Scuffed | USMNT, World Cup, Yanks Abroad, futbol in America - #432: A sports mediator on ways to resolve the Gio/GGG rift

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

Joshua Gordon, an eminently qualified lawyer, mediator and arbitrator whose specialty is sports conflict, joins Belz to discuss what strategies someone like him would deploy if he were called in to help Gio Reyna and Gregg Berhalter have that difficult conversation that Berhalter said a couple weeks ago they still haven't had.Consider subscribing to Scuffed on Patreon. You get an exclusive episode once a week, full versions of all our interviews with players and coaches, access to the Discord server and live call-in shows, plus occasional video content: https://www.patreon.com/scuffed Skip the ads! Subscribe to Scuffed on Patreon and get all episodes ad-free, plus any bonus episodes. Patrons at $5 a month or more also get access to Clip Notes, a video of key moments on the field we discuss on the show, plus all patrons get access to our private Discord server, live call-in shows, and the full catalog of historic recaps we've made: https://www.patreon.com/scuffedAlso, check out Boots on the Ground, our USWNT-focused spinoff podcast headed up by Tara and Vince. They are cooking over there, you can listen here: https://boots-on-the-ground.simplecast.comAnd check out our MERCH, baby. We have better stuff than you might think: https://www.scuffedhq.com/store Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the SCuff podcast, where we talk about U.S. soccer. Our guest today is a lawyer and a mediator who works at the University of Oregon and helps resolve sports conflicts. Most of his work is with large, complicated situations, but we thought he could help us think through the most famous conflict in U.S. soccer right now with some ideas for strategy and best practice. He runs several different workshops, but one of them is entitled Difficult Conversations, and another one is entitled, dealing with an angry sports public. Maybe we can get into that later. He does arbitration for the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland. He does mediation for FIFA and arbitration for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee,

among other things. Please welcome Joshua Gordon, the founder of the Sport Conflict Institute. Mr. Gordon, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. I look forward to our conversation. Always fun to dig in and give a little visibility into a space that a lot of people don't think about about how you deal with issues as they pop up in sport. Right.

I don't think a lot of us do think about it much. I thought it'd be useful, again, from sort of a best practices perspective, for us to start by you asking me what the facts of the case are. Of course, for our listeners, it's no surprise. We're talking about the Giorana Greg Burhalter situation, which is as yet unresolved. This would be a difficult conversation that needs to be had, but there's also a lot more to it.

So what would you want to know, first of all, when you come into a situation like this? Yeah, one of the first things to think about what is the right tool in our toolbox that we'd even want to use is when we're talking about issues in sport, we've got a whole array of tools that we might go to, going from the most self-determination where it would be direct negotiation, you know, helping people prepare to have those hard conversations themselves, all the way to the more formal, like an arbitration and the work I do, in that space where you might have attorneys involved and you might have others helping to make the case and there you're doing it under some guidelines from rules or policies or those kinds of things. So really the first place, really any of these things go is probably triaging with a conversation that looks like an intake so that if you were to call me or a counterpart like me up,

we would be asking, hey, tell me what's going on. Give me a little background here about the situation so that we can understand how we might be helpful in some way. So that would be just whoever, you know, whoever cares enough to get someone like you involved. That'd be the person you're getting the information from. Well, it's going to, it's going to depend on the context, right? So sometimes we're in a bit of a closed, you know, situation where maybe for FIFA, uh, with the mediation work I do there, you already have a complaint going on through their, uh, dispute resolution chambers. And then at that point, we're going to figure out, is mediation a good option for you? So someone like myself is going

to do an intake and try to understand, okay, what are the things here that you're at odds about? And where can we better understand, you know, what those really need? Is there room for some direct conversation or facilitated conversation like a mediation that's going to be helpful here to the situation? It's not always the case, right? Sometimes we need the more formal processes, but a lot of times people want to have more say and more creativity into where these things end up because any any court conversation or an arbitral panel is going to be a bit more of a constrained conversation negotiation or mediation is going to be a far more open conversation that we can have yeah i don't know how familiar you are with the whole this whole situation but maybe i should i

just give you the sort of the basics from starting in november yeah give me a bit of a bit of timeline i know there's quite a timeline i from i understand on this one and you know part of the decisions we have to make and trying to be helpful in these situations is how far back do we need to go to be useful how much can we stay in the moment and certainly the most important part is can we define a move forward that everyone feels okay about right so there's I mean there's kind of a lot of relationships going on here but the key one for our purposes is fans of the US men's national team is the one between Greg Burhalter and Giovanni

