Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Matt Kreditsch and I believe anything is possible.
This is Anything is Possible.
Part two of my interview with Matt Kreditsch,
he's the director of swimming and diving at the University of Tennessee.
These are great stories about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.
We started in your story, you started out playing basketball.
Your parents were Duke alums and worked at Duke
and you thought, I'm going to be a blue devil basketball player,
then life happened.
Not only did you have some problems with your knee,
but also, and we passed by this real fast,
you had a battle with testicular cancer.
And so you had to fight through that.
You were surrounded by the love and support of a team.
Your coach showed up at the hospital all the time and you thought,
man, if I'm going to be in ministry, oops, sorry for saying it that way.
But if I'm going to be in ministry, this looks like that.
This is what love looks like in street clothes, right?
So you decided to dedicate your life to making that kind of a difference.
You end up getting some coaching opportunities after swimming at Duke
and you take those opportunities, you grow as a coach
and you start to have a lot of success.
Based on our last conversation, you said,
I started feeling pretty good.
As my man says, I'm going to curb your enthusiasm.
Larry Davidson, pretty good.
So you said you started feeling pretty good about yourself
and then that starts to mess with your self-concept,
your sense of self-worth.
And then you and your wife begin the journey of trying to have children.
That's difficult for a moment.
And then you have twins.
And then you have another child.
And then now there's a realignment.
Purpose becomes really important.
And I think that's where we left off.
So quite the journey.
First, just on your cancer, how did you shake past that?
Were you just so young that youth kind of camouflaged
how deep or traumatic it was?
Yeah, I was young and lucky and in great shape, basically.
I was deteriorating in my swimming performance for months
and couldn't figure out what was wrong.
One day after practice, I felt a lump in my stomach,
went to the hospital.
I was very fortunate.
My parents worked at Duke Hospital,
so I had quick access to good doctors
and showed tumors all through my lungs and my spine.
And so it was very advanced testicular cancer
at a time when the therapies were still experimental.
I was really fortunate to be in on this new,
new at the time use of this combination of drugs
that's still in use today that have made the cure rate
probably upwards of 90%.
And it was some nasty chemotherapy
and they've learned ways to soften it.
But I lost 50 pounds off of not a very big frame.
And it's really knocked back a lot.
But that was difficult in a lot of ways,
but also...
Clarifying?
Clarifying. It really was.
It made me feel like I had a more...
It was very fortunate.
It made me...
There goes that gratitude.
Yes. And so grateful for my family.
So grateful for my family and swimming and my coach.
And for another...
It's kind of a second opportunity at doing swimming
and then having...
Being able to look at the rest of what I hoped would be a long life,
and say, man, there's so much I can do.
How are you now?
Great.
Now, testicular cancer, in a lot of cases, leaves people...
That's what I was wondering.
Did you worry about being infertile or impenet?
I did.
And Kim and I talked about that before we got married.
And I basically told her it takes one sperm with one egg.
And now I'm still producing sperm.
And it just may be difficult to extract it.
And we were just really lucky that the rate at which IVF in vitro fertilization
was progressing coincided really well with our desire to have kids in the late 90s.
So we tried for three years through IVF, and then finally 12.
Twins.
Let's talk about Ben.
Because you lost Ben.
What's the story?
So Ben was 24 years old when he died.
And he and I had a standing date at Sunspot on Monday nights.
And I started back in the pandemic, right after he had moved away from home.
Ben is autistic, had autism.
And one of the goals that we had from the time that he was diagnosed was for him to be able to live independently.
And he was able to move into off-campus housing sometime around 2019.
It was just one of the most wonderful moments in our lives to see him have that level of independence.
He and I, and he lived not far from the pool.
He and I were always incredibly close, and he was my world.
And I know I was his.
So we started having Monday night dinners when he lived off-campus.
And it was during the pandemic, and he wasn't getting to see anybody.
We just met at Sunspot every Monday, and it was faithful.
If I was out of town on a Monday, we'd have to make that up and then go the next Monday.
He was walking along Kingston Pike, just heading to dinner,
and an impaired driver, somebody who had overdosed on narcotics, been Narcan'd, released,
and then was either impaired through the Narcan wearing off or some other way.
Fell asleep at the wheel, drove across three lanes of traffic, and he'll hit Ben while he was walking.
And it killed him instantly.
My God.
You know, he did it a lot.
He walked often.
And we were so proud of him for...
Kim would take him sometimes.
He might call me to take him.
It was really cold, so I'd drive from the pool back home and then back to Sunspot.
And we were happy to do that, but we also encouraged him to get exercise,
and he would say, I'm going to get exercise and walk to Sunspot.
He did it at his own volition.
And he walked that dozens, if not over a hundred times.
How did his twin take this?
He took it like he might imagine.
So first of all, none of this is quite like we imagined.
There are so many dimensions to losing a son, losing a brother,
losing somebody that I feel was a part of me, and I think our whole family feels the same way.
But a twin feels that especially.
I mean, they had been together their whole lives.
They had a...
Miles was his greatest friend and advocate,
because he was in school with him every day, all through high school.
And Miles is an artist he feels deeply, and it was not only life altering,
but it was life-shaping for him, for all of us.
Miles is incredibly creative.
The one who wrote Spooky Rocky Top as just a side project, if people have heard of that.
He creates music.
He's a sound designer.
He and Ben shared so much music.
Ben had a musical brilliance that I think is beyond the understanding of anybody who's not a brilliant musician.
