Monthly Archives: May 2012

The Art Of Slowing Down For Greater Understanding

Coaching strategy, Mental game

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I love high energy drills. I love the way the gym sounds when my team’s engaged in those types of drills. I love the way I can sneak in some conditioning in those drills. I love the controlled chaos high energy drills create.

I was talking to a coaching friend of mine and she was describing a drill she really liked that was decidedly low energy. I told her that while her drill was probably great, it also sounded kind of boring. And she said (I’ll never forget it), “yeah, but sometimes that’s the game.” It’s so true! I hadn’t prepared my team for playing an opponent with low energy. I also hadn’t prepared them for the natural lulls that happen in our sport. And I certainly hadn’t prepared them, with my high energy drills, for playing a team that they were significantly better than.

Our world is so fast (we check our texts while we chat on the phone while we search the internet) that we’re losing the value of slowing down…and our athletes are losing focus because of it. What if we single-tasked instead of multi-tasked? Can our players really chat about their Chemistry homework and perform their drills correctly? Probably not.

3 ways we can slow our sports down

Slow understanding. How many coaches out there have tried to correct or teach a new skill to a player, only to have them give up seconds later? This is the world we live in now, where the average person switches their internet focus twenty seven times per hour. Don’t like it? Change it! Can’t figure it out? Don’t do it! That mindset won’t work in the athletic world and we’ve got to remind our athletes that it’s okay if they don’t master a skill at the moment they are being taught.

Slow seeing. To me, vision is what separates mature athletes from those who are immature in the sport. I’m not talking philosophical vision, but what the athlete actually sees when they’re playing. I’ve found that young athletes are much more reactionary than those who’ve been through the ringer a few times. You hear this a lot when folks talk about baseball or football…about how the game slows down for them when they’re in the zone. I believe we can teach this skill in our gyms and on our playing fields.

Slow thinking. I’ve got a little one at home and often find myself telling her to “focus”. She’s all over the place! I ask her to go put on her shoes so that we can leave the house only to go into her room a few minutes later to find her playing with toys…without shoes on her feet. The same is true of our athletes. I think we sometimes forget that we’re not the only people giving them work to do. We’re telling them to practice, lift, watch video, eat well. Their professors are telling them to study, do homework, come in early for office hours. Their friends are telling them to hang out and have fun. There’s a lot for them to balance and arming our athletes with the ability to block out the non-essentials will be key in their lives.

By forcing our athletes to slow down and give their sport the time it deserves, it will not only help them become better players, but (in my opinion) more engaged and present in all facets of their lives.

I got idea for this post from, Fleeting Attention Shortchanges the Art of Patience, on the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s website…check it out!

Good Intentions Gone Bad: Dealing With Difficult Players

Coaching strategy, Team chemistry

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Recently, I gave an interview talking about some of the challenges I’ve experienced as a coach and it didn’t take me long to recall a situation that I still regret even though it happened years ago. I certainly don’t want any readers to think that I haven’t had any difficult situations or players, so I figured I’d tell you the story of one of my failures.

The hot & cold player

Back when I coached at the high school level, I had a great team. Three of the players went on to play in college, two of them at top twenty five Division I schools. They were all good, but one of them was clearly the best.

The player, let’s call her Susie, had a magnetic personality. People were drawn to her. When she walked into the gym, all of the other players would make their way to her just to be in her presence. Susie would always have a funny story or some sort of wild and weird thing that happened to her during the day…she was a great storyteller.

Besides that, as I said before, Susie was our best player. Our best server, passer, setter, hitter, blocker…everything. She went on to be a four-year starter for a big-time program, so you can see, she was a major baller!

When she was flying high, there was no player I’d rather be around. But when she’d had a bad day or was just generally grumpy…Susie was a whole different person. Quiet, sullen, and withdrawn, she would go at half-speed (which was still better than most of the team!) through drills or not give full effort in games.

So what’s a coach to do?

4 tips for managing interpersonal conflict on teams (based on suggestions from this article)

Stick to the facts. Believe me, I tried it all with Susie. I tried to let her know that her teammates where in a weird position of trying to guess if she was in a good or bad mood and then they would respond accordingly. I thought if she realized how her behavior affected the rest of the team, she would try to change.

Use “I” statements. I told Susie about one of my teammates from college, who pulled one of the more selfish stunts I’ve seen to date. Again, trying to show Susie how one person’s actions can be harmful to the entire group. While she totally sympathized with the collegiate version of myself because she couldn’t believe one of my teammates would even try that, she didn’t see her behavior as selfish.

Seek to understand the other person’s position. I tried to let Susie know that I understood that she was in a tough position. There was a lot of pressure on her. Everyone relied on her to be the best player (all the time), to entertain the team (all the time), and to be a great leader (all the time)…she never got a break. I told her that I got it…I understood that she carried a heavier load than anyone else on the team. But I also told her that was the burden the best player carries, people will always look up to that person.

Frame the conflict as a mutual challenge. As I’m sure you can imagine, both Susie and I were sick of talking about this by the halfway point of the season. I was trying to figure out why she wouldn’t change her behavior and she just wanted me to leave her alone. I remember telling her we had a problem because her team needed her to be someone she wasn’t ready to be yet. She nodded. I suggested she take a break from volleyball. She looked shocked. I suggested that the break start immediately. She started crying. Susie took a week off, missed practices and games, came back after that week…and nothing changed.

The outcome

I’m sure you want to know what happened with Susie. Our season ended in the conference championship game, with Susie in tears. They weren’t happy tears, but tears of disappointment as she realized that our team wouldn’t win the big game. You all probably remember my aversion to tears from my players…especially before the game is over. Yep, you read that right, she was crying on the court!

