From 1994 to 2004 I was the head men’s and women’s cross country and track & field coach at Northwest University, a 950-student Christian Liberal Arts school in Kirkland, Wash.

In 2001 I learned in the most dramatic and painful way the value and power of failure.

I created the cross country and track & field programs from scratch at Northwest in 1994 after literally asking them if they wanted to start a program. To my shock, despite the fact that my coaching resume totaled 3-years as a high school assistant coach and 1-year as a high school head coach, Northwest said “sure.”

Facilities and budgets were almost non-existent. On my first day I met the newly hired volleyball and soccer coaches. Together we found a storage closet in the gym, pulled all the junk out, salvaged a “desk” of sorts and a ripped up chair from the junk heap by the maintenance shed, and ran a phone line in from somewhere. That was our coaches office.

Also on that first day I declared to them and everyone else I met at Northwest that I was going to win a National Championship there. The response was literally laughter. Like “that’s really funny Bill, but seriously” laughter.

In hindsight it was pretty funny. No budgets, no facilities, no resources, and here is a guy with four years of modest high school coaching experience saying he is going to win Nationals. But I didn’t find the laughter funny at the time. I took it as a challenge. People said it was impossible, but I truly believed it would happen and I set myself to overcome all challenges and disadvantages to make it happen.

Fast forward 8-years to the 2001 Cross Country season.

In 2001 my women’s cross country team won our second consecutive Cascade Conference Championship, which in itself was an almost unbelievable accomplishment. We had a phenomenal season winning most meets, beating NCAA I competition regularly and rolling into the NAIA National Championships in Kenosha, Wisconsin as the unanimously ranked #1 team in the country. As unbelievable as my bold prediction was in 1994, here we were on the cusp of fulfilling my crazy prophecy.

Everything we did that season was with the overriding goal of winning nationals. I posted national rankings on the bulletin board every week. That’s all we talked and thought about. In fact, we barely noticed the season we were having and didn’t celebrate the wins and success we were having all season long. Everything was about winning nationals.

We arrived in Kenosha Wisconsin certain of our victory. The night before the race I gave the most amazing speech. It was about Christian martyrs among other things. It had the team all hyped up, in tears, “motivated”. We were 100% ready. Or so I thought.

The next morning we woke up, drove to the championship course and warmed up as normal. The team was called to the starting line. I ran up the course about 400m to position myself in a key spot to yell encouragement before the race disappeared up a long hill.

The gun fired, the race started, I waited. As the field approached and passed me, just 400m (about 1 minute 20 seconds) into a 5000m race, I knew it was over. It was done. No national championship. My runners were scattered about. We were normally a pack running team, running together near the front of every race. Instead we had a runner in the top 40, then another around 60, and the rest strewn about further back. All of them looked tired and overwhelmed even though the race had just started.

We didn’t just lose the National Championship in 2001. We went from unanimously ranked #1 in the nation, to finishing seventh! It wasn’t just a loss, it was an epic loss. It felt like our guts were ripped out. It was such a colossal failure, it didn’t seem real.

We flew back to Seattle a very sad team. All we had dreamed about was gone. The whole season felt like a waste and it felt like a National Championship would never happen. After all, if we couldn’t win with that team, unanimously ranked #1, how could we ever win? My bold prediction when I started in 1994 wasn’t going to happen. For the next two weeks I was just angry. Not at my team, or anyone really, just stunned and angry and sad and acting like a small child.

Then two weeks after the championship it suddenly hit me that maybe much of it was my fault. Maybe all the pressure of winning nationals wasn’t helpful. Maybe not fully enjoying the season and each other wasn’t the best approach. Maybe focusing on the result, instead of the process was a mistake. Maybe posting the weekly national rankings and drawing attention to things we couldn’t control was short sighted. Maybe making nationals different than any other race hurt us. And maybe giving the most inspirational, emotional, literally “life and death” speech possible the night before the National Championship race was misguided.

So I decided to be a problem solver. I took the things that had contributed to our failure and I reinvented myself before the 2002 season. I changed my perspective on winning. I focused myself and my team on enjoying what we were doing, on celebrating our successes and experiences along the way, on trusting and emphasizing the process, on giving our absolute best and on not worrying about the result.

I never once posted the national rankings. I wouldn’t let anyone, especially anyone outside our team, talk about rankings or nationals anywhere near our team. Our goals for 2002 were to do what we trained to do, the best we could, to do it better every time and to have fun doing it. That was it. It was all about the process and the experience. Nationals was just another race. We never once even mentioned winning nationals in 2002.

And we won the 2002 Women’s Cross Country National Championship. It was awesome!

But winning the 2002 National Championship isn’t the success in this story. The success was losing the 2001 National Championship so spectacularly, then learning, growing, changing and doing things much better going forward.

Losing in 2001 was the best thing that happened in my entire more than 20-year coaching career. If my team had won in 2001, I wouldn’t have changed. I would have focused on the wrong things. I would have continued to operate the way I had in 2001, unaware how miserable and messed up it was. That would have been terrible. By losing, spectacularly, I was given the opportunity to become far better than I ever could have become by winning.

So it is with everyone. Failure, whatever that means, is a given. Every person is a fallible, imperfect human that will fail repeatedly throughout life. There is no way around that. Not only is that a given, it’s a gift. I cannot think of many, if any, things I have learned from my greatest victories. Don’t get me wrong, I love victories…I love winning championships and I strive to be the very best at whatever I do. But I can’t think of many great things I have learned from those successes.

However, from my greatest failures I have learned things that can only be learned from massive failure. Those have been my biggest opportunities to change and grow and become a far better person in all that I am and in all that I do.

When failure hits, many people don’t react well. Just like my own two-week stint of misery and pouting following the 2001 loss, we get self-absorbed, feel bad, maybe look for excuses or blame others, wallow in self-pity, etc. The problem is, many people stay there. They see failure as an end all. They fear failure. They only see it as a completely negative experience. It is something to be avoided. It is something to be embarrassed about. They see it as a reflection of themselves they may not be able to face. So that is what it becomes and nothing more.

However, when failure is viewed as the greatest opportunity to learn and grow, it will be just that. I’m not saying failure is fun. It’s not. I am saying it is essential though. It transforms into the most important moments of your life and an essential part of your story. It becomes the vital road to being more than you ever thought you could be.

I’m saying failure can be your best friend because it can be the greatest transformative force in your entire life. Treat it that way and you both eliminate fear and open up unlimited possibilities for growth and ultimate success.