What Yaxel Lendeborg’s Story Tells Us About Formation
Paul Tan
If you are watching Michigan continue its run in the NCAA Tournament —Yaxel Lendeborg leading his team, throwing down a dunk that made his own coach Dusty May say he was “in awe”—you are enjoying a 23-year-old playing at the peak of his powers. Big Ten Player of the Year. Consensus First-Team All-American. Projected lottery pick. Leading the number-one seed into the Sweet Sixteen.
You did not see what made him.
For that, you need a minivan in a driveway in Pennsauken, New Jersey, on a school night in 2019. A mother who has driven to her son’s friend’s house at ten o’clock because he will not come home. A seventeen-year-old who has been cut from the basketball team three years running for grades so low the school stopped asking him to try. A kid whose grandfather—his “second dad,” the man who understood him—died when he was seven, and who has been falling ever since.
She does not start the car. She just looks at him.
Both of them cry. Then Yissel Raposo tells her son that he will complete ten community college courses in one year to graduate from high school. His first instinct is to refuse. But then, as he later described it, there is a moment where he stops talking and just looks at her face. And everything changes.
That moment is what formation looks like when the room is right.
• • •
The sociologist Hartmut Rosa uses the word resonance to describe the experience of being in responsive relationship with the world—when you act and the world answers back, when you are known and the knowing matters. Its opposite is alienation: a mode of relating to the world in which nothing answers back. The crisis of our time is that the institutions responsible for forming young people have become structurally incapable of hearing the frequencies those young people carry.
There is a distinction worth making between formation and processing. Processing manages, tracks, assesses, and discharges people in a language adequate to the situation but deaf to the person. Formation builds rooms where a person can discover who they actually are—where the frequency can sound and someone is there to hear it.
Yaxel Lendeborg’s story is a formation story. It is not, primarily, a basketball story. The basketball is what happened after.
• • •
Look at what actually happened in that minivan and you will find the anatomy of formation compressed into a single night.
First: a person who stays. Raposo did not send a text. She did not issue a warning. She drove to the driveway and sat in the car with her son. The neuroscience of attachment is clear on this point: the human brain was designed to be co-regulated by the presence of someone who does not leave. For a young man whose grandfather’s death had ruptured his earliest experience of being understood, his mother’s physical presence—not her argument, not her logic, her presence—was the intervention. Daniel Siegel calls this the foundation of human development: safe, seen, soothed, secure. On that night, in that car, a mother made her son safe enough to be seen.
Second: the truth spoken in love. Raposo did not coddle him. She gave him an assignment so demanding it bordered on absurd: ten community college courses in one year. Jocko Willink calls this extreme ownership—the refusal to accept a diminished version of someone you love. Becky Kennedy calls it sturdy leadership—holding the boundary without losing the connection. They are describing the same act from different positions: Willink from the side that will not let you quit, Kennedy from the side that will not let you go. Raposo held both. She wept and she gave the assignment. She did not choose between compassion and expectation. She understood, instinctively, what formation practitioners spend years learning: that the two are the same act.
Third: the person responded. This is the piece that no program can manufacture and no institution can guarantee. Rosa’s deepest claim about resonance is that it is uncontrollable. You can build the room. You can bring the presence. You can speak the truth. But the moment of encounter—when a person’s frequency sounds for the first time—cannot be engineered. Lendeborg describes a shiver passing through his body and a sudden clarity: Why would you do this to your own mom? That is the moment of resonance. It is unrepeatable, uncontrollable, and it changed everything.
• • •
But the formation did not end in the minivan. It never does.
Watch the arc. After that night, Raposo drove her son to Camden County College every morning before work so he could complete the courses. She found a basketball exposure camp for Dominican players in New York—behind his back—and dragged him there. When coaches noticed him, she lobbied them for a spot. When Arizona Western offered a place, she threw him a going-away party he never asked for and put him on a plane while he cried.
None of this is heroic in the way the sports media tells hero stories. There is no montage. There is a woman driving a minivan before dawn, making phone calls coaches did not return, baking a cake for a son who did not want to leave home. This is what Ursula K. Le Guin called the carrier bag theory of narrative—the fundamental human story is the gathering, not the conquest. The story of civilization is not the spear thrown at the mammoth. It is the bag that carries the seeds home. Raposo’s carrier bag held ten community college courses, a basketball camp registration, an Arizona Western application, and a faith in her son that no evidence yet justified.
