Monthly Archives: July 2011

5 Reasons Why Athletes Are More Prepared For The Real World

Coaching philosophy, Leadership, Team chemistry

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I love the intangibles…it’s what this blog is about, after all! I don’t just love them because they help my team to find success. I think they consistently prepare my teams, individually and corporately, for life after their time in my gym is complete. In this final post of “I Love Coaching” month, check out why I think our athletes have a leg up on all other graduates when it comes to being successful in the real world.

Real life lessons our teams learn a.k.a. “I’ve failed if…”:

…my teams don’t know how to win and lose with grace. A sore winner is just as bad as a sore loser in my opinion. In their time with me, I hope to teach my players that humility will go a long way to ingratiate them with folks. So whether it’s on the court or in the boardroom, athletes should be ahead of the curve in understanding how to handle themselves with grace in all situations.

…each member of my team doesn’t understand how to be a good leader and follower. Can someone be a leader if no one follows? I don’t think so. Leaders and followers have quite a tight relationship. If a leader is perceived as abusing their power, then their followers will turn on them. On the other side of the coin, the followers can’t be fighting the leader for that title. A good captain or team leader will have a good relationship with their coach, while also being able to navigate potential problems with their teammates. What a great quality to take into their lives after college! Similarly, a good follower will make themselves an invaluable asset for their leaders…also a great quality to have. I’m sure all of us have been both leaders and followers (sometimes in the same day!) and it’s a great lesson to pass on to our athletes.

…my players don’t know how to work well with different personality types. Generally, I’ve found out the players who rub each other the wrong way are a rough mix when it comes to personality types. I think that educating my team through giving them personality assessments is a powerful way to show them the teammate that drives them crazy isn’t doing it on purpose…it’s just how they’re wired. As soon as they all realize that something they do is annoying to someone else, hopefully they understand that they shouldn’t take things personally. So when your extrovert player is sharing an office with an introvert, she’ll understand that her officemate is just quiet…not mad at her for being too loud.

…my teams aren’t high achievers. Just like players don’t get on the court or field without being producers, they won’t succeed in the business world without standing out from the crowd. If competition doesn’t excite my players to excel, then something is seriously wrong.

…my players can’t put the team’s interests before their own. That statement means so many things. It means not wallowing in pity for yourself when you’re having a bad game. It means cheering your heart out from the bench if that’s where your coach deems you should be for the moment. It means being genuinely happy for a teammate’s successes. It means not complaining about the coach behind her back. It means not complaining about your teammates behind their backs. Being on a team carries the burden of supporting the team at all times.

I can’t imagine that folks in the business world don’t give an extra look at the resume with participation on a varsity sport on it…and we didn’t even talk about having to balance academics and athletics! Athletes are driven, focused, team oriented, and understand team dynamics. If we’ve done our jobs right, they are well-prepared for life after sport.

Like this post? Check out 3 Ways That Team Sports Prepare You For Life

How To Create And Maintain High Functioning Teams

Coaching strategy, Recruiting

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Recruiting. Most coaches have a strong reaction to that word. It’s either something like, “Yippee!!” or an expletive that can’t be written in this blog. I tend toward the yippee crowd, because I understand what recruiting is…but before I get into all of that, check out this post I wrote a year ago when I started this blog The 1 Thing You Need To Be A More Effective Recruiter. I believe when we understand what recruiting is, we take a more active and engaged interest in potential student-athletes. Recruiting is our chance to make an impact, to teach young people leadership, team building, goal setting…more on that in the next post. And if we’re lucky enough to coach female athletes, we have the added opportunity to show them that girls and women can not only get along in groups…they can achieve great things together. We don’t get the chance to teach these lessons if we don’t get our recruiting on! That’s why I’m talking about recruiting during “I Love Coaching” month.

Now that we can agree that recruiting is more than putting together a bunch of folks with an array of skills that will benefit the team (though that’s certainly important!), let’s talk about the four quadrants that make up a successful recruiting class.

