Lessons From Ohio State Basketball That I Still Use in Business

I played forward for the Ohio State men's basketball team and wore number 34. I have spent a lot more years in business than I ever spent in a gym, but I still catch myself using habits I picked up in Columbus. Here are the ones that have lasted.

Film does not lie

Every college player learns to dread film sessions. You can remember a game one way, and then the tape shows you exactly where you were standing when the ball went past. The lesson is that how something felt and what actually happened are different, and only one of them helps you get better.

In business, the film is the numbers. Monthly results, cash, customer counts, and turnover tell you what happened whether or not anyone wants to hear it. I ask every company Creek Equity owns to review those numbers on a steady rhythm, and I try to read them the way a coach watches film: looking for the habit behind the result, not the excuse.

Everyone matters, including the bench

A college roster has starters, rotation players, and guys who mostly practice. The good programs treat all of them as essential, because practice is where the team gets better, and the scout team is half of practice.

Companies are the same. The people who answer the phones, schedule the trucks, and close out the books every month rarely get the credit, and they are usually the reason a business works. When I visit a company, I spend as much time with them as I do with the leadership team. They tend to know where the problems are first.

Know your role, then play it well

Very few players get to do everything. Most contribute by doing a few things reliably: defending, rebounding, setting a good screen, making the extra pass. Teams win when each person knows their job and does it without being asked.

I think the most common problem in growing companies is a good person in the wrong seat. A great salesperson asked to run operations. A strong operator stuck managing sales. Fixing that is often the highest return decision a new owner can make, and it starts with being honest about what each role requires.

Preparation is the advantage you control

You do not control the other team, the officials, or the crowd. You control how ready you are. The players who lasted were the ones who prepared the same way for a weeknight game in December as they did for a rivalry game.

In business, I cannot control interest rates or what a competitor decides to do. I can control whether we did the work: whether we visited the site, read the contracts, talked to the customers, and wrote the plan down before money moved. Preparation does not guarantee a result. It does make bad surprises rarer.

Short memory, long view

Basketball moves fast. Miss a shot and you are back on defense in four seconds. The players who dwell on the last possession usually lose the next one. At the same time, a season is long, and the teams that improve steadily through February are the ones playing in March.

That combination still guides how I invest. Creek Equity holds companies for the long term, so a bad month is information, not a crisis. We deal with it, learn from it, and keep building toward where the business can be in five or ten years.

I am grateful for those years at Ohio State. I did not know at the time how much of my working life they would shape.