You Have To Love It

“You have to love it. Because you can’t fake doing it.” This quote talking about football is from Super Bowl winning football player and former NFL/college football coach, Chris Dalman.

Not many people know who Chris Dalman is because tragically offensive linemen and offensive line coaches are the completely unsung heroes of any halfway good football team. Chris was born in a small town on the Central Coast of California to a very blue- collar family. He went on to become the first man in his family to graduate from college, and not just any college, but Stanford University. He was drafted in the sixth round by the San Francisco 49ers and worked his way to a starting job. He won a Super Bowl in 1994 and then broke his neck during a routine training camp drill in the summer of 2000. He was paralyzed from the neck down for about 30 seconds on the field before regaining feeling in his limbs and he never put on a football helmet again.

Chris Dalman is also my dad. And this very quote and this person and this story shaped me and how I approached my career and who I am in every single way. Because of this, whenever people ask me how I got into football I jokingly say, “I was born on a football field.”

Which... is only half true… I was in fact born in a hospital… but in the middle of football season to Chris Dalman. There’s even an article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel shortly after I was born that quotes my great grandmother saying, “Who knows? Maybe Kate will be the first female linebacker in the NFL.” From the time I was very young, football was the foreground to every meaningful thing in my life and welcomingly so. I was inspired by my father, his story and his love of the sport in such a way that it shaped superpowers in me that have led me to be successful in the football space. I was never forced football; it intrinsically was a love that I had and existed ever presently in the interstitial spaces within me.

Because of that love, it was always easy for me to work hard – that was bare minimum. Because of that love, it was easy for me to be genuine with coaches and players and staff.

Because of that love, it was easy for me to understand that none of this is about me. I was able to graduate college in 3 years, work my way from unpaid intern to the Asst. Director of Football Ops at Stanford by the time I was 24, receive and turn down several NFL jobs and college football jobs, and begin building out the new NIL landscape here at Stanford University as the Director of Operations for our collective before I was 30, all because I simply can’t fake doing it. I love it too much.

And that’s it. That’s the secret sauce. I understand that it’s completely unhelpful to the average person, as I have no idea how you distill a lifetime of inspiration into any meaningfully accurate words. But that’s it, the sauce is loving it in such a way you couldn’t possibly imagine it being taken from you during a routine moment in training camp. You cannot fake doing this work, it’s too hard and too thankless to ever be done well without it being the core of everything you love.

Follow Kate Dalman