  1. Scout. This is the beginning of the process. The most obvious way to scout is to attend recruiting events. I won’t talk about how much I love the first view when I walk into a convention center and witness volleyball courts as far as my eyes can see…it’s glorious and it never gets old. More important than scouting is being connected. If we have contacts with club/AAU teams, high schools coaches, even other college coaches, we can maximize our efforts.
  2. Contact. Once we’ve got athletes that we’re interested in, then it’s time to get in touch with them. Whether that’s going to see a practice, watching a game, calling, emailing, talking to their club coach, home visits…whatever you can do within the rules of your league is fair game. If you’re not doing it, someone else will.
  3. Visit. Any Admissions professional will tell you that your odds increase dramatically if you can recruits on campus. Sooo, we’d better make sure we get them on campus! Not only do they see campus, they get to sit in on a class, meet your team, and generally see what campus life would be like if they were to attend your college. I know some coaches who threaten their team with copious time on the bench if they’re negative with a recruit. I’d prefer to remind them that someone took time with them when they were still making their college decisions and now it’s their time to return the favor. Also, they don’t want the team to be awful when they leave…the only way to ensure that the level of play stays high is through recruiting efforts.
  4. Retain. Plain and simple, we’ve got to keep them on the hook. We don’t want to spend months and months on an athlete, only to have them snatched out from under us because we thought we had them wrapped up. Use your team, have them send your recruits emails or hook up with them on Facebook. Of course, we should stay in touch with them and remind them of why they fell in love with our team and our college all those months before. In the last few weeks before I got married, my brother advised me to “not screw it up now”. Great advice! Basically he was warning me not to become Crazy Wedding Lady and forget to show my hubs why we were doing this in the first place. Coaches, we’ve metaphorically “wooed” these recruits…let’s not screw it up by not closing the deal.


Recruiting is any team’s lifeblood. I think remembering that our job as a coach is to teach life lessons through our sport will make recruiting more meaningful and less of an obligation.

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Believing And Achieving: How Groups Accomplish Goals

Coaching philosophy, Goal setting

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It’s almost a cliché for a coach to talk about setting goals. It’s how we’re wired. We want people to be successful…and how can you be successful if you don’t have a goal in mind, right? Helping people achieve things that they did not know they were capable of is one of the many reasons that I love coaching. Since I’ve taken it upon myself to bestow July with the tag of “I Love Coaching” month, goal setting fits in very nicely.

The easiest 4-step process for goal setting ever!

#1: Set the goal. In my post, Effective Use Of Films For Goal Setting, I talk about using the movie Hoosiers to help your team aim high with their goals. It’s frustrating for me to sit down with an athlete and ask them what their goals are and they shrug their shoulders. If they don’t know what they want to do, then my impact on their life will be minimal at best. Just slightly better than the shoulder shrug is when they tell me that they want to win. Of course we all want to win and more than likely they’re just saying what they think I want to hear…but winning is an outcome. It’s the result of a process. That’s when I have to refocus them on the things about the process that are within their control.

#2: Go after the goal. Our athletes need three things in order to accomplish their goals. They need a task…that’s the goal. They need a support system because none of us can do things alone, we like to think we can, but we can’t. Luckily, our players are linked up to a ready-made support system—their team. The last thing they need is a reason to play, a stake in the game, a “push” to achieve that goal. I wrote about these things in my post, Here’s A Quick Way Your Team Can Accomplish Goals.

#3: Achieve the goal. Teams are all about goals and achieving them…but it’s a process and it is much easier said than done. I wrote in my post, The 5 Stages Of Accomplishment, that goals will probably be a bit overwhelming at first, then scary, then seemingly impossible before they get to the point of actually reaching the summit.

#4: Set a new goal. And because we can never be satisfied, achieving a goal just starts the whole process all over again with a new and more difficult challenge.

Setting goals sometimes makes folks nervous, because now their success or failure can be measured. It’s our job as the coach to give them the tools that they need in order to set goals that aren’t too lofty, yet not too low. In A High Stakes Game: The Goal Is Just The Beginning, I talked about the process of making sure a goal is appropriate for each person…check it out! I think it’s a great way to think through the goal setting process.

