There’s a difference between the elite and everyone else. Elite by definition means superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society. Elite is not good. It is not great. It certainly is not above average. To be elite means you’re among the best.
The Stars and Stripes Classic pitted America’s two most elite Special Operations Forces against each other on the lacrosse field.
To talk about what it means to be elite, not just in sports but in anything you do, Fran Racioppi sat down with Paul Rabil. Paul is the co-founder of the Premier Lacrosse League and undoubtedly one of the most elite lacrosse players to ever play the game.
Paul is multiple time NCAA champion, a four year All American, he holds NCAA records for the most goals, assists and points. He is a multiple time Player of the Year and two time champion. He holds the most points in professional lacrosse. He is what every young lacrosse player ascribes to be.
Paul is also an elite visionary and businessman. He developed the PLL out of the gaps he saw as a player. Now he’s changing professional sports and how athletes are treated by owners.
Check out our conversation from the endzone of Gillette Stadium to learn how anyone can be elite if you’re ready to put in the work and relentlessly execute. Head over to our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast platform to catch all the action from the Stars and Stripes Classic.
Don’t forget to go to Green Beret Foundation to join our 18 Series Match Challenge to support our team as the Snakeeaters took on the Frogmen.
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There’s a difference between being elite and everyone else. Elite, by definition, means superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society. Elite is not good. Elite is not great. Elite is certainly not above average. To be elite means you’re the best. The Stars & Stripes Classic pitted America’s two most elite Special Operations Forces against each other on the lacrosse field.
To talk about what it means to be elite, not just in sports but in anything you do, I sat with Paul Rabil. Paul’s the Cofounder of the premier lacrosse league and undoubtedly one of the most elite players to ever play the game. Paul is a multiple-time NCAA champion, a four-year All-American. He holds NCAA records for the most goals, assists and points. He’s a multiple-time player of the year and two-time champion. He holds the most points in professional lacrosse. He’s whatever a young lacrosse player ascribes to be.
Paul is also an elite visionary in business. He comes out of the PLL out of gaps he saw as a player. Now, he’s changing professional sports and how athletes are treated by owners. Check out our conversation from the end zone at Gilette Stadium and learn how anyone can be elite if you’re ready to put in the work and relentlessly execute. Head over to our YouTube channel or your favorite platform and catch all the action from the Stars & Stripes Classic. Don’t forget to go to the GreenBeretFoundation.org to join our eighteen-series match challenge to support our team as the Snake Eaters took on the Frog Men.
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Paul, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
Thank you for having me, Fran.
We’re at Gillette Stadium. We’re standing in the end zone. It’s getting dark out and it’s the first game for the PLL. It just happened. The chaos one, Andy Towers, is coming on next, so he’s going to be in a good mood.
He will be in a good mood, I would imagine.
We got one more game to go. Before all that started, we started the day with the Stars & Stripes Classic, Green
Beret Foundation versus Navy SEAL Foundation. The brainchild of yourself, your brother Mike, who we had on and Charlie Iacono from Green Bay Foundation CEO. First off, I have to thank you for setting that up.
It was our distinct honor. It was a privilege to do that. What I said at the Green Beret dinner, it’s bare minimum work of showing gratitude for us with the most authentic way where you have guys who played Division One lacrosse who are now serving and representing our country and protecting our freedom. There were skilled fucking ball players.
For me, as a former player and fan of the game, I was ready to pack it in after that first game. I know we have these two quarterfinals going on but that was like a dream. I’ve played with some of those guys around the field and know them from my times growing up in and around the sport. I admired a few of them and a few of those guys I played against. It’s just an amazing sport that it brings us together. Even though there were a few scuffles out there between the Berets and SEALs all the way down the end, and then what do you do? You’re right to handshake and big hugs as a sense of shared intention among our special forces and that’s pretty amazing to see.
I’m sitting here with one of the greatest who’s ever played the game. You know that and the stats show that. What did you think of their play?
Great. Some of the guys who are understandably perfectionists and are self-critical are coming to me afterward. They’re like, “Sloppy.” My response is, “Lacrosse is sloppy.” That’s also the beauty in it. It drives a coach nuts when you mishandle a ball or a defender dislodges it. From an offensive perspective, it might feel sloppy but a great play for defender and that’s just the nature of the game.
As I’ve said before, it’s an indigenous game. It’s been played in so many different variations. The ball is meant to be picked up off the ground, be dislodged, passed, and checked. They’re shot in the net, faced off. It’s the essence of the game. I don’t care if I’m watching kids who are playing the game for the first time or former Division One players like we did or the pros. That’s part of the essence of what we see. They’re like, “That’s true.” Embrace the suck type of thing. By the way, there weren’t a lot of turnovers. There’s probably like 1 or 2 unforced because the guy was going for it and make a 20 yard skip.
