Have you ever interviewed for a job that you really wanted?  If you haven’t then you’re going to learn something in a minute.  When you went to that interview did you wear a suit or something nice or your ratty jeans with a Winger T-shirt?  My guess is you wore nice clothes.

Were you late to the interview or did you show up 10 minutes early?  Did you do your research on the company to show you want to know who you would be working for or did you wing it?  Did you try to put together polished answers for different questions you think they might ask you or rattle off whatever came to your head?

Here’s the point.  If you truly wanted that job, you were willing to make sure that you did everything to leave the best impression possible of you.  You want to show your future employer that you are the person for the job and that you did everything in your power to illustrate that.

Basically, you prepared for this interview.

Recently in the sports world, you had the baseball (MLB) draft, the NBA draft, and the NHL draft.  I’m more familiar with the NBA draft than the other two, but the draft works something like this.

You have scouts that watch the basketball players in high school or college.  You get a good idea what these athletes can or cannot do.  Then these players declare for the draft and now they enter their “interview” stage.  For the “interview”, they will actually have an interview with some teams.  They will also participate in a combine type deal where they get weighed, measured, and play basketball with their peers so scouts can see how they play compared to others they could be drafting.

Then, if individual teams wanted to schedule their own workouts with you, they would.  They’d have doctors examine you and after all that, they would determine if you fit their particular need that they are looking for.

What causes a player to rise or fall in a draft?

Jared Sullinger, the two time All-American from Ohio State, was falling in the draft for potential back issues.  Can you control your back from failing on you?  I’m not exactly sure if you could, but that is something Sullinger really couldn’t control.  He also can’t control his height.  He is what he is.

William Buford, also from Ohio State, scored the second highest body fat percentage among attendees at the NBA combine.  Ultimately, someone is going to have to have the second highest total, but should it be from a shooting guard?  If coming in to the combine there are already questions about your conditioning, then you need to do everything in your power to make those questions disappear.  This is the preparation work for your “interview” to be drafted.  This is your big job opportunity.

Once you declare for the draft, you hire a conditioning coach to get you in shape.  You hire a nutritionist to make sure what you are eating is giving you the ultimate energy for your performance at the combine.  You hire a shooting coach to fine tune your game.

I can understand if you just don’t shoot well at a combine.  The pressure gets to you and sometimes you just get in shooting funks that are hard to get out of.  Scouts can look at your stroke and mechanics to determine if those look good and if you just had a bad shooting performance.  But, when you show up potentially out of shape, that is inexcusable.  That tells scouts that you might not have the heart.

You see it in the NFL combine too.  Was the 40 time you ran slow because you are slow or because you just didn’t prep for it and ran a less than stellar time?  The NFL game is a lot on ability, but heart has to count for something.  If you show up to a combine, your interview, and are out of shape, there will be teams that won’t touch you with a ten foot pole.

With all the professional help out there nowadays, there is no reason to not show up in your optimum athletic state.  Suck it up, dedicate the weeks prior to the combine training to put yourself in awesome shape, and then let the cards fall where they may.

If your talent is borderline at best, then what is going to put you over the top?  The preparation and hard work you put in to getting yourself in the best shape possible.  That might be the tipping point between you and someone else who showed up out of shape.  They see your dedication, then a team is going to say “he or she will give 100% for us.”  And that is ultimately what a team is looking for.