The Joys Of Coaching Female Athletes

Female athletes

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Usually, when I tell someone that I love coaching female athletes, the person I’m talking to starts giggling. Granted, I’m a pretty funny lady, but that’s one topic I don’t joke about. During “I Love Coaching” month, I’ve been talking about the things that make my heart happy about this profession. One of the biggies, and certainly near the top of the list, is working with female athletes. So whether you think I’m crazy and need to be convinced or you totally agree…read on to find out three of the reasons that working with female athletes rocks my world!

3 things I love about coaching female athletes

Teaching the intangibles. All the stuff that this blog is about: leadership, team chemistry, goal setting, the mental side of our sport…I love, love, love working with female athletes on that stuff! Why? Because I firmly believe that women can get along work together well, they just need to be taught how to coexist on a team. I believe that when the coach firmly lays out their expectations for behavior on the team, their female athletes will fall into line. Will playing time be yanked if you find out your players have been gossiping, fighting, or bullying their teammates? I bet they’ll stop that nonsense right away if it is. Confronting negative behavior while giving them a model of appropriate behavior is what coaching is all about…whether it’s tangibles or intangibles.

Lifelong benefits of sport. Think about this: research suggests that girls who participate in sports are less likely to get involved with drugs, less likely to get pregnant and more likely to graduate from high school than those who do not play sports. Why? Because they’re accountable to a team and a coach…something bigger than themselves. They won’t do drugs because they know if they get caught, they can’t play. They’re less likely to get pregnant because their self-esteem doesn’t come solely from the attention they get from boys…they’re confident in themselves. They’re more likely to graduate from high school because their coach probably has minimums for participation and she wants to play…so she adheres to the guidelines. Isn’t that awesome?

Feel the love! Female athletes love “the team”. Female athletes are so relational and caring that they can genuinely revel in the successes of their teammates. Check out this picture of the Penn State volleyball team as they celebrate a victory. They physically connect with one another, their eyes are locked, they’re tuned in!

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Now your job, Coach, is to sell your team on the fact that giving a correction to their teammate is loving that teammate. And that not accepting poor behavior off of the court is loving your teammate. Finally, that going all out every practice so that they can make each other better is loving their teammates.

Of course there are challenges associated with any team that we’ll coach, but those challenges shouldn’t be gender-based. If you’re coaching female athletes…consider yourself lucky!

Want more info on the topic? Check out my ebook, Coach Dawn’s Guide To Motivating Female Athletes.

Stay Classy: Handling Winning And Losing With Grace

Coaching strategy, Mental game, Team chemistry

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Have you ever played a game with a little kid? They are legitimately the worst at both winning and losing! You’re sitting down to play a friendly game of Candyland and find yourself staring at a crying, sobbing mess if you win the game. Or, you take it easy and let them win the game and they’re strutting around the room calling themselves the “King of Candyland”!!

That’s fine when the person is five years old…it’s what we’d call a teachable moment. Not too long after that and people stop wanting to play games with us because we’re poor sports.

The fact that someone is going to lose and someone will win is the contract our players figuratively sign when they shake hands and tell the opponents “good luck”. To ward off the inappropriateness of a team full of crying people after a loss or a bunch of egomaniacs pounding their chests after a win, we’ve got to teach the beauty of winning and losing with grace. And that’s yet another reason I love coaching…which qualifies this post for “I Love Coaching” month.

Winning with grace says, “Though you didn’t win, I appreciate and applaud your effort.” (That’s a little different than, “In your face!”).

Losing with grace says, “You got me this time, hopefully the next time we meet, I’ll give you a bigger challenge.” (That’s a lot better than, “You got lucky!”).

3 areas where winning and losing with class should be taught

In practice: Sometimes I’ll intentionally stack the deck against one team when we’re scrimmaging. It’s interesting to see the different reactions. Some players will rise up to the challenge. Others will visibly crumble under the pressure. I’m sure all of us remember game two of the NBA finals from this year, Mavericks vs. Heat. The Mavs were down fifteen points with just a few minutes left in the game. Of course, they came back to win that game and shifted the momentum of the entire series. I believe that putting our players into stressful situations where there is a winner and a loser (and a consequence for losing) is vital to developing their composure muscles.

