Monthly Archives: December 2011

Z Is For Zenith: 8 Top Posts Of 2011

Leadership, Team chemistryCoaching philosophy

Please join me for a fun series. My mission, and I’ve chosen to accept it, is to write a post based on each letter of the alphabet. The English major inside of me is very excited about this project…and my inner nerd is even more fired up! Keep checking back as I tackle the intangibles of sport…from A to Z.

It’s that time of the year again. Everywhere you look, there’s a top ten list for this or that, so I figured I shouldn’t be any different. Here’s a chance to read my most popular posts again. “Team” seems to be a common theme here, so I suppose we’re all trying to figure out how to be the best we can be for our players…and that’s awesome.

#8: Fake It ‘Til You Make It: An Introvert’s Leadership Guide. Did you know that 75% of people are extroverts? Those are the folks who love social situations and being around people…they thrive in this environment. So what’s an introvert to do in a world dominated by extroverts? Check out this post to find out.

#7: Can You Sum Up Your Coaching Philosophy In 8 Words Or Less? Much like you wouldn’t get in your car and start driving without knowing the route, you shouldn’t coach without a coaching philosophy. It’s a great measuring stick of where you are and a guiding post for where you want to go. This post is based on a Harvard Business Review blog which says that most mission statements are too long and we don’t actually remember them. Read this post to find out how to create a coaching philosophy that will stick.

#6: 8 Ways To Help Your Team Overcome A Weakness. Every team has a weakness, just like every player has a weakness. Every offensive scheme has a deficiency…as does every defensive system. The best way to camouflage those weaknesses is to be honest about them and figure out to minimize them. Check out this post to learn how to keep from beating yourself and get on the road to success.

#5: The Top 5 Qualities To Look For In Team Leaders. We need great team leaders and captains for our teams to function at a high level. This post includes five characteristics and five corresponding questions for us to consider as we cultivate our captains.

#4: 3 Lessons Your Team Can Learn From The Movie Hoosiers. I’m a sucker for a good sports movie. I don’t care if I know how it’s going to end at the opening credits (the good guys win), it’s fun to experience the struggle of a group of people press toward accomplishing their goals. Hoosiers is fun to watch with your team and this post gives a few talking points you can go over with your team.

#3: 3 Actions You Can Take Right Now To Make Your Team Excellent. I’m fascinated by the concept of excellence…I suppose that’s why I’m a coach. I enjoy reading books about folks who are at the top of their game, whether they’re business leaders or sports figures. Check out this post to learn how excellence isn’t reserved for some secret society of people, but for those who are willing to consistently and attentively work at it.

#2: 5 Ways To Make Conflict Work For You And Your Team. “Conflict” and “conflicts” are the top two search terms that bring people to this blog. That’s why I believe in teaching conflict management with my teams, because it’s clearly something we all struggle with! Small, unsolved problems can snowball into gigantic barriers to your team’s success if not addressed. Check out this post to find out how to encourage conflict resolution as a healthy way to build great team chemistry.

*drumroll please*

The top post of 2011 was…

#1: 7 Things We Must Teach Our Teams To Make Them Better Leaders. Based on an article called, Today’s Students Need Leadership Training Like Never Before, this post details the seven pillars of leadership that we can share with our student athletes. What if the backbone of our coaching philosophy was a desire to create great leaders…and we had an organized plan in order to accomplish it? This post gives us guidelines to do just that.

This year flew by quickly, let’s stay committed to learning how to get better at our craft for the new year!

Y Is For Youth Sports: 5 Reasons Kids Should Play Sports

Youth sportsTeam chemistry

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My purpose for writing here is to connect with other coaches who are as nerdy about coaching as I am. Those folks who can’t get enough about leadership and team building and all sorts of intangibles. Which seemingly puts the topic of “youth sports” squarely outside of the perimeters of what I’m supposed to be talking about here. I’ve talked in many different ways about the wonderfulness of sport and the fact that I believe in the power of athletics to cultivate greatness. Kids receive intangibles from sports as well. They may be different intangibles than high school or collegiate athletes, but they’re intangibles all the same.

