Every summer we like to have a consistent message for our summer camps. A message that the players can take with them and implement into their lives outside of basketball. We love teaching basketball, but basketball is also a great outlet to teach kids life lessons. 

This year’s message is to “be a coffee bean”. The story of the coffee bean comes from writers Damon West and Jon Gordon.  The story of the coffee bean is a story about life and how life can get extremely hard sometimes. In this world we can be 3 things, a carrot, an egg, or a coffee bean. 

Imagine a pot of boiling water. The pot of boiling water represents life and all the pressures that come with it. Pressures in life could be relationships, a job, school, athletics, family, etc. Most of the time you cannot control the environment that you are put into. 

The first thing we can be in life is a carrot.  When you put a carrot in a pot of boiling water, the carrot becomes soft and weak. A carrot will give up easily and will be impacted by the condition it was in. The carrot was changed by its environment. 

The second thing we can be in life is an egg. When you put an egg in boiling water, the water causes the egg to harden on the inside . Like the egg, people who keep everything inside, become angry, mean, negative, and numb to their environment. One of the worst things we can do is keep negative energy inside. This will cause our hearts to harden and hate life and the people around us. 

The Third thing we can be in life is a coffee bean.  When you put a coffee bean in boiling water…..it makes coffee. The environment did not change the coffee bean, but the coffee bean changed the environment. As a coffee bean you do not allow the outside world to impact you, instead you impact the outside world.  Sometimes we cannot control our environment or the situations we are put into. What we can control is the type of energy that we put into the world and that energy can be positive or negative. As coffee beans, the thought of “ This is the environment I was put into, how can I make it better?” should always be in our heads.  And if you are acting as a coffee bean, spreading positive energy to the world and looking at how you can change the environment you were placed in, other coffee beans will gravitate towards you. 

When it boils down to it (pun intended) we have two options. We can let our environment change us and make us soft or hard boiled or we can change the environment around us for the better.