In competition: One of the things that non-volleyball coaches always ask me about is why volleyball teams celebrate after each point…win or lose. I usually say that winning a point is the result of a bunch of folks doing their jobs correctly, and that’s definitely worth celebrating. And of course, time together between points can be where vital information about the opponent can be shared. Finally, constantly connecting with one another keeps the team energy up. There are so many defensive and offensive battles being waged during the course of a game that we’ve got to give our athletes appropriate ways to respond to the good stuff and bad stuff alike.

For playing time: This is probably the toughest one, because it’s winning or losing to a teammate. Years ago, I had a great player. She was the team’s best player and everyone was drawn to her, but she had serious maturity issues. Yada, yada, yada, I had to sit her down for a couple of games. Let me tell you what, she was not happy it about it! She didn’t voice her displeasure, that would’ve been too easy. She moped, went at about seventy percent in practice, didn’t cheer for her teammates, and just generally sulked around the court. Of course, I chatted with her and told her that there is a right way and a wrong way to respond to adversity. I reminded her that it was her behavior removed her from the court and that it would be her behavior that would return her to it…or keep her off.

These are tough lessons to teach, but they’re why we get paid the big bucks. Winning and losing with grace will benefit our athletes for the rest of their lives: with their bosses, in their personal relationships, and with future teammates in the business world. So it’s vital that we give them tools to be successful.

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If You Want To Build Your Team Chemistry, Then Hit The Road!

Team chemistry

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Road trips. Ugh! Booking hotel rooms, scheduling tournaments, figuring out where to get some healthy and tasty food. Sometimes road trips can be a pain in the neck. But…they can also be amazing ways for your team to come together in amazing ways. So, during “I Love Coaching” month, find out why I love a good old fashioned road trip.

4 ways overnight road trips will make your team closer

  1. Bonding. As dictionary.com says, bonding is “a close friendship that develops between adults, often as a result of intense experiences.” We get to supply the intense experiences (discussed below) and watch the friendships grow!
  2. Silliness. Defined as “absurd, ridiculous, or irrational” and those of you who’ve taken a group of young ladies on a road trip understand that all of those words apply. The good part of this is that we all have quiet folks on our teams that the rest of the team hasn’t really gotten to know yet and this is when they can break out of their shells.
  3. Friendships. Joseph Addison said that, “the greatest sweetener of human life is friendship.” I’d say they sweeten up a team pretty well too!
  4. Camaraderie. This means “a spirit of familiarity and trust existing between friends.” This definition shows us that camaraderie is a step beyond friendship…it’s the ultimate! It’s what happens after a long time together and it’s glorious. Most of us has have seen two people enter as shy freshmen, not knowing anyone—and very nervous about it—leave as confident seniors who can’t imagine their lives without one another. That’s camaraderie.


Why is all of that important?

I believe it’s important because they will have shared experiences and inside jokes that will make your team a “team”. When we first assemble as a group, most folks on the team have a picture of the previous year’s team in their mind’s eye, because that’s the last time we were together as a “team”. So the things they talk about, while uniting the returners as a team, will alienate your newbies.

Our first order of business as the leader, has to be to create some sort of shared experience. I believe preseason practices count (I still talk to some of my former teammates about the pain that was misnamed “preseason” when we were players), going to team building camps, and if you’re cash-strapped, the first tournament you attend will have to do.

All of this creates a team identity and gives them something to belong to…and something to work hard for.

But really, why is this important?

It’s important because your team will get good. They will forgive each other mistakes because they’re close, and that forgiveness will enable them to play freely…knowing that those mistakes won’t cost them friendships.

It’s important because they’ll know how to pull their teammate out of whatever funk they’re in on the court that keeps them from performing at a high level.

It’s important because they will play hard for one another because they care for one another.

And this is the starting point for successful teams.

10 Reasons Coaches Should Embrace Their Inner Salesperson

Coaching career, Recruiting,

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Coaching is a complicated gig…much more complicated than it seems on the surface. We get to wear lots of different hats. We manage budgets, we motivate, we fundraise, we’re PR people, we’re admins. In my mind, though, our biggest job is that of a salesperson.