5 reasons I think sports are great for kids

Social network. Sports are a great way to make friends. Kids find other people their age who are interested in some of the same things they are…they get a sense of belonging. Perhaps the young person who feels uncomfortable asserting themselves or being aggressive in a classroom environment will step out of their shell on the court or field.

Healthy habits. At the youngest levels, kids learn that drinking water is good for them, orange slices give them good energy, and that exercise is a good thing. Beyond that, they learn that relying on others for their own success is the hallmark of “team”.

Develop discipline. Having worked with elementary aged students, I know that it can sometimes resemble herding cats…cats that are all hopped up on caffeine. Sport teaches kids the importance of being on time, sticking with what you start, working hard when you’d rather be somewhere else, and that you’re accountable to others.

Manage emotions. I’ve known folks who coach middle schoolers and they have to teach young people how to control their emotions so that they’re actions can stay under control. Talk about a lesson that will last a lifetime! Those who coach that age group understand how to teach teamwork (and how to squash the fight between basketball players who think the ball isn’t being passed enough), conflict management (it’s not okay to blame your teammate for the team’s loss), and team roles (everyone can’t be a starter).

Personal success. Sport is a way for our children to stand on their own two feet and have their own accomplishments. They’re no longer so-and-so’s daughter/son/sister/brother…but a person of their own right. Athletics is the place where they can say, “I did it!”

Most athletes aren’t going to play sports in college…and even fewer will get scholarships to do it. Hopefully these are five solid reasons for you to get the kids in your life involved with athletics.

Like this post? Check out 4 Reasons Our Children Should Play Sports (Or My Love Letter To Athletics).

X Is For X-Factor: The Secret Of Success

Coaching nerds, CollaborationTeam chemistry

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X-Factor: “An unknown or hard-to-define but important special property.”

Much like Judge Potter Stewart famously said about another “x” word (x-rated movies), I may not be able to intelligently describe what the x-factor is…but I know it when I see it! Young folks might call it swagger. Coaches may call it confidence. If asked, John Wooden may have called it poise. Whatever it is…I know it when I see it. So rather than talk about what the x-factor is, let’s talk about what it looks like.

If you’re a …, then the x-factor looks like…

Player. Years ago, I had a player on my team who was tall, but she wasn’t my tallest player. She was good, but not my best player. She could hit, but she wasn’t my best hitter. She was a good defender, but her technique (despite my efforts) wasn’t stellar. She wasn’t a lot of things, but she was a winner. Whether it was practice or live competition, this young woman elevated herself and those around her to play at a high level. She played with a focused intensity that simultaneously frightened and motivated her teammates. Her x-factor: Confidence in who she was as a player and an unapologetic requirement for those around her to step up.

Administrator. God bless those folks who want to be athletic directors and hold other administrative positions within athletic departments. I used to think that I wanted to be an administrator until I saw what their jobs entail. Every institution is different, of course, and will require a different x-factor to be successful. If you operate a club team, your x-factor might be an ability to shamelessly promote your club and your members. If you work at an elite prep school, your x-factor would entail the amazing ability to put out fires from entitled athletes and parents. The ultimate x-factor for an administrator would be to find the right institutional fit for you and your skill set.

Coach. I like watching coaches coach their teams. It doesn’t have to be my own sport, I just enjoy watching the different ways in which coaches can manage their program. Back in the day, I was friends with a soccer coach who was a goofball type of guy. His teams were successful and, quite honestly, I’d attributed his team’s success to players coming in with a high level of skill rather than his “coaching ‘em up”. Since I’m a coaching nerd, I asked to watch one of his practices to see what he was doing. It was wonderful! His drills weren’t anything different than any other soccer coach would use, but his manner with the players was masterful. His players hung on his every word and responded enthusiastically to what he said. He ran an organized practice (just like I’m sure we all do), his players were quite skilled (like most of ours are), and I could tell he knew his stuff (as I’m sure most coaches do)…but there was something different about his practice. His x-factor: He was connected with his team. They spoke the same language and they had a high level of respect for him.

