Get Real with Caroline Hobby · Nashville Podcast Network

Getting Real with Dax: Survival, Faith, Rage, and What It Means to Be a Man

·1 hr 5 min·4 clips

With 32 seconds left, Dax says his coach finally called his name in a game that could send Montana to March Madness.

The guest tells a story about one shot he did not take. A teammate passes the ball, the moment slips away, and the miss hangs around long enough to shape the next two years of his life. He cannot shake it. The conversation follows how the coach did not want him back the next year, how three projected minutes the following season made the choice to leave feel final, and how the whole thing turned into a private lesson in pressure and regret. He keeps replaying it. Even after he transfers, the memory keeps pulling him back to the same spot on the floor, where he trains until the wound turns into a habit and the habit turns into scoring. That is the strange part. By senior year he is leading the conference in scoring at the Division II level, with 80 percent of his points coming from the exact place where the old mistake happened. He is still working through it. The talk leans hard into the way a person can turn embarrassment into repetition and repetition into identity, especially when the brain keeps dragging the old moment back for one more look. Then the story opens up. He describes visiting Montana last year and finally letting the loop go, not because the past changed, but because he did. That shift matters. A message he wrote on the locker room board during the transfer era shows the same instinct at work: if he could not fix the moment, he could at least put language around it and keep moving. The episode stays close to that impulse. It is a conversation about self correction, discipline, and the odd hope that comes from trying to rewire a painful memory instead of pretending it never happened. Nothing here feels tidy. The best parts are the ones where he sounds most exposed, because the story gets bigger whenever he stops trying to look composed and just tells the truth about how long it took to let go. That honesty lands. Listeners who want a candid, emotionally direct interview about regret, persistence, and finally letting a defining moment loosen its grip will find plenty to hold onto.

As heard by us

One missed shot turns into a blunt, honest account of regret, repetition, and letting go.

A missed shot becomes the wound that shapes the whole conversation. It keeps returning to that split second, then to the transfer that followed, the replay of the moment, and the hard work of turning embarrassment into something usable.

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Why you'd press play

For when one missed shot keeps replaying in your head.

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