Raina who is one of them if not the one of the one of the the most talented players on the team. And he didn't get to play that much at the World Cup in 2022. Some dispute about how healthy he was, you know. I mean, he hasn't been healthy a lot in the last two years. He's been injured a lot. But he didn't feel that he was getting the playing time he deserved. And so it came out on December 11th, so like a week after the,

after the World Cup was over. And he did play. He played the second half of our last game that knockout round game against the Netherlands. But he didn't play as much as we would have liked. Came out. Burhalter was talking to

sort of a symposium in New York City. Under what he thought was Chatham House Rules, Chatham House Rule. And he gave, without naming Gio Raina, he gave this example of his leadership ability where a player had a really bad attitude, it was really sticking out on the team of 26 players.

There was even some conversation about maybe sending him home. They didn't, they resolved it with him, they got him to, you know, explicitly apologize to the team for how he'd been acting. And then, you know, I guess the moral of his story was things moved forward, okay. And then those comments were published in, of all things like an HR, a human resources newsletter from a guy who was just in the meeting.

You know, it's a little murky how he got the green light to publish the comments or, you know, how well he understood the rules or whatever. But immediately when he, when those comments were published, Gio Raina's parents called Ernie Stewart, who is Greg Berhalter's boss, who Stewart was the general manager of U.S. soccer. And they told him that Burrhalter had done something far worse when he was young. He had kicked his then-girlfriend, now wife, after a fight outside a bar at the University of North Carolina in the early 1990s. And that, of course, launched an investigation because it was a domestic violence allegation and put Burrhalter on, like, suspended him from the job for a while. he was eventually rehired, re-hired in the summer or late spring, I believe. So the wrinkle in all this is that the Rannas and the Burrhalters were longtime friends.

So that goes back to your thing about how far back do we go? I don't know. But they, you know, Burhalter's now wife and Gio Raina's mom were roommates at North Carolina at the time that this happened. This thing happened. And of course, Burrhalter apologized for it. I mean, I don't know, apologize for it is the right word. But he acknowledged that it was true. It was something that he had worked on.

He and his girlfriend had broken up. And they got back together. They've now been married for 26 years. Burrhalter gets rehired as coach after all of this. And it comes out recently that he hasn't spoken with Gio Raina yet. And he mentioned he, you know, we need to like, know, we need to take this process in the right way and handle it the right way. We can't just, I guess, willy-nilly have a conversation.

That's my paraphrase of what he said, but that's the basic gist of it. So I guess, you know, a lot of our questions are, what is the right way to have this? Why can't he just call him up and say, hey, Gio, we're cool, you know? Like, you're a great player. I want you to be on the team. What's between me and your parents is between me and your parents. because Geo, as far as we know, he had nothing to do with, like, revealing this old allegation.

And certainly it sounds like a healthy respect that these conversations aren't always intuitive and they're not always easy to have, right? You're managing a lot when you're talking about a conversation is happening in the context of conflict. And we've got a lot of frameworks, those of us who play around in the space in the field, where we're trying to really analyze and dissect and understand what it might be. You know, if someone's looking for some fall reading here to better understand, this is my colleague Gary Furlong, wrote a book called The Conflict Toolbox.

And then there's a number of frameworks that are particularly helpful. So there's something called the Circle of Conflict, where you look at a number of issues that are going on around it. And some of these might be more about understanding, them from the point of acknowledgement, but there's not much you can do about it. So if you and I have a values-based conflict, you believe something from a value standpoint so deeply it's ingrained in who you are to the core. I believe something different. I'm never, there's no conversation I can have with you, Adam, that's going to change your value structure. But I might understand your value

structure and I might be able to acknowledge it and even create some behavioral changes that will create a better respect for that. But I'm not going to ever see the same way as you are and you're not going to see the same way as I am. So if we spend all our time trying to convince each other about our values, we're going nowhere fast, right? Does your intuition tell you that this falls into that category or this type? You know, I don't think so, but I think there are certain things when it comes to the past that fall similarly to the way values play out because we can't change the past. We can acknowledge it. We can understand it. But we, none of us, to my knowledge, have invented a time machine where we can go backward and actually do something differently.