Every now and then, we run into someone who impresses us…though we just can’t put our finger on why. That person just might have the x-factor. I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it!

W Is For Work/Life Balance: How To Stay Sane In Season

Work/Life balanceCoaching career

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“You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.” ~ Jim Rohn

What a great quotation! Coaches work crazy hours and long hours…but let’s make sure that we’re getting the most from those hours. I understand that telling this to an in-season coach is like poking an angry bear, but I’m doing it anyway! Let’s strive to stay balanced so that we’re bringing incredible value to each hour we’re in the office.

4 things we all need so that we don’t “lose it” while in season

Organization. I’ve found that most times when I’m feeling overwhelmed or like there aren’t enough hours in the day, I’m just flying by the seat of my pants instead of having a plan. If I start the day thinking, “Oh my gosh, I’ve got so much to do and it’s all super important and there’s no way I’ll finish it all”…I’m going to have a bad day. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. I have to remind myself that it’s impossible for it all to be super important (super important defined as having importance and a deadline)…that way I don’t forget to get my practice plan finished for the day.
An understanding partner. If we’ve got a family at home, they’ve got to give us a pass sometimes. We may not be able to mow the lawn, or shovel the driveway, or make dinner, or vacuum the rug, or whatever the chore is that we’re supposed to do. For me, I like to make dinner for my husband and family. But sometimes it just can’t be done. While I worry that if I don’t cook, they’ll just have pop tarts for dinner, I’ve come to grips with the fact that pop tarts won’t kill them…not right away at least. A helpful partner is huge!
The ability to stay present. When I’m home, I’m home. I’m not on the computer trying to get more work done. I’m not on the phone calling recruits. I’m not thumbing out texts to my team. I’m talking about how my day went or sitting down to a nice meal (of pop tarts!) or dominating a game of Sorry with the family. I’m gone too much to not be home when I’m at home. Maybe you don’t have a family, but you’ve got amazing friends who miss you when you’re in season…maybe you can grab a cup of coffee with them for some non-shop talk.
A willingness to shrug it off. At the end of every day, I have things left on my to-do list. When I come into the office, I move the old stuff to the new list. This is one of the gems from Franklin Covey’s planning system. I prioritize, do what I can, call it quits when necessary…and do it again the next day. Sometimes I end up completing a task just because I’m sick of writing it day after day! Some days, I check a lot off of my list. Other days, I chat with my team and with my coworkers so much that not much of the list gets completed. That’s okay, chatting is good for the soul! There’s always tomorrow.

If we want to stay in coaching for the long haul, we’ve got to take care of ourselves. Use these tips so that you can stay sane and try not to lose it.

V Is For Victory: Cultivating Competitive Greatness

Pyramid of successCoaching philosophy

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John Wooden defined competitive greatness as being at your best when your best is required. Competitive greatness isn’t required during warmups, but it will be during the scrimmage portion of practice which may have a penalty attached to it. Competitive greatness isn’t required in your first game of the season, but it will be during a conference match that will determine whether or not you make the post-season. Competitive greatness isn’t required when the score is 0-0 against your arch rival, but it will be when the score is 23-23.

So what is it exactly?

3 steps to being great when greatness is required

Take patience to cultivate. Teaching players how to manage their emotions, thoughts, and body when the outcome of the game rests on how they perform is the toughest skill to teach in sport. Embracing competition and being competitively great are two very different things. I’m sure we’ve all had the player who saw themselves as an athlete, carried themselves as an athlete…but unfortunately wasn’t that skilled of an athlete. Performance is the key component here. It’s our job as the coach to give our athletes the tools they need to calm their emotions, to perform physically, and most importantly, to have positive self-talk in crunch time.

Embrace challenges. My teams enjoy competing at the end of practices, they really look forward to it. I’ve noticed competitively great players enjoy the mental aspect of the game: exploiting an opponent’s weakness, staying calm in stressful situations, and relaying vital information to teammates which will aid victory. Even their physical approach to the game is amped up. They’re over-the-top fired up when their team wins a point. They grab their teammate to make sure they have eye contact…if only to tell them how awesome the previous point was. Competitively great players find “the zone” and bring others along with them.