Portrait of a salesperson

When we think of salespeople, we think of the slick used car salesman who will tell you just enough to get you into a car…and let you find out it’s worthless on your own. Or the pushy lady in the store who follows you around telling you how awesome you’d look in absolutely everything your eyes come across. What those two examples have in common is that those folks aren’t being totally honest. But when you really get down to it, coaching really is about sales (we’re selling our institution and program to recruits, selling playing time discrepancies to our teams, we’re selling what our program needs to our bosses), so we’ve got to make sure that we’re being authentic with everyone we encounter so that we don’t come across as salesy.

10 characteristics of successful coaches

I saw a nice listing of qualities that a successful salesperson should have and I thought I’d bring it on over here. Notice there’s nothing about lying or being sneaky or less than honest!

1. Successful coaches are persistent. Just as we don’t expect our players to give up after a setback, neither does the successful coach. Whether it’s on the court with the team or off the court with our athletic directors, we press on.

2. They are avid goal setters. This one is a no-brainer, huh? Goal setting is what we do! With our teams, with our staffs, with ourselves…we are always looking ahead to accomplish the next goal.

3. They ask good questions. If we do this early on in the recruiting process, hopefully our institution will be a good fit for our players. If we do this early in the playing process, hopefully each person on our team will understand where they fit in on the team skill wise.

4. They listen. The answers to those questions we asked above will show us a lot about the recruit if we listen. If we’re on the phone with them and they say they want to attend a small college where they’ll get a lot of attention…and we coach at a gigantic school, it’s probably not a good fit.

5. Successful coaches are passionate. We’ve got to love what we do. We’ve got to believe in our teams and what we’re building with our programs. If we’ve got all three of those, then we’ve got passion.

6. They are enthusiastic. It always comes back to the Pyramid of Success. One of the cornerstones of John Wooden’s Pyramid is enthusiasm. We’ve got to be fired up…it’s contagious.

7. They take responsibility for their results. We can’t blame Admissions or Financial Aid or another coach who may be negatively recruiting. Not just because no one wants to hear our whining, but also because we stay in control. Excuses put someone else in control of our coaching lives and none of us wants to do that!

8. Successful coaches work hard. Interestingly enough, the other cornerstone of John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success is hard work. We tell it to our teams all of the time…everything good comes from hard work.

9. They stay in touch with their teams. In recruiting, even after we know that they’re attending our institution, we’re still calling and emailing and letting them know that we care. With our current teams, we care about them as people rather than just athletes.

10. They show value. What do you value most about your program? Is it your winning history? The academic strength of your institution? The ability to participate in many extracurriculars? Whatever it is…that’s what we should be selling, plain and simple.


    As much as we may not want to admit it, we’re salespeople. I’m hoping this list showed you that it’s not such a bad thing. If we do it the right way, being a salesperson for our program and our institution can be a very good thing!

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    If You Fail To Plan, Then You Plan To Fail

    Coaching philosophy

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    As I was writing the outline for this post, I got to thinking that it teeters dangerously into the “tangible zone.” This blog is supposed to be about the intangibles of sport, but I figured that “I Love Coaching” month could be the exception to the rule. I wrote about the tangibles of the priorities of a coach in the last post…and there are more tangibles coming in the next post. Sooo, lest you think I enter the gym with pom poms and nary a practice plan, I suppose it’s okay to talk about some of the nitty gritty of coaching, right?

    As Hannibal from the A-Team used to say, “I love it when a plan comes together.” Planning has to be an essential part of any coach’s repertoire. Because I’m obsessive about my planning, I won’t break down every detail, but let’s talk about a couple of areas where planning and organization is vital. Planning makes me smile, so it’s another reason that I Love Coaching.

    Season planning

    I start thinking about the next season about a month into my current one. Seriously. I know it sounds crazy, but I start to see what we’ll be missing and what needs we should address through recruiting…and I take lots of notes about it. That’s the first thing: Figuring out which holes on the team will be filled through recruiting efforts and which will be filled through current player development.