We can do hypotheticals. We can talk about I wish I had done something differently. We can create remorse. You know, we can create empathy for the impact that our behavior had. But we can't, we can't do anything to change what happened in the past. And so, So, you know, in a lot of ways that's pretty akin to what a values-based conflict is going to look like. If a lot of what is going on here is a whole bunch of baggage that happened built up over time, well, then that's more what we would call restorative justice conversation. And really trying to figure out what is that understanding needs to happen? What type of acknowledgement would we look for in all of that?

So that's a very different conversation. We'd want to prepare differently for that conversation. If the conversation is, hey, we need to figure out how our relationship is going to look in some of the ways and expectations we should have of each other if we're going to now work together in this capacity again. If we're going to have an effective relationship, you know, forget about the personal stuff for a moment. If we're going to have effective relationship, what does that mean? What are you, you know, what are your main goals in this relationship? what are my main goals?

And why do we each need to have some clarity, knowing that there's some backstory here and that this could go tense pretty quick and that we're probably going to assume the worst of each other right now in almost every moment, right? So my fear for them would be, if they don't have that tough conversation,

they don't work some of this through, the first time someone isn't getting enough playing time or the first time that there is, is any kind of issue that would arise in the normal course of a coach athlete relationship. Right. It's going to take on different weight, right? Most likely because it's got all this extra baggage and it's going to be interpreted in a way that carries with it extra meaning.

And so if we don't want to set ourselves up for that failure, because right now you're in a calm moment, right? But when you're in the heat of the moment and sport brings out the heat of the moment, that's part of the joy and part of the pain. of sport. We need to figure out how we build that relational infrastructure. And that conversation is going to be one that's probably a fairly structured conversation. So I do think there's wisdom and not just showing up and just doing a gut conversation where we just feel our way through it because words will be said, but I don't know if we'll have even figured out what we were

supposed to have talked about in the first place and what we needed to have come out of that conversation. So when you say a structured conversation, that would be like a conversation with a third party involved, like usually? Often, I mean, certainly folks can be capable of having direct conversation and doing a good job of listening and hearing each other. But most often, especially if we've had some fracturing of a relationship, most humans, and these are two humans, most people really struggle.

to get out of their own head and their own thoughts and their own perspective. So if I'm in a heated conversation with someone else and I'm not focused on understanding what is going on for them, I'm mostly just working on my response, right? Most arguments, you know, they're talking. I'm sort of hearing their words, right? I get what's going on. But if this is a personal battle that I'm in, I'm mostly my brain is occupied. with trying to figure out how I'm going to respond or counter everything they just said.

I'm preparing my argument. Well, that's an escalation. That's a stairway where we're spiraling up it, right? I don't know how that gets us to a better place. It probably gets us to a worse place because I'm going to tell you how right I am. You're going to tell me how right you are. How do we back? We become more entrenched.

And then, of course, those folks are our high-profile individuals, if any of that conversation becomes part of the public conversation, well, now you've got an audience who's going to cement these positions even further. So it's a high-risk conversation to have without some support, even though it sounds silly, right? We're going to see each other all the time. Of course, we need to have direct conversation. We can't have a mediator with us all the time.

How is it going to work? Well, that's the conversation you might want to have with a third party who's really skilled in knowing how to do, help people express themselves, express what's going on. It's not just about the emotions. It's all the specific interests. There might be other very tangible concerns that are going on there that need to be addressed. So a lot of what we were trying to do up front is identify what is even the agenda for the conversation.

So that could take a lot of different formats. At times, if it's more, if there's more of a legal overlay, then we may be submitting formal briefs to a mediator beforehand, laying out our arguments and laying out the things that each of us feel strongly about, that gets healthy backgrounds so the mediator can prepare and help have a good conversation around it. Other times, it might look more like shuttle diplomacy at first. So I as a mediator might want to spend time with each of these parties individually before we ever get in a room together and have a really good conversation to understand what's going on there, where might some of this misunderstanding be coming from as well. And then to frame out

an agenda that both sides really think would be productive for a conversation and probably laying out a few ground roles for what this conversation is going to look like, sound like, feel like to be productive. And none of this is particularly squishy. This is really meant to be very constructive and very tangible. Again, it's a performance skill, which is why when in the context of sport, these skills can be differentiators for coaches and athletes to be able to have these skills. and if not, to recognize they don't have it and to get some scaffolding from others who do have that skill set.

