Core value #3: Service

By Ryan Maloney, assistant women's volleyball coach

"Perhaps it's no surprise, when kids are trained to think of service as something they are ultimately doing for themselves - that is, for their resumes. Kids want to save the world, a Brown professor told me, but their idea of doing so invariably involves some form of getting to the top." ~ William Deresiewicz

Alaskan life

I was a member of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest for two years. It's a bit like the Peace Corps, two years of full time volunteer service, but you're placed somewhere in the northwestern United States (in my case, Montana for a year and Alaska for a year).

Because there's the word "Jesuit" in the title of the program, I would consistently be asked, "So you're training to become a priest?" No. Not at all, in fact. But the program was founded by the Jesuits in a spirit of service to the most underprivileged parts of the country.

Before I left, people would tell me what a nice person I was... going off to "help poor people," and "make the world a better place." But at our program orientation, a Jesuit priest got up to speak to the group of 150 of us, and I'll never forget the first thing he said:

"You're all in this for yourselves."


Sorry... what was that? I'm doing this for myself? Did you just call me greedy? What happened to the nice boy that was going off to help the poor people?

But he was absolutely right: I was in it for myself. How cool was it that I was getting to go live in these exotic places, meet new people, and travel the country... all at the same time? Actually serving anyone was pretty far down my list of priorities.

And that's simply how most college students and college graduates are trained to think: that we are somehow "above" others, that we earned our way into college, and that we deserve a nice job and a nice salary when we graduate... because we worked hard for it.

We forget the fact that most of us were born into a privileged household where our parents cared for us, read to us, and made sure we had everything we needed to be successful... not to mention often paying for a good chunk of the college experience.

It's a rare college graduate that realizes how much she's been given in life, and now that she's graduated, it's her job to make life better for those who didn't have those things... to work for the justice of others.

As coaches of these college students, we're constantly trying to balance the two mindsets: playing volleyball for personal accolades (playing time, all-conference honors, etc) versus playing for each other, our family. We want all our players to compete for playing time on the court, but when that mindset becomes all-consuming, when it trumps service, it becomes poisonous to the team and especially to the player having those feelings. It's mostly concerning because we don't want any of our girls to think that life is just one big resume-builder, that your life is somehow equated with how much "stuff" you got (money, job titles, personal recognition, etc).

We want them to know that the quality of your life is proportional to how many of your gifts you shared with the world and with how many people benefited from your existence.