Did you know? Tim Fatheree Shares Life Lessons from the Diamond

PartnerSource Claims Manager Tim Fatheree is known for hitting home runs in his work helping employers take good care of their injured employees. Did you know that Tim was a part of a national championship winning baseball team? The experience of training and working with a dedicated group of committed teammates is knowledge Tim draws on daily.

“I grew up playing baseball. I come from a ‘baseball family.’ Baseball was something I enjoyed. I attended North Central Texas Junior College in Gainesville, Texas, and we won the NJCAA Division I National Championship in 2001. This was the first national title in any sport for the North Central Texas Junior College Lions.

The sport of baseball taught me a lot about life, and being on a championship-winning team took everything to a new level. Here are a few of the lessons I learned:

To be successful, you need to learn to work with a variety of personalities. When playing at the college level, the sport takes on a different role than when we played when you were young -- it almost becomes a job and your teammates are your work colleagues. Your days include waking up at 5:30 a.m. for a group workout before attending class from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. After class, you practice until 5 or 6 p.m., and then you play against other teams. You also have games on the weekends. All of this means you’re with your teammates a lot! Learning how to work with many different types of people consistently is very important to the success of the team. Some people may be easy and some more difficult, but you have to work within that so that you don’t become an issue within the team.

Personal accountability is critical -- and it can positively influence others. When you play at a high level, you learn how to be independent and complete your role within the confines of a team together with others. On a team like the one I was on, there were many leaders. Many of the guys on my team went on to be successful in life at the different things they did, and you could see that even at the college level because of the accountability they would take and the way they would handle themselves. When you are around other high performers, what you find is that you need to raise your own level to whatever the leaders are doing; you don’t want to be the weak link. That taught me how important it is to surround yourself with people who are committed to doing their very best while I’m striving to be the best teammate I can be, too. It also taught me to avoid toxic work environments that drag the whole team down, because a positive environment with people who are committed to creating excellence helps everyone across the board.

Chemistry should not be overlooked. We all lived in the same dorm together and our stringent curfews and rules meant that we were together all the time.  You learn a lot about people when you spend that much time with them. After practice was over and dinner was done, we would get washed up and meet up in a room to play games -- often Risk -- until curfew. We were building chemistry even outside of the sport, learning each other’s personalities and how we meshed with each other. A number of arguments would break out over a game of Risk! All of this helped us to learn each other, build team chemistry, and ultimately function better as a group. 

Accept failure; it’s a part of success. Baseball is a game of failure: The best players in the history of the sport failed 7 out of 10 times when they went to the plate. Those players that failed 7 out of 10 times hit .300 and now they’re in the hall of fame! It’s a game of setbacks, and you have to accept that, but learning how to overcome those things and correct mistakes allows you to get better every day. How to persevere and endure in difficult circumstances is an important lesson. There’s so much that goes into competing and getting yourself ready to compete consistently at a high level, no matter what goal you’re chasing. Whether it’s the countless days spent practicing or the time you have to take to learn a new skill – they may all be things you didn’t necessarily feel like doing that day, but they are important to your overall success when you keep striving for it and working towards it. Failure is just part of the process of creating personal success.”

Tim Fatheree is a claims manager at PartnerSource, where he works on a team to support PartnerSource clients. As a claims manager, Tim provides support to the directors and team leads by reviewing ABD letters, conducting file reviews, creating summaries and providing feedback, assessing summaries for potential liability, and working on appeals.