"More Good Days Together"

It’s May 1st. In exactly one month, I will turn 48. In that same window, the final horn will blow on my 25th spring lacrosse season, and my daughter, Mckenna, will walk across the stage to graduate high school.

My life is lived in seasons of loud, relentless momentum. As a high school history teacher and a year-round coach, my days are measured in early morning drop-offs, bell schedules, the energy of the classroom, and being a friendly face in Commons 1. They are filled with pre-game speeches, halftime motivation, and the raw emotions that come with every win and loss.

But as I look ahead, I know a profound shift is coming.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and this year’s theme is “More Good Days Together.” It’s a call to reflect on what a “good” day actually looks like, not just for our communities, but for ourselves. It asks us to connect people to the right support at the right time. Sitting down to write this for the Fish Clothing Co. community, I realized something: we can't build more "good" days for the people we lead if we are quietly running on empty ourselves.

I recently read a powerful piece by Lachlan Brown that hit me right in the chest. Brown puts words to a feeling I think so many men, especially those of us in our 40s and 50s who spend our lives leading and coaching, are carrying around alone. He writes about the man who looks fine, functional, and successful from the outside, but carries what Brown calls "the quiet Tuesday evening grief." Every coach knows the feeling of an empty field after a big game. The lights shut off, the equipment is put away, and the silence is suddenly heavy. Brown points out that for many men, that silence hits on a random Tuesday evening at home. It’s that moment when the house has finally settled and exhaustion creeps in. It’s the realization that the life you built, as good as it may be, was largely assembled from other people’s expectations. For decades, many of us have kept our heads down. We became the version of a man, a coach, and a father that our generation told us to be. We executed the plays perfectly, but we never stopped to ask whose playbook we were actually running.

In my history classes, we study how systems are built to support a society. On the field, my players know they can't win a game one-on-eleven. Yet, as men, we rarely apply that same coaching to our own lives. We are taught that stoicism is strength, but after 25 seasons on the sidelines, I’m realizing that hiding isn’t strength; it’s just heavy armor. We fill the Tuesday evening silence with more work because sitting still with our own thoughts feels like a liability. We wear the mask of the competent leader so well that we forget how to take it off. 

If we truly want to answer this month's call for "More Good Days Together," the guys leading the charge finally have to learn how to call a timeout for themselves. We have to be willing to look at our own "playbook" and see if it actually fits who we are today.

At Fish Clothing Co., our motto is #WearYourJourney, but we need to remember that our journey was never meant to be a solitary, silent march. It shouldn't be a weight you carry until your knees buckle. The quiet moments don't have to be heavy if we stop trying to carry the world by ourselves. No matter how you are feeling right now, remember that more good days are possible, help is available, and you are not alone.

Thank you for being here.

Coach Fish

#WearYourJourney #Grateful #KeepGoing #Good #MentalHealthMatters