I thought that they played a hard-fought game. You’ve got to quantify it. These guys aren’t picking up a stick, catching, and throwing every day. What do you got to do? You’ve got to work hard. You got to be tougher. You have to try to win ground balls, get up again, and go after it. I want to ask you. You made some comments that resonated with me. Coach A was on. We talked and you talked about toughness and the extra work. When we think about your playing career, your ability to operate for a long time at an elite level. I look at toughness and the extra work. Why are those so important?
There’s a lot to say about this subject matter, especially when you’re having conversations with Green Berets or Navy SEALS or professional athletes. Anyone who is top drawer at their respective discipline. I believe personally that there is an intersection of work ethic and some innate skill. A lot of nurtured skill with intellect.
What I was talking about is a few things. One of which is studying the warrior poets. The commanders in chiefs going back to ancient Greece and ancient Japan and the samurais. They were not only the best war heroes. They were also the best diplomats. When about our Green Berets, our veterans, and our Navy SEALs, oftentimes, we just think that they’re out on the field. They’re fighting and they have more durians and resilience.
Intellectually, we don’t have as many conversations around what they do to prevent all that from happening. If you look at where we’re here at Gillette watching the quarterfinals, a lot of intellect goes into being a great athlete. That’s my first thought. The second, to your point around what it takes to be elite, there is a level or multiple levels that separate the elite from those who are excellent.
One Nick Saban quote that I love is, “We have five choices in life. We could be bad, average, good, excellent, or elite.” Only getting us here would be the first three. There are a lot of people around the world who would be quite pleased with being excellent then there’s elite. Those who choose to be elite, it’s a lifestyle. It’s regular sacrifice. It is grueling, hard work. Here’s the thing I have learned. It doesn’t get easier. You have to be someone who’s committed to knowing that the journey is constantly full of ups and downs. There’s not a goal post that when you become a Green Beret or a Navy SEAL or PO player, all the sudden, we’re good. It doesn’t exist.
That’s day one. What I tell guys all the time, professional athletes who I work with and guys looking to go to be a Green Beret or Navy SEAL, you go to selection. You pass selection and assessment. You go, you do your training and you walk into your team room just like when you get drafted here. You get selected and you walk into that locker room. You just got a seat to the table. That’s it. Now, this is day zero. You have to come to work every day now and earn the right to stay here and get on that field.
I’ll share a quote with the elite who are reading. It’s a quote that’s resonated with me since I was in college. It doesn’t resonate for anyone who’s not aiming to be elite. It’s, “It’s more difficult to maintain success than it is to achieve it.” I say it’s difficult for most people to resonate with because they just want to achieve success once. They realize when you’re there, now the game is about staying there. What happens is people want to take you down.
When you achieve success, now the game is about staying there.
You also have to be aware of not only those who want to take you down, but the next crop of people who are just going to surpass you, who’s constantly pushing you and keeps you up at night. You have to be disciplined. You have to be passionate about what you do. You have to surround yourself with amazing people who believe in the same mission and every day, you clock in. I think about caressing about life, isn’t it?
It is. You have an opportunity every day to reset that clock. What happens a lot of times is that people beat
themselves up. They think, “I wasn’t 100% perfect.” Sometimes, you’re not going to be. The question is, when you woke up this morning, did you say, “Yesterday wasn’t good enough? What did I do wrong? What could I do better? How do I make today a better opportunity than it was yesterday?” The character.
When we do assessment and selection for special operations, we don’t care a lot of times if you don’t have the skill because we believe we could teach you the skill. What we need you to have is the character. We need you to demonstrate things like drive, integrity, resilience, adaptability, curiosity, and team ability. When you have those things, we break you down to your core to display those to us. When everything is wrong, when everything goes the opposite direction and you get up and take action. You think through a problem and find a solution, even if it’s not the best. If you do that repeatedly, that’s a person we will train and make as a skill.
I’m telling you that’s the answer to the test and athletes know that, but it’s hard where you’re describing that level of high character. I’ll give you an example in sport as I often get asked by high schoolers, “How do I get recruited by Andy Shay?” who is sitting over there and the head coach at Yale or Dave Pietramala at University of North Carolina.
I said, “Here’s what you do. You’re the first on the field at your tournament that they’re watching you at. You’re getting shots in before the other teams come. When your team comes, you’re organizing a huddle,” because it’s a hodgepodge group of All-Stars when you’re going to a recruiting showcase. It’s not like your high school team. What happens is everyone stands around and no one does warm up. Organize line drills and stretching. Sprint on and off the field. When there’s a loose ball, dive for it and celebrate louder than anyone else when your teammates score. That’s it. That’s the answer. You’ll get recruited by all of them.