What are some of the things that you would want to cover as like, sort of, I don't know, the ground rules of the relationship, how the relationship would proceed? Yeah, well, I mean, here we are, and you were in a high performance context, right? So first we need to define at the very outset, what would success look like? If each of them could magically control the nature of their relationship, what would that look like and why? Right. So from a coach's perspective, really to dial in, what do you need out of your athletes in order to be effective yourself and in order to make sure the team is performing at a very high level? The expectations are going to be quite high, right?

You're not coming in there just to participate. And then same thing on the athlete's side, trying to figure out what is it that we're hoping, to do why do I want to be part of this entity at all not everything lines up perfectly as all these mixed motive situations that develop in sport where the team might have a set of goals that doesn't mean the athlete shares those goals or it doesn't mean that the athlete's goals necessarily align to the team goals that we have to create alignment between the individual and the team in order to create a high-performance culture and in order to do that especially if we're

already starting in a point of fracture and then we need to to figure out with some specificity how do we want that conversation and how we want that relationship to work you can put in any context right i just imagine right now if any of your fans are also or listeners are also basketball fans just to imagine james hardin if he's walking back into the the philadelphia 76s locker room where he just called his general manager a liar and and all that well, that's not going to magically work itself out either, right? It's probably going to explode further. And again, similar a situation where you've got a cementing audience.

So one thing is so hard about sport is fans, right? People who have a lot of passion are involved in your conversations, and that makes it harder. It makes it a lot harder. It's interesting because we often bemoan, you know, how angry the fan base can be. And I suppose that's the case with most teams, most sports. You know, both sides here are, I think, pretty savvy.

You know, Gio's parents, Gio's father was Claudio Raina. He was a national team player. He was up until this whole thing happened. He was the sporting director at NYCFC and then at Austin FC. So I imagine, I guess I'm curious what the mechanics would be of even getting started here, you know, like, because if, because if the Raina saw that, you know, U.S. soccer wanted to send somebody, let's say Joshua Gordon to, to handle this structured conversation, I imagine, I'm just speculating, but I imagine the reaction would be like,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we're going to like have some say in who is involved in helping us with this conversation. How does that, how would that even, how does that even start, you know? Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. it's in an open context like this where you're just actively seeking someone to help with that. Sometimes someone will suggest a person, and just by the nature of suggesting it, there's suspicion that it's somehow favorable to them and it's going to work against them. So, you know, often it's good to have two or three people that a list that folks are already comfortable with or referral, and you can each, you know, interview them and see if it's a good

fit all around. One of the keys from a mediation standpoint is that it is voluntary. And so in general, there's very few contexts where you have compulsory mediation. So folks are there. Even when it is compulsory, it's just compulsory to try not to actually stay in that conversation. So it might be, you know, part of the challenge up front is to have those intake conversations and the mediator is going to have to build some trust. And it may not be trust by, I look you in the eye and you look me in the eye.

we trust each other, maybe let me explain how this works, explain the process of mediation. So you may not trust me, but you trust the process of mediation. You trust that, in fact, I'm not a decision maker here. If I'm a mediator, you're the decision maker. So ultimately, you need to trust that I'm going to run a fair conversation. But that conversation still requires self-determination and whatever outcomes you might agree to. arbitration, you get a lot more of that arguing over who the arbitrator is and looking at backgrounds, and there you often are going to need to rely on a third party who runs the panels to first

ensure that the quality of the arbitrator is what you'd want. And then you generally have some pretty well-defined processes for knocking out. So someone might suggest one, someone else suggested one, you might have the ability to knock one out, they knock one out, and you arrive at some mutually agreeable arbitrators because there you've lost self-determination. That neutral in that point is going to come out and render some sort of decision or judgment. And there's even more imperative to make sure that everyone trust that person is fair and impartial in that way. But mediators, too. You need to trust that they're both competent and that they're going to be effective for your particular situation as well.

