I've spent most of my life in and around sport. As a player, then a coach, then a parent watching from the sideline — and through all of it, someone who thinks and writes about what the athletic life teaches. About pressure and presence. About what we're really doing when we compete, and why it matters beyond the scoreboard.
The Practice began as a place to work those questions out in writing. It has grown into something broader.
Sport is still here. But so is the harbor at first light. The songs that knew something about me before I did. The people who stayed during the hard seasons. The gardens that insist on returning. The grief that clarifies. The beauty that arrives without asking permission.
What connects it all is a single conviction: that how we show up — in the small moments as much as the big ones — is everything. That presence is not a gift some people have and others don't. It's a practice. It can be cultivated. It can be lost and found again.
These are the essays, reflections, and longer pieces that come from that conviction. They are not prescriptions. They don't tell you what to do. They are an attempt to pay attention honestly — to sport, to nature, to music, to the people we love — and to write down what that attention reveals.
The name is simple. Practice is where life is shaped. Not in outcomes or applause. In repetition. In return. In beginning again.
-Peter
The Practice has been my writing home since 2021.
I’ve spent much of my life coaching, teaching, and learning — from athletes, children, colleagues, and those I love.
Over time, my attention shifted. Less toward achievement alone, more toward presence. Less toward winning, more toward growth. I became interested in how people recover, how they regulate themselves when the moment tightens, how they lead with quiet steadiness.
What appears here was not invented. It was absorbed — and lived. From teachers, coaches, family, and friends. From love and loss. From long walks and songs that took root. From books that moved me, and the authors who imagined them. And from staring at the stars on warm summer nights.
I’m the author of The Why of Sports: Finding Meaning, Presence, and Purpose in the Game and Beyond, and the founder of Integrative Coaching.
But here, I’m simply practicing.
Paying attention. Writing things down. Trying, imperfectly, to live with heart.