I didn’t say score goals. Stop the ball. It’s all that saw skills stuff, that character stuff to your talking about. We could say it, but still very few people do it. That’s something that you can’t fake. With character, you don’t fake integrity. You can try it, and someone will suss it out. By the way, it’s fucking hard. Sprinting every time you’re inside of this rectangle. It’s a lot of ground to cover. We saw it with the guys who are the fittest men in the world.
It’s not, especially if you’re not doing it every day. You’ve carried this idea, this passion for eliteness, beyond the field, into the corporate world and the private center. You need it building a business. As I talked with your brother Mike about this, starting a professional sports league is certainly no easy task. I’ve got my own business. I’m not only in the podcast business but I’ve started businesses security and operations. The hardest thing I’ve ever done.
People are like, “Was it hard to be a Green Beret?” Yes, it’s hard to be an entrepreneur and a lot of ways, but I didn’t go out and say, “I’m going to go build a professional sports league that’s going to go out there and compete for talent one day with the NFL, baseball, and hockey,” because that’s what we’re doing.
We got kids out here who have a choice. They’re not watching football. They’re watching their heroes, as if I had watched Tom Brady earn those six banners for Boston. They’re watching these players. They’re watching you and making a choice now, “I’m going to commit to this game.” Talk for a second about the vision that you had because I heard it started in a bus that broke down in Israel where you had a captain of audience and you said, “I got this idea.”
If you’re fortunate enough to be able to pursue a career in something that you have loved for most of your life, consider yourself lucky, which I feel that I am. I’m an entrepreneur by necessity. It is the way I describe it. I made it. I was drafted number one overall in 2008 by the Boston Cannons. I stepped foot out of a, I believe, the stadium right here in my senior year in the championship we played Syracuse. We lost 13 to 10. There were 55,000 people in the stands.
In the next week, I went to Rutgers Stadium to play against the New Jersey Pride in front of 200 people. This is the elite and these are the pros. It’s very contrasting. I continue on year over year and I was one of the first full-time lacrosse players because I said, “I don’t care if I’m making $15,000.” My principle and my philosophy in life is that if you don’t go all in, you’ll never reach your potential. I’m going to go all in for as long as I can.
I won championships and MVPs, but the business went through change. We’re still playing in front of 500 or 1,500 people. We didn’t have a network partner and didn’t bring a new sponsor. At the time, by the way, it was social media and streaming beginning, you could see MLS, NWSL, UFC, and F1 begin to take off. Pro sports just used to be about the mode of the big four. “Why?” I was scratching my head, and then it began to become the part of necessity.
If I cared as much as I said about this game, the posterity of a game that means so much to so many people. I have, fortunately, the intellect to try to create some change, but then I need to start taking that serious. I don’t like whether it’s in a locker room or in the workplace. People are just criticizing without coming up with solution. It’s easy to criticize.
It was easy to criticize Provo Cross. For some people, it still might be, but if I’m damn sure of where I believe this sport can go, being the oldest team sport in North America now being back in the Olympics and being once in the Olympics in the early 1900s to having product market at the college level, a fastest growing women’s game in any other team sport, not sure how we’re going to do everything we can to innovate and grow without getting into the next step which led to the PLO.
That was my experience. I was the consumer in start-up language. I was the player in sport and it was something that, on this side of the house where I’m the entrepreneur, I have a unique ability to understand where the players feel and what the front office and ownership view. That is an advantage when you look at traditional sports leagues that are started by the wealthy. They weren’t playing.
We have this symbiotic relationship with our players that is allowed us to grow quickly. There’s a long way to go. Maybe the soft skill side of this is in entrepreneurship, it’s two things. It’s about the strong, the fast, but more importantly, those who can endure. We often romanticize the cover of Inc. Magazine and some founder of AI or the next technologists and the unicorn company that’s not worth a couple of billion dollars. The deal we talked about on that cover is a 25-years of work that went into it. Everyone’s an overnight success. There’s no such thing as overnight success. That’s a big part of how I think about your success, our success is enduring. You’ve got to keep going and you’re playing the long game.
It’s so incredible. As you’re talking, you’re talking about this success. You’re six years into this, and we’re sitting here, and we have the teams coming out. Denver is going to take the field. How does it feel now because you talked about how you felt as the player with the 200 people? You got the vision, you start to create, and busting your ass. Mike talked about sleeping on hotel room floors, crying and bleeding. Now, you look around and we’re Gillette Stadium. Your team’s coming out and there’s a crowd here.
