I love old movies.

Love them.

Casablanca? Own it.

An Affair to Remember?

Cry every time.

The Way We Were?

Robert Redford as Hubble, swaying on that barstool with his sandy blonde hair....

But one of my all-time favorite movies is the Wizard of Oz. Maybe because I grew up without cable t.v. and it was a treat when the movie played around every holiday. (I also adore the Sound of Music).

I remember the dramatic effect of the movie turning from black and white to color because at the time and being mind-blown. 

Mind. Blown.

I watched the movie again over the Thanksgiving holiday for the first time in years, and at the end of the story, you'll recall that Dorothy yells at the poor old man when his wizard machine goes awry and his gig is up:

“You’re a very bad man!”

And he says to her:

“No, I’m a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard.”

How true that is, for so many of us in so many endeavors. 

I feel this way a lot, and I’m not going to compare this only to fitness, though I think you can see where I’m headed.

You set out to do something (like maybe post three blogs a week...I don't know...) and then at the end of the week, realize that you've posted only twice, you fell short of your workout goal, you didn't follow your budget exactly to the letter. And you think, sometimes, what an awful person you are. 

We set out to do many things in our lives, or at least I hope we do. I hope we find the courage to start new endeavors. And we have high hopes and high expectations, as we should, when we set out on our yellow brick roads. (Might as well run with the analogy now...)

In the process of starting these new endeavors, and yes it might be joining a gym or starting a different nutrition approach, we sometimes fall short of our goals. It doesn’t mean, it never means, that we shouldn’t hold ourselves accountable. But I think it’s important to remember, especially when we are making big, sweeping changes in our lives, that when we do come up just a little bit short, that we are not bad people. 

We are very good people. 

But sometimes we’re very bad wizards. 

Last week a client mentioned to me topic at the forefront of many blogs geared towards mothers, and a quick google search netted this Huffington Post article from 2012.

Mothers avoiding getting in pictures with their kids. Mothers avoiding getting in pictures period.

I stopped for a minute, surprised. 

“Think about it,” she said. “How many pictures do you have of you with your mom?”

This is one of about five pictures I could find of me with my Mom...yes I'm wearing a dress and fishing lure earrings. 

Not many. We just threw a 70th birthday party for my parents in July and I sorted through plenty of pictures. I think Mom is in my college and high school graduation picture...but there's a gap between her wedding day and the next 40 years. 

We had a video camera in high school and I have plenty of footage of Mom running to another room until I swore the camera was off. 

She'd crack the door open. 

“The red blinking light is on!!”

Busted. 

It’s not only mothers who avoid the camera; so many women, and I am absolutely one of them, look at every picture of themselves with nasty critiques of their appearance. 

“I look like a whale.”

“I have 16 chins.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me that my chin hair was so long I could tie it in a knot?” (Seriously people, why didn't you tell me that?)

For the first few years of my Facebook life, there were no photos of me. I imagined people from my past looking at my picture and critiquing all of the things I saw when I looked in the mirror. 

How many photographic moments are we sacrificing to the harsh self-judgement we hammer on ourselves day in and day out? 

Photos and videos are important because they jog our memories. I know my mom and grandmothers were around me a lot as a kid. I know they were at birthday parties and holidays. But knowing that is different than seeing a photo of me sitting on my Dad's lap and remembering that he blew out the candles out with me. 

I don’t have kids. But I have a niece and nephew that I think are pretty awesome. 

As they get older, I’d like them to have evidence that I got down on the floor and played with them. Or that I got in the pool in a sports bra and my brother's gym shorts because I didn't have a bathing suit. I have some very unflattering pictures of myself with the two of them. I see the bad hair, the awful tan line, the sports bra from 1997 that I should probably throw out. But I hope when they look at those pictures years from now that they will remember the fun. 

Looking at photos of yourself without judgment is more than just hard; it is a life-long practice. But allowing yourself to get into pictures so that your family and friends and kids especially can think of you as the fun, loving, kind person that you are is worth the trade off.  

There is an assumption, I think, that it’s only little boys who dream of growing up and playing for their hometown sports teams.

My first hope after watching the 1984 Olympics, was that I would be Mary Lou Retton. As it turns out, I couldn’t do a cartwheel without throwing up.

I was 11 years old here. And I wasn't just wearing the Pittsburgh Pirates hat. I was sure I was going to play third base for them.

My second hope was that I would play for the Pittsburgh Pirates. And the better I got at T-ball and Little League, the more I believed that I would be the first woman to play professional baseball. But in the summer of 1989 my Dad had that first heart-to-heart conversation with me. I wasn’t allowed to play Pony League.

“The bases are further apart,” he said.

“So?”

“The mound is further away,” he said.

“And?”

“And you won’t be able to keep up,” he said. “Boys will get faster and bigger and stronger.”

He wasn’t being cruel. He was being realistic. And it broke my heart. My talent would not be my limiting factor. It was my gender. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't out-work my gender.

So it was all the more important when I tuned in to a Penn State v. Tennessee women’s basketball game one Saturday afternoon in January of 1990. That’s when I saw Coach Pat Summitt for the first time. That’s when I saw the crowd.

That’s when it occurred to me, at the ripe old age of 13, that women’s sports mattered too. Up until that point I'd see the Steelers, the Pirates, the Penguins. Except for the Olympics, I never saw women compete in athletics on a national level.

I never met Pat Summitt. I never set foot on the University of Tennessee campus. And I never wanted to play for her. Really I wanted to play for my hometown Penn State Lady Lions. In the end I turned out to be an average basketball player.

But I was a good softball player. And because of women like Pat Summitt, I played four years on a traveling softball team. Because of women like Pat Summitt, I had the opportunity to play college athletics. I had the opportunity to coach college athletics.

It’s amazing to me how much we can feel affected by the loss of someone we never met. But this morning when I woke up and saw the news, my heart broke a lot. I cried watching the tributes on SportsCenter. (And the fact that the news of Coach Summitt's death dominated SportsCenter says everything we need to know.)

Because I know and recognize now as an adult that the opportunities I have been granted as an athlete and a coach would never have existed if it wasn’t for fierce, strong, brave women like Coach Summitt who paved the way for the rest of us.

For any of us who coach, it is our distinct privilege to be in a position to impact the lives of others. It is both our gift and our burden to carry the responsibility of changing lives for the better. To understand that our words, our body language (the stare from Coach Pat), and our actions have ripple effects far beyond what we will ever know.

No, I didn’t get to grow up to be a Major League baseball player. But I grew up to be a coach. And that’s not an opportunity I would have without the likes of Coach Summitt and those who broke through the gender barriers.

RIP Coach. We never met, but you changed my life.