This is likely going to be a mediation situation, not an arbitration. situation, right? Yeah, unless you're telling me there's a bunch of rules that are coming into play. So if we're, if our conflict is really about some specific rules or something that's coming under a collective bargaining agreement or something that's coming under some of the FIFA regulations or whatever, right? Then then we've got specific rules that we might see differently and we're going to make our arguments and we're going to listen to them. We're going to apply the rules. We're going to look at some of the jurisprudence, the past cases that are similar and look for guidance and all of that. Here, from everything you've shared with me, we've got a lot that's very relationship

driven here. And we need to figure out how to get a relationship that seems pretty fractured at the moment into one that not only is just sort of okay, right? You can be just okay with your neighbor who's five houses down from you. But this is a really important relationship to be firing on all cylinders, if you're going to have the type of success on the pitch that you're hoping to have, you can't have it be, you know, 30% of a good relationship. It's got to be probably 100% of a good relationship. Well, it's interesting you say that because I think one of our listeners asked, like, can Burrhalter reach, is it totally related to what you just said, can he reach sufficient

reconciliation with geo so that they can work professionally without also seeking reconciliation with Claudio and Danielle, his parents, with whom I would imagine the rift is even greater, you know? I mean, this was viewed as a, like, a personal betrayal for her to bring up this, this thing that, you know, everybody had known about for 30 years and it seemed to have been resolved, you know, quite thoroughly. So, I mean, I guess the question is, can you have a hundred percent relationship between the player and the coach without, I received?

restorative justice with the parents, you know? Now, Adam, you're sound, now you're sounding like a mediator. Because these are the kinds of questions you would ask the parties, right? I would ask them. Okay, so it sounds like we're making a lot of progress. You guys are both feeling confident that you can work together and work effectively together. And yet I have to ask the question, if nothing is done to restore some of that relationship between the parents, right?

will it really be where it needs to be? And then I'm going to rely on them to be honest and to share with me. And again, this may not always be in a joint room together. This might be in confidence, a mediator who can then help reframe and share some of that information. So we start to get some understanding there. But the answer might be no. This part of my life, my family is so important to me that if that is not supported and that is not, I don't have their support or their blessing to be in this relationship, well, then no,

it's not going to be okay. And so we might need to expand. This might not be a two-person mediation. This might be a many-person mediation, right? I mean, I've dealt with 300 people mediations. So sometimes you are talking about a whole lot of people that need to be involved to get there. More people creates more complexity, but also it creates more opportunity to really fix the issue if that's what it involves.

Okay. This isn't, I'm gathering that this isn't going to be like one meeting and then you're done. Or can it be sometime? I wouldn't think so, but it also, it's surprisingly efficient if you can figure out what's going on. And again, you know, what we're doing either between the ears or with a pen and paper is we're trying to really understand and dissect the conflict through some frames that make some sense. So, you know, try and understand. And is this information gap where we have misunderstandings about information? Is it a values-based gap?

Is it purely a relationship-based issue where we need to restore that relationship? And we're going to actually purposely spend more time on some of these past issues that we may not do if it were really about, you know, how do we create behavioral expectations for each other in the workplace, you know, in our sport place or any of this, right? And, of course, always that the fundamental underpinning of any of these conversations is understanding interest. So everyone's pretty good at articulating their positions. There are things that they say that they absolutely must have. But really, that doesn't answer the why. Why do we hold those positions?

And to do effective conflict resolution, we need to get underneath the surface and understand the why behind someone's what statement. So if someone says, you know, I never want the coach to talk to me. I always want an assistant coach to talk to me directly. That's a what. We don't know why that is. Right? We need to understand why. Until we understand that why, you're probably not getting an agreement on that issue.

Because the coach probably said, no, I'm not going to agree not to talk to one of my players. Right? And then you see, you have to figure out what's the why? Why would that position even be there? Once you understand the why, it might be, well, because I'm so upset right now from all the stuff that's happened in the past and for how my family's gotten involved that if I say anything right now, I'm probably going to say something stupid along the way. So we shouldn't even talk to each other. Well, that's a different why. And now we need to work on that.