They’re on playing on ESPN. Michael Dell started Dell Technologies has the saying called be pleased but never satisfied, BPBNS and you know this as an entrepreneur. When I look around and see empty seats, I’m like, “Fuck, man.” I look around and see Denver Outlaws players right in front of us and Maryland. I’m a hardcore fan. I can’t wait to see what Brennan O’Neill does. I can’t wait to see what the veteran Matt Rambo and Zen Williams do.
I live in a duality. I enjoy it. I used to stress about it like trying to do multiple things at the same time. When I was doing that, I started to leave with my brother was playing in it. When I retired, I was like, “I’m just going to focus on the league. No, I’m a dual or a triple type of guy. I like to work on multiple things. I’m project-based. That’s how I function. I can’t wait for this game. I can’t wait for the rest of the season. I can’t wait, honestly, for us to do our next start to Stripes Classic and see what the POs in 2 and 3 years as we approach the Olympics in 2028. You have to love what you do.
We do. If it’s not working, you get up every day and you just do it. You do it because you want it, not because you have to.
You also have to learn. For me, attempting to become a subject matter expert is so important in entrepreneurship because part of what we’re asking to do is be predictive and make bets. The best way to be predictive is to understand history. There’s documentation on history of the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, UFC, and English Premier League. Even Alliance Football League, the Power Tennis Tours to the Olympics rise and fall and rise again. I want to know it all. That stuff interests me. That’s my daily reading. I can be smart around this stuff. Being able to be a subject matter expert is table stakes if you’re getting into any line of work in a complex industry.
You’re seeing it every day with what you’re doing at the PLL. I told everybody that I meet, “It’s Pro.” There is no cutting corners. I come from an organization and people say, “What’s it like to be Special Forces?” I tell there’s nothing special about it because you have to execute the fundamentals without compromise to a higher standard day in and day out, unwavering a relentless pursuit to standards.
You guys are doing that every single day. It shows on the field and with the partnerships you’ve created. It shows with the relationship that’s been built between you guys, the Green Beret Foundation and the Navy SEAL Foundation. I believe a lot of that is a testament to you, your attitude, how you played as a player, and how you built a culture around that.
I appreciate that.
Thank you.
Thank you. I’ve got a question for you.
Usually, it doesn’t work that way on the show. I like it.
Everything you described resonates for me around standards, execution, focus, getting up every day, having passion for what you do, and being a good communicator to your team internally and externally and then it’s hard. I’m curious for you as an entrepreneur, how you process the hard times, whether it’s alone or with someone or people. At what point do you go, “I got that out. I’m ready to turn the page?”
I tell myself that this is the work that has to be done. No one’s going to do that work but me. That is the phrase that goes through my head. This is the work that has to be done because we talk about solving problems in Special Forces. What’s a Special Operator? What’s a Green Beret? Somebody that we could deploy to a problem. We might not have to find the problem, but we know we need a solution.
We’re almost never going to get to a perfect solution. We’re never going to have somebody who’s like, “This is 100%,” and then it’s going to be easy because we had to think through it. We’re going to find that solution that’s always going to be 80% or 85%. What’s the last 15%? That’s the work. That’s the sweat. That’s the, “It’s 11:00 at night and I had a coffee and went back into my office until midnight. I’m falling asleep now, so I put my shoes on and went out to the barn. I worked out for 45 minutes, so I can come back in here at 1:00 and get two more hours.” That’s what I tell myself.
When I do that, that motivates me. A lot of people will say, “Why do you work out in the middle of the night?” Why? It’s because I had to wake myself up because the work has to get done and I’m the guy doing the work. I’m going to do whatever it takes with a relentless pursuit to achieve my goal. It’s not easy.
One of my favorite writers is Ryan Holiday and his best book is called The Obstacle is the Way, but it’s that. Hard times are the obstacles and if you can shift your mentality to run the obstacles out. That’s exciting. That’s the word that I have to do that resonates.
It’s not that you don’t want to do it. It comes because I want to do it.
Yes, because you look at your history and you go, “Shit. Those hard times, I got better after that.” The hard times don’t come as
freakingly as the good when you have some good runs. It gives you rest. The hard stuff’s coming around the corner and that’s when you’re being called. You better be ready.
Alright, we got to get you to this game, but I appreciate you taking time with me.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for everything you’ve done for the Green Beret Foundation, and Navy SEAL Foundation, and supporting our Special Operators. I can’t wait until 2025. I look forward to the follow-up with you and continue to build this relationship.
Likewise. As I started, it’s bare minimum work. You guys do the great work and we’re so grateful for your service. The freedom that you enable still live in America. It’s like Nick Lavery said, “Freedom is not free.” Thank you.
Thank you.
Green Beret Foundation
P.O. Box 25138
New York, NY 10087-5138
15618 Summit Park Drive, Suite 801 Montgomery, TX 77356
Call: at: (844) 287-7133
