Find Your Groundswell

Daily Letter · Mindset Operating System · 8:42 PM

TRIVIA | Lacrosse & Legacy

Start here. Answer at the bottom.

In 1956 a former Princeton lacrosse player did something nobody had done before in the Hudson River Valley. He walked into a public high school in Westchester County, New York, and started a lacrosse program from nothing. Not a private school. Not a prep school with a hundred years of tradition behind it. A public high school in a small town. He spent decades as its coach, its mentor, its benefactor, and its father figure. In 1994 he was inducted as a charter member of the Hudson Valley Lacrosse Hall of Fame. In 1998 the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame inducted him in Baltimore. The athletic field at that school still bears his name today. Who is he, and what school did he build?

FIELD REPORT | The Groundswell

Nobody is going to hand you the groundswell.

That is the honest truth about self-motivation, and it is the biggest variable in athletic development at every level. Not talent. Not access. Not the right program or the right system. The groundswell. That internal current that gets you moving before anyone asks you to.

Finding a way to play hoops. Setting a running goal or a sprint target. Doing 300-yard shuttles in the heat of a July afternoon with nobody watching and nobody counting. Getting a stick in your hands on a Tuesday when there is no practice, no game, and no audience.

That is where it starts.

The showcases will be there when you are ready. The high school programs, the college systems, they will all present themselves when the time comes. They will offer structure, competition, and frameworks worth stepping into. But they cannot create the groundswell for you. They can only channel it once it already exists.

The training you do alone, the sessions where you have to manufacture your own resistance, where the workout gets hard and nobody notices whether you push through it or quietly reduce the effort, that is the true key. Not because suffering is noble. Because the athlete who has learned to struggle productively on their own terms has built something that every system they enter will immediately recognize and reward.

A few things worth doing this week regardless of where you are in the process:

Find a wall and throw. Find a court and run. Find a hill and sprint it until the sprint becomes a habit instead of an event. Walk to the driving range and hit a hundred balls with intention rather than motion. Move through your space like the field is everywhere, because it is.

The system will find you when you are ready. Build the groundswell first.

MINDSET OS | 95% Without The Ball

Here is something worth sitting with.

Ninety-five percent of the game of lacrosse is played without the ball.

Read that again, not as a statistic but as a philosophy. You are on the field for the entirety of every possession, every defensive sequence, every transition, every shift — and the ball is in your hands for a fraction of it. Which means ninety-five percent of the game is about what you do when nobody is looking at you directly. How you move. Where you go. What you create for the person who does have the ball. How you respond to what your teammates do.

Want to spot a great team in thirty seconds? Watch what happens when a goalkeeper makes a save. Watch what the defense does when a midfielder clears the ball cleanly and starts a fast break. Watch what the five players without the ball do in the two seconds after the sixth player scores a goal.

Do all five players raise their fists? Are the arms up? Is the celebration immediate, genuine, unrehearsed, the kind that says we are in this together and the short-term mission just got accomplished, or do five players jog back into position as though the goal belonged to someone else?

That reaction, or the absence of it, tells you everything about a team's culture. Everything about the invisible systems running underneath the visible performance.

This is why people want to hire athletes. Not because they played a sport — because the sport taught them that the team's success is the individual's success, and the individual's success is only meaningful in the context of the team. That understanding does not come from a classroom or a leadership seminar. It comes from a thousand moments of playing without the ball and choosing to be fully present in every one of them.

Watch this week's film at the link attached. Watch what happens when a teammate makes a play. Watch the body language. Watch the fists. Watch what it looks like when a team is operating as something greater than the sum of its parts.

Then ask yourself, does your team look like that? Do your people look like that?

More importantly, do you?

Tagging @AJ Haugen @Adam Doneger @Brian Carcaterra and the Johns Hopkins lacrosse community, this one is for you!

📽 Watch:

TRIVIA ANSWER | Lacrosse & Legacy

Charlie Murphy. A Princeton lacrosse player who in 1956 founded the very first public school lacrosse program in the Hudson River Valley at Yorktown High School in Yorktown Heights, New York. He spent decades as its coach, its mentor, and its most devoted advocate — building a program and a culture that produced generations of players who went on to compete at the highest levels of the game. He was inducted into the Hudson Valley Lacrosse Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1994 and into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1998. Charlie Murphy Field at Yorktown High School carries his name today.

He said it himself at his Hall of Fame induction: "If I have contributed to lacrosse and the lives of young people, then my life has been worthwhile."

That is the whole groundswell in one sentence. Someone opened a door in 1956 in a small town in Westchester County, and everything that followed walked through it.

Brian Carcaterra in the video above and numerous other lacrosse players have stemmed from Yorktown, a legendary lacrosse spot in this world!

ON ROTATION | What's Playing

There are places in this world where the air itself seems to carry music differently. Red Rocks is one of them.

This week's listen: Ain't Life Grand | Widespread Panic, Ain't Life Grand (1994)

There is something the Legend of Bagger Vance understood about golf, and about life, that applies directly to an evening at Red Rocks. The authentic swing already exists inside you. The right environment simply gives it permission to emerge.

We had just wrapped a lacrosse event in Denver. A ticket appeared. The plan was simple — go alone, experience Colorado, let the music find you. A past co-worker showed up before the first set. A stranger in the next seat turned out to be the person who helped kick-start lacrosse in Vail, Colorado. Three people with no reason to be in the same row of the same amphitheatre on the same evening, connected inside two hours by the game and the music and whatever invisible current runs between them. The band opened up with Ain’t Life Grand (see song link below).

The lacrosse community and the music community have a way of doing that. Finding each other inside the sounds of the air. Building something real in the space between strangers.

Widespread Panic has played Red Rocks more times than any band in history — over 63 nights on that stage carved into the Colorado mountainside. They built their following the old way. Relentless touring. No two setlists the same. Trusting that the music itself was the only marketing strategy they ever needed. Ain't Life Grand was released September 6, 1994 — recorded at a home studio in Athens, Georgia, the sessions so strong the band used them as the final album rather than going back in. Thirty years later John Bell still opens shows with a mandolin and the title track. Unbothered. Unhurried. Exactly the same as the first time.

Put this on tonight. Let it remind you that the right environment has a way of finding the right people.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kyle Smedley is the founder of Harbor Lane Holdings, building at the intersection of sport, people, and capital.

Career stops include Events.com, Tourmaline Builders, Lombardi Contracting Corporation, and DPR Construction. Today he leads Atticus Lacrosse Company, working alongside Mad Dog Lacrosse and Ravenscroft School, and Harbor Lane Company, operating across real estate, private equity, and talent placement.

Field & Fathom goes out every night at 8:42 PM.

Reach out directly: [email protected]

Until tomorrow,

Kyle Founder · Harbor Lane Holdings · Atticus Lacrosse Company

Field & Fathom · Harbor Lane Holdings · Daily

AI is already handling large parts of execution. That shift is not coming later. It is happening now.

What is left, and becoming more valuable, is the ability to design systems, apply AI thoughtfully, and own outcomes in production. That is the work strong teams expect from senior engineers in 2026.

Gauntlet is built for engineers who want to operate at that level. In a single week, 15 hiring partners conducted 246 interviews with challengers onsite in Austin. Apply now.

Apply to Cohort 6

_{Must be a US citizen to qualify.}