    Then I start designing our competition schedule for the next season. To an extent, that depends on the team I’ve got coming back the next season. I was chatting with another coach at a recruiting event recently and she told me that she’s going to have a starting lineup of all seniors. Because of that, she’s getting after it with her scheduling and playing some of the toughest teams in the nation. As coaches, we’ve got to design a schedule that is challenging but not soul crushing…that’s the second thing. As usual, that all depends on the skill level (and leadership and experience, etc.) of the team you have coming back.

    The third thing is coming up with a theme for the season. As long as I’ve been coaching and wherever I’ve coached, I’ve always given my seasons a theme. It’s always based on a book that we’ll read together as a team over the course of the season.

    Practice planning

    The first thing I do when thinking through my practice plans is to assess the makeup of my team. Is it mostly newbies? Do we have strong leadership? Did we just graduate a strong class? All of those things go into the pacing of my practices.

    Every coach has a different way of teaching skills, I go weekly. Meaning that I want each skill required for my sport to be addressed during my practices at least once a week…that’s the second thing.

    Using competition as self-evaluations of our practices is the third thing. Years ago, a team I was coaching at the time went out and couldn’t block a volleyball to save their lives. If it touched us, something bad was bound to happen…and that was if we were in the vicinity of the ball. That signaled to me that we needed to focus more on blocking in practice. I usually take notes during a game of the things that stick out to me that we need to work on so that I can get them into a practice plan…and soon!

    The fourth thing is to tailor your practices to the stage of the season that you’re in. Preseason is all about seeing if your team is in shape and building “team”. Mid-season is when players are solidifying their positions on the team. It’s also a time for refocusing on the basics as well…sometimes the grind of the season breeds bad habits. Tournament season means short, focused practices. Their bodies are beat up by then, so no need to be in the gym for the sake of being there. Then the end of the season where we get to celebrate our time together, celebrate our seniors, and talk about off season training.

    As I said in the last post, having a plan and vision for the program is the head coach’s job…take it seriously and your teams will thrive.

    11 Things You Should Be Doing If You Are The Head Honcho

    Coaching career

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    So you want to be a head coach, huh? Well, I’ve always said that each coach in an athletic department is like the CEO of their sport. Then I got to thinking…is that actually true? Do I actually know what the job description of a CEO entails? So I did a handy dandy internet search and found a website called CEO to CEO with a list of eleven things that every CEO should be doing. So, during “I Love Coaching” month, you’ll appreciate why the bossy lady living in side of me loves being a coach. You see: I like to be in control, I like that the buck stops with me, I like (for lack of a better term) being the boss.

    Check out these things that are vital to a head coach’s job. Notice how many times we have to operate on dual planes…with our staffs and our teams at the same time.

