Tim McKenzie for Gratitude for TNAA Day

Speaker: Tim McKenzie, President & CEO

Tim McKenzie: Hey, good morning everyone. You know, we have the Spread the Love event this week. And I'm gonna, I wanna use basketball if you know me, you know, I love basketball. I love playing, I love coaching. I love watching the game. And so I'm gonna use it as a metaphor. And there's three things that I look for when I watch a basketball game, I look for spacing, I look for passing, I look for rebounds. And so let me go through those real quick and just terms that so spacing means sort of spreading the floor, everybody has their role. And when you spread the floor, you make it harder for us to guard in terms of doing that. So it's really important that everybody does their assigned role to be successful in a basketball game. The second thing is passing and so I track passes and when we move the ball around, we move around quickly, then we make it easier, it's harder to defend and we make it easier to score the basketball. And so if, if our college team, which is the Razorbacks passes over 200 times a game we have a really high winning percentage. It's just fantastic. We're just sharing, sharing the ball and we're doing it really, really quickly. And then the third thing is rebounding, and rebounding, offensive, rebounding in particular is what I like to watch. And that's basically when the shot is missed, that you get your team's rebound and you either set it back up to run another play or you actually try to score yourself. So, those are the three things. So now let me leap to just sort of us in terms of Share the Love. I think it's really important and I think we do a fantastic job of trying to identify our roles and play our roles really well and trying to get out of each other's space by spreading the floor and spreading it around. I think we can do that quicker. I think it's been really successful for us in terms of how we're organized, passing the ball, it's not the number of passes. But it's really how quick we do it, how quick we pass and catch it and get back to people. So, in our world, when we need help, it's important that we reach out to people and we ask for the help and it's important that people catch that, acknowledge it and then respond back, get the ball back really quick. And so how quick we respond to each other is really important as part of our success and we need to keep working on that and doing all that kind of stuff. And the rebounding is as we know, we're not perfect. And so we, we have to, we have to, everybody's responsibility on the team is to rebound. And so, if something goes awry, we need to get the rebound, we need to put it back in, so to speak. And so those are the three things that I wanted to share. I think we do a great job. This is a hard season. It's why we've been successful in great seasons is why we will be successful in, in tough seasons is when we share, share with each other and we play as a team and I think we do a fantastic job in doing that. This is my granddaughter's basketball and, if we think of this as the love ball, then we want to share the love. Let's pass it around this week. Let's, let's tell each other how much we appreciate our teamwork, our roles that we play our ability to, to cover for each other, and do a great job as a team. So, congrats to TNAA. Let's Share the Love this week and have a great time doing it.