What Ryan Coogler's Football Career Teaches Us About Identity and Excellence

From star athlete to generational film writer

Twenty years ago, Ryan Coogler thought he was destined for the NFL. He was a standout player at St. Mary’s College High School in Berkeley, California. He went on to play wide receiver for Sacramento State University on a scholarship.

Last weekend, he won his first Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for writing the breakout movie Sinners. (Which he also directed and produced.)

When Coogler was in college, he took a creative writing class. He loved it and was encouraged by a professor to pursue the craft. Later in his collegiate football career, it became increasingly clear that the NFL was out of reach. So he pivoted off the athlete track and enrolled at USC’s film school.

He brought football with him.

“A lot of the things I’ve learned, I learned from playing football. You gotta lead a group of people against sometimes insurmountable odds. Every week, you’ve got to prepare for an opponent. You watch game tape. You prep. You get all your players up. But you get out there, you never know what to expect… This is a high-intensity job. You’re responsible for a lot of money. You’re responsible for a lot of people’s livelihoods, and more importantly, you’re responsible for the audience’s dreams and expectations. There’s no way I’d be able to do this job if I hadn’t had the experience I have from playing organized sports. I’d be a different person,” says Coogler.

That transition—from wide receiver to film school—marked the genesis of Coogler becoming one of the most celebrated directors of his generation. He never would have gotten there if he hadn’t given himself permission to change paths.

Building an Identity House

A trap that everyone faces at some point in their life is when their identity gets tied to one thing. You become the athlete. The writer. The chef. The entrepreneur. The doctor. Researchers call this identity foreclosure.

“[Football] was life, it was how I self-identified, how I saw the world and for me it was my ticket out of my hometown,” Coogler says. “It was a dream of mine to get a full ride, full scholarship, and I ended up doing that and I loved it.”

The tragedy of identity foreclosure is that it shrinks the imagination of your own future. It ties you so closely to one path that it keeps other opportunities, interests, and passions at bay. Because you are so locked in on one thing, you can’t even imagine, let alone explore, others.

In The Way of Excellence, I discuss identity in terms of a house: If you live in a house with only one room and it floods, then you will be forced to move out of the house altogether. It’s an utterly disorienting experience.

But if you live in a house with multiple rooms and one room floods, you can seek refuge in the others while you repair the damage.

The goal is to build an identity house with more than one room, because you never know when you’ll need to find strength and stability in others.

There’s a saying that athletes die twice: when they actually die, and when they retire from their sport. I can only imagine how painful it was when Coogler’s talent for football reached its limit. But perhaps the blow was softened, even if only just a bit, because he had another room in his identity house: creative writer. He didn’t have to move out of the house altogether. He walked down the hall and began pouring his time and energy into a different room.

Still, it wasn’t easy. One of his former teammates, Brett Shelton, can recall the conversation he had with Coogler about going to film school. “You could tell he was nervous,” Shelton recalls."That was a big leap of faith for him. That was a time when I knew he was serious. I have never really seen him fail at much. We have setbacks, but the guy is a worker."

Fit then Grit

Research shows that a diverse sense of self leads to greater long-term success. Athletes who play multiple sports before specializing are more successful than those who specialize too early. A study published in Nature Communications examined the career trajectories of artists, film directors, and scientists. Those who explored many interests had higher rates of breakthroughs than those who confined themselves to a narrow range. In Coogler’s case, he did both sport and art.

The qualities you build and train in a field like sport—discipline, patience, focus, consistency, strength, resilience—are transferable to art, business, medicine, writing, and more. Coogler didn’t leave football behind completely. The young film writer and director who was managing huge projects on tight timelines never stopped using the internal muscles he grew in sport, he just changed fields.

A common myth about excellence is that you have to be all-in on one thing forever. Sometimes that’s how it works. But not always. Many people sample widely and then commit deeply. First you find fit, then you worry about grit.

It’s not an argument for “balance” or being a jack of all trades. It’s an argument for realizing that we can be enigmas, that there is no single cookie-cutter mold. You can be an athlete and an artist. A soft parent and an intense businessperson. A musician and math nerd. A doctor who is also a tattoo artist.

We shouldn’t limit ourselves to a narrow identity. We contain multitudes. When one path closes, others open. Coogler is proof.

The identity house metaphor is one of many ideas I explore in my latest book, The Way of Excellence, an instant New York Times bestseller. It's about what it actually takes to pursue excellence over the long haul: the patience, the pivots, the process that rarely looks like a straight line. If you found this piece resonant, the book was written for you.