Of the tens of thousands of student-athletes across America that Stanford coaches watch across 36 varsity sports each recruiting cycle, only about 900 in total are extended the privilege of wearing a Cardinal uniform. 

You will enter one of the proudest traditions in college athletics at a university that has won more NCAA team championships – 136 and counting – than any other school while  graduating 94 percent of its student athletes.  

As members of the 2019 Stanford men’s water polo team who won the 11th national title in program history and used that Stanford training to win an Olympic bronze medal for the U.S. in 2024, we’ve learned the difference between athletes who do well and those who fall short.  

Here are three things that helped us succeed as athletes at Stanford and in life: 

First, accept that in the pursuit of greatness at Stanford, hard work is a requirement for success, but not a guarantee.  

Everything you might dream of in your Stanford career – success, growth, championships and even playing time – demands a level of commitment and sacrifice to yourself, your teammates and your staff that will likely be harder and more intense than anything you’ve ever experienced before. All that work in pursuit of those goals ensures you nothing.  

You might think that your hard work that took you to Stanford makes you deserving, but here as in life, that is not the case.  

The star of his high school team, Dylan arrived at Stanford with expectations that were far from met, barely seeing the pool in his first two seasons despite working his butt off. For his first two seasons, the hardworking and dedicated water polo squad filled with Team USA athletes and All-Americans failed to reach the NCAA tournament, let alone win it. 

For many of us, Stanford is our first experience being a small fish in a big pond. The abruptness of that transition and constant weight of the talent around you can be an immensely difficult reality to accept. In the past, our talent and hard work made us stars, but for many of us at Stanford, that was no longer the case. 

As you head to Palo Alto, know that you will be pushed to work harder than you have ever worked before, and what you discover about yourself will be immensely meaningful. But it won’t guarantee a championship or even a starter position. Whether that discourages or motivates will be entirely up to you.  

Second, realize that most people break down mentally before they do physically, and a core job of your coaches is to train you to think and perform under pressure. 

It’s not hard to measure physical strength. It’s a lot harder to test mental strength, to understand how you’ll perform in the nail-biting final seconds of a game when the eyes of an entire arena are fixed on you.  

Coaches must develop players to perform at their best, especially in high pressure situations. Elite coaches achieve this by ensuring that nothing you face in a game is more intense than what you encounter in practice. If you can’t hold up in practice, you can’t expect to do it when it counts.  

For instance, long before we became NCAA champions and All-Americans, coach Brian Flacks trained Ben from ages 11-18 and went on to lead Stanford men’s water polo in 2022 and the U.S. National Team. He built up our mental toughness. 

Like all Stanford’s elite coaches, Brian values people who are hard-working, intelligent, unafraid to put in extensive time and able to hold themselves accountable.  

He worked to create a competitive environment where we had to prove ourselves every day against the best players on the team – often with his loud voice in our ears – so that by the time we faced the pressure against opponents, we knew how to handle it. After all, if you can’t learn to withstand the sound of one voice pushing you to succeed, how can you withstand thousands of voices of opposing teams’ fans screaming at you to fail? 

Like Nick Saban or Tara vanDerveer, Brian knew how to create an environment that fostered growth, one where players met and learned to exceed limits of what they thought was possible. But as intense as our training got, we knew that he always believed in us, always had our backs and always saw more in us than we saw in ourselves. He worked until eventually, we could see it too.  

If hard work and excellence were easy, everyone would do it. If you embrace the tough love and let it motivate you, you will find an incredible incubator for growth.  

Third, pressure is a privilege; embrace it. 

As in life, there are many ways to take the path of least resistance in sports. We encourage future Stanford athletes to be extra conscious of making decisions to avoid challenges that come with being an elite college athlete.

One prominent example can be found in the NCAA transfer portal. Over the past five years, college athletes now have the flexibility to easily transfer to a new school, a new environment or a new situation at the first sign of discomfort.  

By and large, enabling athletes with limited eligibility who aren’t getting adequate playing time to find another school without penalty or delay is positive. The portal reinforces Stanford’s commitment to athlete mental health, a concern that continues to top the agenda for coaches, programs and alumni. 

But to be honest, we’re glad that the portal didn’t exist in its current form when we were battling for playing time and the team was floundering our freshman and sophomore years. We easily could have transferred and missed out on the increased drive and focus that came from failure, the strides we made in our mental toughness and the deep relationships we built with teammates during moments of pressure and stress.  

By choosing to face our challenges, we built a new level of confidence and earned the trust of our coaches, who not only helped us to play, but to excel, ultimately finishing our final season by winning the NCAA Championship. 

As you embark on your own Stanford adventure, know that you may not have control over the speed at which elite college athletics comes your way, but you have complete agency over your response to those challenges. Take charge of your effort, your attitude and your humility. 

That’s what coaches like Brian Flacks brought out in us, and if you let them, they can bring it out  in you, too. 

Dylan Woodhead ’20 M.S. ’22 won a bronze medal with the U.S. National Team at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris and is a professional water polo player with the Nautical Club of Vouliagmeni in Greece. Ben Hallock ’20 is a two-time NCAA national player of the year, captain of the medal-winning 2024 U.S. Olympic team and center-forward for the Italian Water Polo Club Pro Recco, where he won three  consecutive Champions League titles.