Perform under pressure. A few years ago, my team was losing a match…down two games, one more loss and we’d lose the match. They fought the opponent off in the third game, down 1-2. Now they were starting to believe. They kept fighting and won game four, tied it 2-2! Until this point, we were just battling and that was the team’s whole focus. With the tide turning in our favor, this was prime competitive greatness territory. In the time between games, I told them this was their time to be competitively great. I even defined it for them: do what you always do…nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary, don’t go and try to do something you’ve never done before. Being competitively great means doing what we’re counting on you to do when we’re counting on you to do it. We ended up winning that match 3-2.

Some players never experience being competitively great, but continue to shrink under pressure. Let’s challenge our players to get out of their comfort zone and take a chance at greatness. We all want our athletes to experience the joy that John Wooden says “comes from being involved with something that challenges your body, mind, and spirit.”

Ebook Now Sold With FREE Pyramid Of Success PowerPoint

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ebook page

Okey dokey. I did my Motivating Female Athletes presentation at the American Volleyball Coaches Association convention and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Not only am I humbled that something I said made an impact on people’s lives, I’m excited because I believe in this stuff.

Everyone should love coaching female athletes.

Lots of folks asked me about how I use the Pyramid of Success with my team, because I talked about it being the guiding post for our team when we battle “girl drama”. Enough people asked me that I have included a powerpoint presentation of how I use the Pyramid with my team when you buy my ebook, “Coach Dawn’s Guide To Motivating Female Athletes”.

Not only does the Pyramid help me with “girl drama”, but it helps the team set goals, gives us a common language for how we’ll be successful, and shows the team what it will take to achieve the ultimate goal.

The presentation goes through each block and has a place where you can click to hear me talking about how I implement each block with my team and the thought process. So if listening to me for an hour at the convention wasn’t enough, you can listen to me for another hour talk about using John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success with your team!

Hopefully this offer sounds good to you and you’ll buy the ebook which I’d sold previously without the powerpoint presentation for $9.95…and I’m still selling it for $9.95 even with the additional materials.

Please click on the “Add To Cart” button so that you can purchase “Coach Dawn’s Guide To Motivating Female Athletes” and you’ll receive a FREE powerpoint (2010 version) called “Guarantee Your Success: Using John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success To Increase Your Team’s Cohesion”.

You can find out more about the ebook by clicking on this page.

The 3 U’s Of Leadership

LeadershipTeam chemistry

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I think coaching is the greatest profession in the world! When people ask me what I’d do if I won millions of dollars and could do anything at all…I always say coach volleyball. I love it! Now, I may do it at a part-time assistant level that would free me up to travel the world in the off-season…but I’d still be a coach. Of course a major reason is because I love my sport. But the main draw of the coaching profession for me is the players, the team, and all of the intangibles. One of those intangibles is leadership. Let’s see what leadership qualities our captains need to have in order to be successful team leaders.

3 qualities of great team leaders

Ubiquitous. This is a fancy way of saying these players seem to be everywhere at once. As coaches, one of our major limitations is our inability to be everywhere our players are at all times. That’s where our captains come in! It’s not that they’re checking up on their teammates (though sometimes they are), but rather that they’re always being seen doing the right things. Whether it’s on or off of the court, our captains are held to a different and higher standard than their teammates.
Unflappable. Our team leaders have to have a sense of calm amid the chaos of stressful situations: practices, games, etc. I’ve had teams with poor leadership where just looking at the players stressed me out. But I’ve also had teams where I never worried about their reaction to being down late in a game, a tough practice, or when there are challenges for playing time.
Understanding. Our captain’s main job is to be tolerant of the different personalities on the team. I believe that most conflict on teams happens because of personality differences more so than personal differences. Hopefully we’ve equipped our players to recognize those personality quirks. They’ve got to help the coaches manage players who may have failed a test, had a fight with their best friend, or just found out that their grandparent is sick. It’s not easy being a captain, but being understanding will go a long way with their peers.