    Head Coach Action Items

    1. Planning: Overall program direction, fundraising strategy, season plan (which should be the origin of our practice plans).
    2. Organization: Org charts for program professionals (assistant coaches, operational directors, administrative staff), job descriptions for those folks; also org charts for your team (captains, leaders, etc.) and a clear idea among your staff of what those players roles entail.
    3. Recruitment and development: The list calls it succession planning, I’ve always heard it said that we should always have a “replacement list”. In other words, when our assistants get plucked away for the next big job, we’ve got to have someone in mind to fill their spot. Clearly while they’re with us, we should be preparing them to be a head coach, if that’s their ultimate career goal. Additionally, we’ve got to recruit, recruit, recruit when it comes to our student-athletes and I think it goes without saying that we should focus on their skill development while they’re with us.
    4. Policy: Program rules for students and staff as well (especially for those of us with assistants that may have just graduated, rules for Facebook, going out, etc. will be necessary). Also important are annual policy reviews to make sure they are up to date.
    5. Standards of performance and performance reviews: How will our staffs know if they’re on the right track to success if you don’t have standards for them to meet? Same thing with our teams. If they don’t know what they need to in order to get better, success will be hard to find. Regular team and individual meetings will help clear the air.
    6. Controls: These are management tools. They include monthly recruiting reports (where does your school stand?, what contacts have you made with them?) and quarterly reviews (of fundraising efforts, alumni contacts, etc.).
    7. Morale: In terms of our staffs, that means everything from job satisfaction, communication styles, and salary negotiations. With our players it comes down to happiness at the institution, satisfaction with their position on the team, and their perception of how much they feel there will be opportunities for movement within the team.
    8. Product development: For teams, our “product” is the competition. We’ve got to evaluate our team after each competition and develop practice plans to address our needs.
    9. Community relations: This one is huge! Our team and our staff should active on our campuses as well as within the greater community. Not only is giving back good for the soul, it also gets bottoms in the stands to watch our games.
    10. Profitability and growth: As I said before, our product is competition, so that’s how we need to judge ourselves. How did our season end in comparison to what we anticipated? Did each individual player reach their potential? How are we improving in comparison to other teams in our conference? The answers to those questions should drive the next season’s recruiting plan, season plan, and development plan for each player.
    11. Relationship with board of directors: For most of us, this is our athletic director. I can’t imagine that it would benefit us or our programs to have a strained relationship with our bosses, so if that’s the case…time to work on that. At the very least, we should give them an annual report of everything we’re doing…especially the stuff that’s not in our job description. We can’t expect them to just know it, we’ve got to tell them.


    That’s a lot huh? Being a head coach is fun, it’s awesome, and it’s fulfilling…it’s also a lot of work! So the next time someone outside of athletics asks you what you’re up to now that your season is over, you can whip out this list.

    5 Reasons Why Game Day Excitement Never Gets Old

    Coaching career

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    Game days are the culmination of lots of work…over days, weeks, months, and even years. Game days are also amazingly fun. So here with post four of “I Love Coaching” month, let’s talk about the five things that are awesome about game day.

    1. Preparation. I love watching video and figuring out the puzzle that the opposing teams represent. I enjoy putting together the practice plans to get ready for competition. The other puzzle that’s fun to figure out is my team. What should I say to them to make sure they’ve got the right mindset for the game? Is there a story or anecdote that I can tell to fire them up/calm them down/show them I believe in them/keep them focused…whatever the situation calls for?
    2. Suiting up. Okay, I don’t actually wear suits to coach in, but I love that show How I Met Your Mother and Barney says that all the time. As coaches, we don’t have to put on a uniform (except for baseball, for whatever reason), so our game day attire is the way we can signal to our brains that it’s time to bring it. Quirk alert: I wear brand new tops for each of our conference games…I will not wear an old one. Those tops are judged harshly as winners or losers based on the team’s performance. Winners are worn in a non-conference competition at a later date…losers never see the light of competition again. This confession leads us quite nicely into the next topic.
    3. Superstitions. Obviously, my tops (while super cute) have no bearing on whether my team loses or wins a game…that little nugget of truth doesn’t stop me from doing it year after year though! My assistant does fist bumps with some of the girls before every match. I have no idea how he chooses which players to connect with in that manner, but if he forgets, they yell at him to come and perform the superstitious act. To add to the insanity, certain players only wanted to do the fist bump when we were on certain sides of the court. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be consistent. I wrote about game rituals in this post about skill development.
    4. Getting nervous. I still get butterflies in my stomach on game day. I’m not talking about crazy, like when I coached my very first game, nerves. But the healthy, this isn’t a normal day (but game day!) nerves. I fret over things I can’t control (like whether or not my team is properly prepared) as well as things that are completely within my control (like whether I should have the same lunch I had when we won the last game). Everything calms down for me though, at…
    5. …the first whistle. It’s magical, let me tell you! After the warmup music is turned off, lineups are announced, and the teams tell each other good luck…it’s time to see if it all worked. If the preparation was adequate, if my outfit is a winner or loser, if we can respond to the moves being made by our opponent. I love watching my team execute the game plan, and seeing their faces when things goes well, and their fortitude when they don’t.


    I’d love for you all to email me with what you love about game day…I’m sure it’s interesting. Then I can put together a post compiling everyone’s thoughts. Just let me know in your email if you mind me using your name.