And Lendeborg’s own journey follows the pattern Scott Barry Kaufman describes when he reimagines Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a sailboat rather than a pyramid. Security needs—safety, connection, self-esteem—form the hull. Growth needs—exploration, love, purpose—form the sail. You cannot unfurl the sail until the hull is sound. Lendeborg’s formation moved in exactly this sequence. The minivan repaired the hull: connection with his mother, honest reckoning with who he was, the first stirring of self-worth. Then the sail opened. Arizona Western. UAB, where he described himself as walking around every day with a huge smile on his face. And finally Michigan, where—critically—he chose the program that would form him over the one that offered him three times the money.
That choice tells you everything. When Kentucky reportedly offered seven to nine million dollars and Lendeborg chose Michigan instead, he was making a formation decision. He told the press he still had habits to break, that his approach to life was “kind of childish,” that he needed a program that would help him grow as a person, not just pay him as a player. His teammates describe him as someone who has matured visibly across the season—goofy and warm, but learning when to lock in. His roommate says he is on “Yax duty,” making sure Lendeborg brings his best. This is co-regulation in action. This is what a formation community looks like when it works.
• • •
And then the breaking that is not the end of the story.
Just before this season began, Raposo called her son and told him she had been diagnosed with appendix cancer. She had kept it from him to protect his season. She opened the call by telling him she loved him, over and over, before she could bring herself to say the word.
Makoto Fujimura writes about the Japanese art of kintsugi—the practice of mending broken pottery with gold, so that the repair becomes the most beautiful part of the vessel. The theology beneath the art is that brokenness is not the end but the site of the most profound making. Kaufman calls this post-traumatic growth. The language differs; the insight is the same: the crack is where the gold goes.
Lendeborg is playing this tournament carrying the weight of his mother’s illness. He is open about it. He is not performing resilience for a camera. He is doing what formed people do: holding the pain and the purpose together, because formation taught him they are not opposites. He wears his teammates’ jerseys during warmups to show them love. He credits his faith before every game. He says, of this year at Michigan, that it is the best year of his life—and he means it, and the meaning includes the suffering.
His mother cannot attend most games because of chemotherapy. But she has become, in her son’s words, “a famous mom.” People recognize her at restaurants. She calls him to report the news, laughing. He bought her a car. He pays her bills. The son she dragged out of a Madden marathon is providing for the woman who saved his life.
That is resonance. The world answered back.
• • •
I have spent thirty years building formation environments—community centers in south Seattle, shared tables, workshops where young adults who have been processed by every system in the country discover, for the first time, that they carry a sound the world needs. The young man who reads rooms. The neurodiverse young woman who hears pitches no one else can detect. The cook, the carpenter, the grandmother. They live in different circumstances than Lendeborg. Some come from foster care, some from refugee resettlement, some from neurodivergent lives that were managed rather than formed.
But the architecture of formation is the same. Someone stays. The truth is spoken in love. The person responds. The hull is repaired. The sail opens. The breaking, when it comes, becomes the place where the gold goes.
Yaxel Lendeborg did not need a program. He needed his mother in a minivan at ten o’clock on a school night, refusing to start the car until the truth had been spoken. Not every young person has a Yissel Raposo. That is the crisis. And the question her story makes unavoidable: What if we built rooms that did for every young person what that minivan did for him?
Not programs. Rooms. Places where someone stays, where the truth is spoken, where the frequency can sound, and where somebody is there to hear it.
Right now, Michigan is still playing. The Sweet Sixteen is this Friday. Lendeborg is still carrying his mother’s fight alongside his team’s. He said after the Saint Louis game that this team is still learning from its mistakes, still growing. Still being formed.
But here is the detail that turns the story from illustration to icon. Yissel Raposo was in the arena in Buffalo on Saturday. Mid-chemotherapy, three sessions from done, she was in the stands when her son threw down the dunk that stopped the building. The cameras caught her reaction—arms up, face lit, the joy of a mother watching the boy she pulled out of a minivan become someone the whole country can see. After the game, Lendeborg told CBS: “I know she’s over there smiling super hard, dancing, so we get to talk about it later.”
Think about what she was watching. Not just a basketball game. She was watching the frequency. The sound her son makes when the conditions are finally right—the sound she spent years building the room for, driving the minivan for, baking the unwanted cake for. She was hearing what she always heard, what no system or assessment or eligibility report could detect: that her son carried something the world needed, and that her job was to refuse to let him lose it.
The boy she would not give up on became someone worth not giving up on. And the woman who saved his life was there to see it—dancing in the stands in Buffalo, three chemo sessions from done, watching her son light up an arena. That is not a sports story. That is the sound a life makes when the conditions are finally, at last, right.
Paul Tan has spent thirty years building formation environments for young adults, immigrant and refugee families, and neurodivergent communities in the Puget Sound region. He is the founder of Good Protocols, SPC.