The Village

On the value of support and finding those that lift us up

Hey everyone! 👋🏻


Happy Sunday, and welcome back to The Gunn Show. Hope you all had a fantastic week as always.


It was about as good of one as we could’ve hoped for on our end, as Baby Grayson made his long-awaited appearance last evening to make our family a party of 3. 6lbs, 4 oz of complete and total perfection. Mom and little G are doing well, and we are beyond excited to move into this next phase of life with him!

January 18th, 2025 - Welcome home, Grayson!

It’s been a chaotic and fulfilling experience, and as such today’s edition will be a little bit shorter and less fleshed out than usual. Forgive me, but these are thoughts from the hospital after all…


But after hearing from so many people from different walks of our lives over the last 24 hours, I had a few thoughts I wanted to share on concepts of support and community, specifically as it relates to each of us finding our Village.


Let’s jump in.


- CG

The Village

One of my close co-workers here with the Rangers has an old proverb he is fond of reciting: “It takes a village”.


It’s a relatively simple phrase with which I’d guess most of us are familiar - perhaps a bit ‘cliche’ yet nevertheless one I’ve always enjoyed. Because each time I hear it, I can’t help but be struck by how powerful of an insight those 4 short words contain: an insight that speaks to life’s accomplishments, but even more importantly to the necessity of support in reaching them.


A life in sports teaches you pretty quickly about what a village looks like, through the lens of something we call a team: a collection of individuals from different backgrounds and with different experiences, coming together in service of a common vision. Said differently: many, joining to become one.


The longer you are around competitive athletics, the more you come to appreciate the value of a Village. This is because of a deep truth about great moments of success on the field - they are never achieved in isolation. Instead, achievement in the world of sport is always the result of countless contributions from a wide array of people and systems working together.


It is easy to see this idea reflected in team centric sports, where each group is composed of a myriad of players and coaches from unique walks of life. Shifting from single-player to multi-player competition places an increased premium on coordination, and the teams that harness it best tend to reap the lions share of the rewards.


Think about some of the greatest dynasties in the history of sport and you will see that this is true - Saban’s Crimson Tide, Popovich’s Spurs, and Wooden’s Bruins to name a few. While each had great players and great coaches, their hallmark trait was what they did together rather than in isolation. Great runs of success that were defined by their ability to create their own distinct ‘Villages’ in which the power of the collective outweighed that of the individual.


And yet while we don’t often think of athletes competing in individual sports this way, the same concept applies. We tend to romanticize the power of the individual when it comes to single-player sports life golf or tennis, but this line of thinking is naive. Because behind every Masters winner and US Open champion is a slew of people standing behind them - trainers, coaches, nutritionists, publicists and the like. Each has their own Village that they fall back on, whether we see it on the television screen or not.


It follows that regardless of if the name on a leaderboard is a person or a program, sports are always a multi-player game. And villages thus are a defining factor behind success within them.


It should come as no surprise that the phrase “it takes a village” applies just as equally for life itself as it does to sports.


There is a quote from Isaac Newton that I am fond of. In talking about how humans make progress as a species, he said the following: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”. And while he was talking about scientific innovation specifically, I think the core of that quote speaks to what it means to have a Village for each of us.


See, each of us stands on the shoulders of others every day of our lives. In the same way that athletes need people behind them to bring out their best selves, we too need a support system that lifts us to new heights. Friends, family, co-workers and more that help us be something more together than we could be alone. Every one of us needs our own Village.


What that Village looks like will differ from person to person, with each distinct and evolving over time.


We start life with a pre-scripted Village for each of us, an environment into which we are born that serves as our starting foundation. But is a mistake to think that birth is destiny.


The beauty of life is such that as we progress through it, navigating the challenges and experiences that come our way, we are presented with countless opportunities to shape our Villages. New people will immigrate in, old ones will emigrate out. And since the inhabitants will always determine the Village, the structure of each is certain to change along with the people inside it.


Each of us has our closest confidants, the people on whose shoulders which we stand. And yet while I think it is easiest to define this group - and thus each of our Villages - in the singular, I think there is something missing in this viewpoint alone.


That is the following: Villages are not defined so much by their singularity as they are their plurality. Because while each of us ultimately has one that we will call home, there are in fact many others that intersect with it depending on the seasons of life.


We may live at a certain address, but there are many adjacent ones within the same zip code. The teams we play on, the colleges we attend, the cities we move in and out of - each a unique Village with something to provide. And the more we frequent them, the more we come to redefine our own. New experiences lead to new connections, new friends and a subsequent intertwining of our Village with theirs.

Our Villages thus do not exist in isolation so much as they do at an intersection. Between me and you, us and them. And that is what makes them spectacularly beautiful. Because life is about connection - between ideas, experiences, countries and more. But connections between people, most of all.


And so as I sit here and reflect on the past 24 hours, I can only say that I am grateful for the Village that we have. It is moments like these where the power of a Village is felt most of all - through texts and phone calls, well wishes and prayers. We stand on the shoulders of giants, after all. And each of you has played a part.


Our Village gained a new inhabitant today, and I can’t wait for him to go out and build his own.

P.S. - If you are looking for some deeper reading and missed last week’s edition, I’d encourage you to go give Athletic Antifragility a read.


It’s about the value of stress in sports and how challenges serve as a necessary impetus for growth - a particular relevant topic for those of you looking forward to the CFB National Championship between Notre Dame and Ohio State tomorrow night!