Ingrained
by
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I squeezed out the final reps. My chest muscles were burning as I got closer to my bench-press goal. Our training had intensified through the summer. Bobby and I used our free time during those lazier months to become bigger, faster, and stronger than just the year before.
In the spring earlier that year, he and I drove six hours to Eugene, Oregon, to participate in their annual football camp. Four days of three practices a day and a final day of scrimmaging. Most of the athletes there had come with their high school teams, but random participants including Bobby and I were lumped into a renegade mash-up of players from all over the United States. They were some of the best players I had ever seen.
It took me five minutes to see the vast disparity between my then 155-pound frame and the 215-pound frames lining up next to me. But it was a successful camp, and I learned quite a bit despite feeling largely underdeveloped compared to my competition.
One of the greatest lessons I learned during that camp was to acknowledge the competition I couldn’t see. My dad had always preached it, but I did not believe him until I experienced it. I had been satisfied being a big fish in a little pond, but the body of water I was shooting for in my football career, college football, had lots of bigger fish. I needed to train to beat the competition I couldn’t see.
Even if I had been big enough to be the best on my team, I needed to get bigger because somewhere out there, someone just like me wasn’t taking it easy. He was lifting heavier weights more often and getting bigger faster. We were already trying out for the same position for some team that neither of us knew about then.
I had to think that way. I had experienced a taste of my real competition. Unlike the boys I played against whose helmets bobbled and shoulder pads rattled when they ran, the men I would face filled out their pads.
That summer, I gained ten to fifteen pounds and got significantly stronger. I also chased faster and faster 40 times. I caught hundreds, maybe thousands of footballs daily. I wanted to outperform my unseen competitors every way I could.
I set personal goals to maximize my in-game performance; I met with the leadership on our team, and our coach helped us establish team goals. We discussed those goals in depth, and coach planned our playbook and practices accordingly. We committed to perfection and practiced passionately to honor that commitment throughout the summer.
When fall rolled around, we had twenty players show up to camp. Our head coach was livid and justifiably so. We needed at least twenty-two to play both sides of the ball. We couldn’t even practice properly. He said, “In that school are a bunch of bums who are sitting at home, relaxing, playing video games, and thinking they’re going to show up to school this year and just coast through like every other year. It takes courage to sacrifice your body, to wake up early, to come out and fail here time and time again just so you can reach out and touch something bigger than yourself. I tell you what. They can keep their video games and comfy couches. I’ll take twenty of you who want to be here over the hundreds of those nobodies any day. Shoot—if I have to, I’ll go with eleven of you who really want it. We’ll work our butts off. And we’ll win.”
We believed him.
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Book Details
About the Book
Ingrained is a collection of over fifty stories about how five family members each found a way to reach the highest level in their respective sports. Its disjointed biographical short-story format will take you behind the curtain into life as a kid of the Chapdelaines through the eyes of their middle child, Matt.
Ingrained is for parents, teens, young adults, mentors, coaches, athletes, and fans alike. The lessons and stories range from helpful reminders of oft-neglected wisdomisms to thought-provoking cliché busters and even out-of-the-box perspectives on some of the trickiest issues such as growing up, finding yourself, and grappling with what you believe. Topics include thoughts on competition, courage, will, values, tenacity, decision-making, coachability, growing up, manhood, family, faith, and so much more.
This heartfelt, funny, emotional, challenging, convicting, and liberating journey will unveil the most formative moments in Matt’s path to becoming the man he is today; it will illuminate the power of one’s story and provoke you to consider the power hidden in your own.
With its short chapter lengths, this page-turner will appeal to both the reader who consumes books whole and the reader who likes to nibble a little bit at a time. The short but saturated stories will take you from root to fruit in the Chapdelaine family tree and give you insights into the life lessons, core values, coming-of-age moments, and powerful truths that have culminated in the secret to their success.
About the Author
Matthew Chapdelaine was born into an extremely athletic family. The perfect mixture of high-performance genetics, exposure to a wealth of athletic opportunity, and a few family secrets has made athletic success synonymous with the Chapdelaine name.
His father, Jacques Chapdelaine, was a professional football player in the Canadian Football League (CFL), and has coached professionally at the college and professional level ever since.
His mother, Kim, was a Canadian National Team track star, who later transitioned to become one of Canada’s most highly touted female track & field coaches. Her tenure allowed her to serve in roles on various national teams and as the head coach of several Canadian universities.
With parents like that, It’s no wonder that his older sister, Kaela, had an acclaimed career as a basketball player, playing in the NCAA and internationally on both the Canadian National Team and as a professional.
It also comes at no surprise that his younger brother, Justin, had an illustrious college football career. After turning down an offer to play professionally, Justin stepped into a role as a football coach. Having served as a coach at both the university and professional level, he has rapidly earned a reputation as one of the most highly respected up-and-comers in Canadian football.
Matt was a two-sport high school champion who had the opportunity to compete in both track and football at the university level. He entered the 2010 CFL draft and was selected to the B.C. Lions.
Matt has a Bachelors in Psychology and a Graduate Certificate in Pastoral Counselling. Today, his athletic and academic background permeates his life as a high performance trainer. Matt combines life experience, performance counselling and his faith to provide mentorship, guidance and inspiration to a rising generation of athletes at the high school, university and even professional level. Beyond the impact Matt has had on thousands of athletes in over 10 years of coaching, he has also taken it upon himself to speak at various high school, church, and community events. Recognizing the impact of sharing the lessons he accrued through many of his stories about growing up a Chapdelaine, Matt began chronicling the messages he speaks on with hopes to one day compile and share them with a much wider audience.
The culmination of experiences that have influenced Matt have allowed him to mix academia with anecdote in his thought-provoking book, Ingrained. From cover to cover, the pages are brimming with details about Matt and his athletically-gifted family, as he uncovers the stories, life-lessons and secrets that led to their success.