And Miles understands Ben's brilliance, so they would collaborate a lot.
And what's come out of it for Miles is this need to create, in honor of Ben,
this kind of inspiration of Ben's life and missing Ben.
He's brought music into the world from him, and other kinds of art.
I mean, I'm incredibly just proud of the way each person in our family has gone through this grieving process,
because it's been incredibly deep, profound, devastating,
but I think also healthy and life-affirming and creative.
There's been this generation of beauty that's come out of Ben's death that has come through Miles, and I think probably all of us.
Let me say I'm really sorry for your loss.
Thank you.
And I know that now you're processing this.
This is still kind of fresh.
You talked about how having children transformed your sense of purpose.
Has this loss, is it doing something different in and through you as you kind of resolve what to do about your son's legacy?
Because we don't want to forget Ben, the tremendous light and life that he was.
And I know there's legislation and other things, but what is it?
It's kind of like, I felt like being inside a snow globe and having it shaken up and turned upside down.
And there's a tremendous kind of reorienting and remapping of my mind and my vision of the future and my purpose since he died.
And probably four months ago, I couldn't have told you what that was, but I knew it was happening.
I have a need to understand on some level what I'm going through.
And I've had a lot of help from grief therapists, from people who have gone through similar losses from my family as we go through this together.
But one kind of beautiful and I think true descriptor of what we go through in grief is that it seasons or even cooks the soul.
There's a maturing of the soul that happens through grief and I feel that's happening.
I know it's happening. I know that I'm moving through it.
Ben was my greatest teacher because I had to work hard. I had to stretch myself to see the world through his eyes.
And I so wanted to understand him and what he was going through.
The loss of that was really disorienting. And I think that what I've come to, or what I'm coming to, is that the things that he was searching for were deeply human, inclusion, understanding, love, companionship, fight against loneliness.
And those are human needs that I see in everybody now. I can see it including myself.
And me now probably being certainly in the second half of my life, I have decided that it's up to me to, instead of looking for those things myself, to help provide those things for others.
At some point, I think we all need to decide are we going to seek belonging or are we going to help provide love and belonging.
And I was able to do that for him and he helped me learn to do that well. And now I need to do something with that.
Have you figured out what that actually is? Or is coaching the platform to maybe even do that at a deeper level?
For me, coaching is the platform to do it at a deeper level. That may change in the future. I don't feel as... I certainly don't feel like coaching is the only thing that I can do.
But right now I've found a lot of comfort in using coaching to help, I think, provide that sense of belonging and sense of being cared for and loved to be like a coach.
There's something really powerful that happens with loss. The first thing for me, this is just my take on it, I would not presume to know the depths of the pain that you feel or how this is affecting you and your family other than to say,
we mourn with you and we stand with you and pray with you. I've had some loss in my life and just sitting here talking to you today thinking about what... the name of the show is anything is possible,
what possibilities could emerge out of tragic loss like this. For me in my life, loss eradicated any... any centilla of a judgmental spirit.
I just don't have a lot of judgment for people anymore. It awakened a deeper level of empathy. Like, I can feel when somebody's in pain and it's not that I have a solution to that pain,
but I'm also not afraid to be present with that pain. Sometimes that's exactly what people need, it's somebody that can just bear witness to what they're going through. Not solve it, just, I'm here, I'll show up at the hospital every day,
I'll be in your life every day, just... and things come into more full relief. And I would imagine as a coach already you pay attention to not only the performance, but hey, what's going on with you?
I would imagine that that's even more evident to you. Absolutely. I mean, 100%, the... I feel the same. I feel more... maybe a depth of empathy and understanding and compassion for other people,
way less judgment, a different sense of perspective of what's important.
Is it deepening the level of love you have in all your other relationships though? Because that's what shocked me was... Completely.
The people that surrounded me through some of my darkest moments, I felt the love, I recognized it, it may have always been there, but not only did I feel the love that I needed, but I wanted to be a participant, I wanted to love that way.
I think it awakens that ability to love, the sense of the energy that comes from love, our mutual friend Doug Banister said, isn't energy in fact love, or love in fact energy, and I believe that's true.
And the... I think the other thing that maybe I've realized, and hopefully I can be more articulate as this process goes on, but the joy I felt has been incredible.
It's my appreciation for just beauty in the world, small things that are actually just spectacularly stunningly beautiful.
And those could be acts, those could be something in nature, could be a connection.
So much more beauty in the world than I had been in the habit of recognizing. And that's almost like... I don't even want to put it this way, but it's what you get when you experience the depths, the inexplicable depths of loss and sorrow.
That for me, the impossibility of still wrapping my mind around the fact that this person who is so much a part of me, I can't find him.
He's... if I wanted to find him, I couldn't. And the answer I always come back to when I say he's nowhere, is he's actually everywhere.
And we... I carry him with me. He's here forever. And he's... the ripples that are kind of coming back from the impact that he's made on so many people keep kind of washing over me also.
What do you want to say as we wrap in honor of Ben?
I'm incredibly grateful for the Knoxville community, the swimming community, people who have kind of reflected back the impact of Ben's life.
It keeps reflecting back on me and reflecting sort of outward in the community, to our family. And it's... and those reflections are, I think, just based on the tremendous love and appreciation for the impact that he had.
What a great, great life and legacy. Matt Kredits, thanks for being on Everything Is Possible.
Thanks for having me, Aaron. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for letting me talk about Ben.