the thin thankfulness people toss around this time of year. The deep kind that hits you in the chest. The kind that only appears after enough time has passed that patterns become visible.

I am thankful I got to do this.

That is the simplest way to say it. I got to stand in rooms and on courts where young people were becoming who they would be. I got to be present during the years that shaped them. I got to offer something, and some of them took it, and some of what I offered actually mattered.

Not everyone gets that. I did.

The photos span two decades. There is Thai as a boy, holding a racquet that looks a little too big for him. The body has not caught up to the ambition yet, but ambition leaks out anyway in the way his eyes track the ball.

There is a photo from 2006 where he stands among older high-level players, Cory Ann and Tim Neilly, absorbing everything.

There is the picture from Mansfield, Texas, Thai's first professional tournament, standing next to me with that smile kids get when they step into something they have dreamed about for years.

And then there is the photo from the Challenger of Dallas. PK, Diya Menon, and Eric Hadigian standing with Thai. The kid who once watched the older players had become the older player the next generation watched. The lineage made visible in a single frame.

I was there for all of it. That is what strikes me now. I was positioned to be present during the years that turned a kid with an oversized racquet into an NCAA Singles Champion and two-time ACC Scholar-Athlete of the Year. Thai did not just win on the court. He earned his Commerce degree from Virginia, made the ACC All-Academic Team four times, and became only the sixth Cavalier ever to win the NCAA Top 10 Award.

Tennis and education. That was always the deal. The athletic tail must never wag the academic dog. Thai understood that. So did PK.

That phrase did not originate with me. I first encountered it in 1978, inside a football document from my high school coach, Bill Tighe. Coach Tighe was a World War II veteran who coached at Lexington High School for 36 years. He was the oldest active high school football coach in the nation when he retired at 86 in 2010. His motto was family and football. The Boston Globe once said he was as big in Lexington as the Minuteman statue.

I played for him. Wore #86. There is a photo of me in that jersey, taken after my last game playing for Coach Tighe. That photo was taken on Thanksgiving Day, 1978. Forty-six years ago today.

After my playing days ended, I came back. In 1991, I was a volunteer assistant on his freshman coaching staff. I wanted to learn the craft from the inside, to see how he built what he built. Two years later, I wrote my own version of his principles for tennis.

In 2019, I traveled to Massachusetts for his 95th birthday party. I filmed a documentary on him during that trip. I wanted to capture what he meant to the generations of young men he shaped. A few months later, he died of COVID complications.

Coach Tighe made a point of recruiting kids from the METCO program into his football program. My mother was the first METCO coordinator in Concord, one town over. The same current running through different channels in the same community. I did not understand that connection until years later. Lineage does not travel in straight lines. It moves sideways, diagonally, through margins and borrowed documents and coaches who see something in a kid before the kid sees it in himself.

There is PK as a child, holding the Learning Zone Award. And there is PK last weekend, winning a professional doubles title in Austin, walking up to me afterward to bring up a story I told him fifteen years ago. A silly thing about alligators and the midcourt. I had forgotten I ever said it. He had not.

PK carried that story through degrees from Texas A&M and SMU. He carried it into adult life, where tennis and education continued to move together.

That is what I am thankful for. Not that he remembered. But that I was there to say it in the first place. That circumstances arranged themselves in such a way that I could be useful to him at a moment when something I offered could stick.

I did not earn that positioning. Life gave it to me. The same way Coach Tighe gave me something in 1978 without knowing what it would become.

Each face in these photos represents a window of time when I was trusted with something precious. Kano Solomon, one of my earliest students. Tim Neilly walking onto courts where younger kids watched with wide eyes. Cory Ann, who returned to coach beside me after her career took her onto the world stage. Diya and Eric growing into their own lives.

A young person's development. A family's hopes. Years that cannot be recovered once spent. People handed me those years, and I tried to do right by them. I tried to be worthy of the trust.

I am thankful they let me in.

I am thankful for the parents who believed in the process when results were not yet visible. For the early mornings. For the long afternoons. For the conversations that happened in the margins of practice, the ones that sometimes mattered more than anything happening on the court. For the patience they showed when I was still learning how to teach what I knew.

I am thankful I got to build something. Not a business. Not a brand. A lineage. A thread that connects one generation to the next. A WWII veteran who coached until 86 passing something to a kid in a #86 jersey on Thanksgiving Day 1978, who carried it into tennis, who passed it to players now winning professional titles and earning graduate degrees. That thread exists because people trusted each other with time and attention across decades.

And I am thankful that I, too, was shaped. That Coach Tighe handed me words I did not fully understand forty-six years ago, and that those words lived inside me long enough to become something new. I was not the beginning of this. I was a relay station. I received, I transformed, I passed on. That is what coaches do, if they are lucky. That is what people do, if they pay attention.

Lineage is not something you plan. It is something you notice. And today, on Thanksgiving, through a set of old and new photos, I noticed it all over again.

The work mattered. The opportunities I was able to provide made a difference in lives. And I am grateful, deeply grateful, that I was the one who got to provide them.

That is enough. That is more than enough.

If this work aligns with where your organization is heading, I’m open to serious conversations about partnership and collaboration.

Performance Architect | Founder, Communiplasticity Solutions
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