Cultivating leaders is a fun, challenging, and ultimately rewarding endeavor. So keep your eyes peeled for those future leaders on your team.

Click here and you can get Coach Dawn Writes articles emailed directly to your inbox! It’s free and easy…and I promise this is a “no spam” zone.

Reminder: I’m speaking today at 11:30

Coaching career, Female athletesCoaching career

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Top 5 reasons you should come see my talk today at the AVCA Convention

It’s not super early! Even the most social of butterflies should be able to make it by 11:30 am.
Who doesn’t want to learn more about Motivating Female Athletes?
I’d love to meet you face to face.
I’ve got some good stuff for you, I’m pretty fired up about my presentation.
Championship game is tonight, let’s talk about who we think will win!

Hope to see you soon!!

T Is For Title IX: The History, The Myth, The Reality

Female athletes, Title IXFemale athletes

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I’ve said it a million times on this blog in a million different ways: sport isn’t just about sport, but about learning the intangibles that will benefit its participants for the remainder of their lives. Title IX enabled a whole new segment of our society to experience the joy of athletics…check out this post to learn more about what Title IX was intended to do and if it’s accomplished its mission.

The history. I was at a conference a few years ago and learned that Title IX isn’t just a sports amendment…all I’d ever heard about it was in relation to gender equity for collegiate athletes. In reality, the law prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in any educational institution that receives federal money…from kindergarten to university. Apparently, back in the day, schools would favor men in admissions policies, recruitment strategies, and financial aid packages. That would clearly limit women’s access to education. Title IX came about in 1972 to alleviate this problem. It turns out that equity in athletics was a happy by-product of a much broader law.

The myth. There are a lot of them so I won’t talk about them all, but I did want to hit a couple of them. The first is “we don’t need Title IX anymore, everything’s all good.” While things are most certainly better than they were before the amendment, we’ve still got a long way to go. In terms of athletics, women receive less in scholarship money and less in opportunities to compete…so we still need folks to be mandated toward equity. Secondly, a prevalent myth is “women’s sports are causing men’s sports to be cut.” Schools aren’t cutting men’s sports because of women’s athletics…they’re cutting them because that’s the choice they’ve made. Participation in men’s sports is growing. Administrators have decided to cut some sports (notably men’s track and wrestling) to bolster financial support of more popular sports.

The reality. Check out these numbers from the Women’s Sports Foundation and Equity Research Center:

Male athletes still receive 55% of college athletic scholarship dollars;
Women’s teams receive only 38% of college sport operating dollars and 33% of college athletic team recruitment spending.

All is not lost though! Check out some of the great things that have happened since Title IX was enacted:

In 1995, women made up 37 percent of athletes in college, compared to 15 percent in 1972;
In 1996, girls constituted 39 percent of high school athletes, compared to 7.5 percent in 1971;
In 1994, women received 38 percent of medical degrees, compared with 9 percent in 1972; 43 percent of law degrees, compared with 7 percent in 1972; and 44 percent of all doctoral degrees, compared to 25 percent in 1977.

I believe athletics has made me a better person and I can’t imagine my life without sports. Title IX is important to me because I believe in the benefits of sport…and I want to make sure everyone has as level a playing field as possible to experience those intangibles.

Want to know more? Check out Title IX: A Brief History from the Equity Research Center.

Come See My Session At The AVCA Convention

Female athletesCoaching career, Female athletes

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I wanted to hit pause on the A to Z series so that I can let you know that I’ll be speaking at the AVCA convention this Saturday. If you’re here in San Antonio, I’d love for you to stop by and hear my talk and most importantly…introduce yourself!

It will be a classroom session at 11:30 a.m. (Room 217A) and the title is, “Motivating Female Athletes”. I’m excited about it and I certainly hope you’ll come check me out!

Here are the subtopics I’ll cover:

The socialization of females
Identify your ideal female athlete
Create team chemistry
Battle “girl drama”
Train leaders & followers
Create a competitive culture

I’m such a convention dork…I love everything about it! I’ve learned so much at them over the years that I’m pretty fired up to be able to give back.

See you in a couple of days!