Amaker, Alumni Share Experiences of Success, Failure in Sports

A group of Harvard affiliates involved in the Boston sports scene, including Harvard men’s basketball coach Tommy Amaker, discussed their successes and failures in the sports community and offered ways to overcome adversity Wednesday afternoon during a panel discussion held at the Faculty Club.

Amaker was joined by Jon Dienstag ’05, who works as senior manager of concessions and merchandise operations for the Boston Red Sox, and Jessica Gelman ’97, a former Harvard basketball player who serves as vice president of customer marketing and strategy for the New England Patriots. Dienstag is a former Crimson sports editor.

Boston Red Sox senior manager Jon Dienstag '05, New England Patriots Vice President Jessica C. Gelman '97, and Harvard head basketball coach Tommy spoke Wednesday about resilience in athletics at the Harvard Faculty Club. By Manizha Kholmatov

Sponsored by the Office of Career Services, the Bureau of Study Counsel, and the Department of Athletics, the event was moderated by Harvard Bureau of Study Counsel Director Abigail Lipson.

After each panelist shared personal anecdotes of triumphs and obstacles throughout their careers in the sports world and in their personal lives, the speakers fielded questions from the audience, which included student-athletes and other members of the Harvard community.

All three panelists agreed that despite the difficulty of dealing with failure, negative experiences and rejections can help to make success more meaningful and fulfilling.

“It helps to have training in rejection,” Dienstag said. “It doesn’t bother you as much. It motivates you to prove them wrong and do better somewhere else.” Dienstag noted that he had unsuccessfully tried to walk on to the varsity golf team at Harvard, but that the rejection encouraged him to pursue other facets of athletics.

Gelman shared what she believed were some of the biggest lessons she was able to pick up from her time playing basketball at Harvard and how she applied those lessons to her professional career.

“The first [lesson] is confidence,” Gelman said. “Confidence in my own abilities and the ability to teach myself.... The second is resilience; there’s a lot of failure in sport but you can have a lot of impact and make things change. The third is the importance of the team.”

While the panel mostly focused on bouncing back from failure, speakers also talked about recovering from triumphs and the difficulty of dealing with high expectations.

Amaker spoke about how the men’s basketball team worked to manage high expectations this season, as players dealt with the media hype, which surrounded the squad.

“Our leadership was outstanding,” Amaker said. “They did a tremendous job of keeping our guys focused on not believing all the amazing things that people were saying about them. We stayed true to our identities, standards, and goals and that’s all we focused on.”

While many of the ideas shared by the panelists were immediately applicable to the contingent of varsity athletes in attendance, members of the audience believed that anyone at Harvard could learn from the presentation.

“It’s always tough to deal with failure, so learning to deal with and learn from it is really useful,” Chris Willis ’17 said.