When the Lights Go Out, Who Are You?

Have you ever been in a school-wide POWER OUTAGE?

That was the reality I woke up to yesterday — South Salem HS completely dark. Unfortunate timing, because it also meant the second-year launch of our Positive Masculinity Club (pizza lunch + discussion format) had to be pushed back a month.

Here’s the conundrum: I had a Prezi show built and ready to roll. Slides, facilitator notes, prompts — everything was loaded. And suddenly the lights go out. No session. No conversation. Just a fully prepped plan sitting on my desktop.

So, what do you do with that?

That’s how we ended up HERE. The school may have gone dark, but I decided to share the spark anyway.

The outage made me think: what happens when the structure breaks down?

When the lights literally go out — or when they go out inside a young man.

We’ve all seen it: the crashouts on the football field, the blackout moments in the heat of competition where passion turns reckless and someone gets hurt. Those are the moments when the score doesn’t matter, when all the coaching in the world seems to vanish, and choices reveal character.

So the question is: when chaos hits, do we panic? Do we posture? Or do we choose curiosity, growth, and integrity — even in the dark?

Coach Prompts

• When structure breaks down in your program, how do your players react?

• Are your team’s “rules” built for when things go smoothly — or for when chaos hits?

• How can you simulate moments of lost control in practice to build resilience?

Player Prompts

• Think about a time something didn’t go as planned in a game or practice — what did you do?

• What version of you shows up when the lights go out?

• Who do you become when nobody’s keeping score?