Once we address that issue, we might be able to get a very different what at that point. So a lot of his understand the why is being particularly curious about it and helping folks be able to get there themselves too. Well, I told you 30 minutes and we're getting very close to that. But I wonder how do generational differences play out in conflicts between, like, say, a Gen X coach, that'd be Greg Burhalter and a Gen Z player. That'd be Geo Ray now. I mean, I'm sure you encounter this regularly. What extra dynamic does that add? Yeah, I think in general, the way I think about generational differences when it comes to conflict

is that it really is just another set of implicit understanding that we think and assume that others should understand because we grew up with a particular perspective and frame. So, you know, if you grew up Gen X, with that comes a whole, bunch of culture and expectation and and shoulds, right? There's all these shoulds in the world that you navigate. And if you're millennial or wherever is Gen Z or whatever you are, you've got your own set of expectations and shoulds and you had a whole bunch of different factors that shaped that culture for you. So it's just another barrier to truly understanding each other. and we have definitely eroded some of our moments where we learn these skills

developmentally in the past couple decades. You know, just fundamentally where sport is, you know, many more of our folks grew up in organized sport where you had a coach there to solve an issue for you. You had a referee there to be the mediator, so to speak, in that moment. it's very different than going out to a sandlot or going out on the street and playing some street football, right? Yeah. Now you're talking my language. Yeah.

Yeah. So you play a little street football. You have a disagreement. Even the crude stuff, someone threads to take the one ball that was brought there home with them. You're going to work it out. You're going to figure out how to have those conversations that you might be able to avoid in a more structured environment if you're in an academy or something like that. So again, we've created a whole structure and infrastructure. where we should not expect that people organically have these skills that we've been talking about today.

They need to be developed or they need to be supported by having others who do have that skill set to be there to help be part of those conversations because they are important. At the end of the day, you know, with everything you share with me today, until they have some meaningful, constructive, supported conversation, it probably is a ticking time bomb if they're going to be together in a high-stress environment, like, you know, international competition. Yeah. And we got the World Cup coming in three years to the USA.

It's a big time for that team. One last question. So we've covered it a little bit, but the pre-existing relationship between the coach and the player is, I think, pretty rich. Like not only were Gio's mom and Greg's wife roommates, but Gio and Claudio were on the national team together. They played on the national team together. They were part of that 2002 team that made a great run at the World Cup,

the best we've ever done at the World Cup. And, you know, from my understanding, the families went on vacation together sometimes. I mean, they were very close. Does that make it, this is going to be a question. I bet you're going to say it depends. but does that make it easier to restore the relationship or does that make it more difficult? No, I think it does make it easier.

And I think it makes it easier because you can even play around with some temporal cues in some of the questions you ask and say, hey, we understand there was a time where this relationship felt pretty good, right? Can we just go back for a moment and talk about why was it good then? And what were some of the things that you appreciate about each other? There's something very powerful. And some of these tools are almost – because now we're talking about genuine restorative justice types of conversations. So you're starting to nudge closer to therapeutic conversations, right? Where you start to be able to scaffold by going in and saying, well, now that you think about it,

haven't thought about this a long time, but we did have a lot of fun together. We did have a great time together. we spent a lot of time together. This is a really important person in my life. That has impact. And you can draw on that and you can translate it. You can try and figure out, well, why was it so effective? Now, we know it isn't that way now.

What's the difference, you know? And if the difference really is a couple of fracturing moments, and we're probably going to have to address those fracturing moments, if we've just become very different people, that we might need to relearn each other and if we're going to be committed to having that relationship. You know, of course, there's the possibility that this is just not good for either of them, right? But assuming that neither of them has particularly great alternatives, there's only one national team.

If you want to be part of it, and they both want to be part of it, it sounds like these are the two roles which they're going to be playing. So it sure is a lot of incentive for us to have and invest in these kinds of conversations. And again, they're not overly burdensome, but you have to be committed to trying. Sometimes people are so committed to the fight itself that it becomes part of their identity. And now you're really talking about a lot of barriers to getting there because part of my identity is hating someone or people thinking I hate that person. Now we have to unwind that too because now I have to lose a part of my identity. But if we haven't gotten to that point, there's a lot of, I would have a lot of optimism that we can get this back on track for sure. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's that bad.

But, I mean, what do I know? No, I mean, look, I spend all my life dealing with people in their most difficult, challenging moments at a point in crisis, and yet I walk around this world as an optimist. So clearly, these moments must be able to serve as a catalyst for productive change for people. And so I do think I share your optimism here that there's room to make this into a much better situation that currently looks. That's a great note to end on. Joshua, thank you so much for doing this.

Yeah, my pleasure. I hope folks enjoy it. Again, a lot of times we're not behind the scenes on these things. They happen in the dark shadows of buildings that no one ever sees. So thanks for bringing this attention to some of the folks who have passion for the sport. Yes. Thanks everybody for listening. We'll see you.