I always try to remind myself that we never know at what point of the teamy progression we find our players. I liken it to planting a garden. We may be watering a full grown flower or we may be the first person to plant the seeds of teaminess within this person. So I try not to be too hard on myself, but Susie’s seeds didn’t sprout while she was with me.

Sometimes we coaches can do all the right things and still not have the opportunity to smell the aroma of that team-oriented flower.

All we can do is hope that it happens at some point. A lot of times, I read articles about conflict management and think of this young lady. I’ve only dealt with a personality like hers one other time in my coaching career. It’s rare, but sometimes it just doesn’t work.

Have you experienced anything like this? How did you handle it?

If you enjoyed this post, check out 5 Ways To Make Conflict Work For You And Your Team, A Step By Step Guide To Handling Conflict On Teams, and Teaching Our Players How To Handle Conflict.

4 Secrets Of Productive Coaches

Coaching philosophy, Connections

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I read a lot of business blogs and magazines, because I believe there’s a strong connection between coaching and the business world. Teamwork, leadership, excelling within a group construct…I think we coaches can learn a lot from the CEO’s and presidents of the world. This article on Inc.com, Secrets of the Most Productive People I Know, is one of those that I think is valuable to coaches. Here’s my take on that post:

4 keys to being the best coach you can be

They have a life. I know we coaches take pride in “getting after it” and working ‘til all hours of the night, so much so, it almost seems like we wear not taking days off as a badge of honor. But what if doing something of value outside of our jobs made us better at our jobs? Maybe you teach a Sunday School class at church, or take guitar lessons, or landscape your yard nicely. Whatever it is, having an outlet to take our minds off of the grind keeps us refreshed and excited for work when we get back to it.

They take breaks. Like assembling a thousand piece puzzle of the sky, our teams can present us with challenges. When we’re working on that puzzle and staring and ten pieces that look like they should fit, but don’t, sometimes we get up from the table, push our chair in, and come back to the puzzle later. In the same manner, when our team is experiencing a problem, sometimes we need to step away from racking our brains trying to find the elusive solution.

They’ve often worked in different industries. Whether it’s coaching at multiple levels or even different sports, it’s helpful to have a different perspective of what “normal” is. It seems that a lot of coaches come from the playing ranks (like me) and don’t necessarily have experience with different ways to skin a cat. Early on in my career, I would watch other sport coaches with their teams. I’d take notes about how the coach set up their practice, how they interacted with their team, how their drills flowed into the next, how they opened practice, how they closed practice, everything. Even for established coaches, challenging our norms is a good thing.

They have great outside collaborators. I’ve got a coaching friend that I can text with my random questions about our sport. I’ll ask her if it’s crazy to do whatever it is I’m thinking about and she asks the appropriate questions and we can work it out. I’ve got coworkers whose offices I can pop in when I’ve got a coaching dilemma and they help me work through whatever it is I’m contemplating. Our team won our conference tournament a couple of years ago, but I remember slumping into a chair in another coach’s office after the very first game of that season and telling him that I knew we had a problem. And we did. He and I talked and he gave me great ideas about the situation. With his help, I was able to solve the problem early on which made the championship possible.

While each of these points is different, the common thread is connectedness. Whether it’s being connected to something significant outside of work or having great coaching friends that we can count on…we can all be more productive if we use these tips.

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Thinking Strategically About Our Teams

Coaching career

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It comes naturally for coaches to think strategically about a specific game and how we can get the matchups we need in order to be successful. But what about thinking strategically about our programs? Where are we behind the times in terms of equipment, transportation, budgets? What type of recruits do we need to bring in to take our team a little higher during the next season? Where are we, as the coach, lacking the information/knowledge/skill to be at our best and how can we acquire it?

These questions and more should be part of every coach’s life at some point during the year.

5 ways to think strategically

Anticipate. For those of us who are nerdy about our profession, this is an easy one for us. Whether it’s chatting with coaching friends who can help us figure out what the next new thing in training will be or figuring out how to mask your team’s weaknesses with innovative techniques…anticipation is huge.

Think critically. To me, this means assessing your program. At the end of the season, we’ve got to question everything: our training, our recruiting strategy, our scheduling, our leadership. Then we’ve got to give ourselves an honest grade and decide whether things need to change or go in a different direction.

Decide. Perfection can never be the goal. If we refuse to make decisions until we’re one hundred percent sure and have heard from absolutely everyone involved, then we may never solve our team’s problem. Eventually we have to feel good enough about the information we have to step out and actually make a decision.

Align. I’m sure that most of us would say that our teams are not democracies, where everyone gets a say in how the program functions. I’m also sure that most of us understand that we still have to get our athlete’s and assistant coach’s input on certain issues. We’ve got to make sure we’ve created an atmosphere where we can approach our players and get an honest answer from them and where our assistants feel free to disagree with us.

Learn. I’ve talked before about personality assessments and how important they are when managing people. I think it’s essential to learn our player’s (as well as our own) personality types so that we know how to approach them for feedback. They are the folks who know what’s really going on behind the scenes, so we need their honest input as we’re putting together our list of things we need to put on the “strategic thinking” list.

How can we create space so that we have time to think strategically?

You may be thinking that this all sounds great, but who’s got time for all of this? I’d say that we all do, but we’ve got to be organized before we can step back and get strategic. Here are three things you’ll need:

A clear coaching philosophy. Strategic thinking can happen at any time during the season, but most likely it’ll be in the off-season. Knowing what we value as a coach (our coaching philosophies) will help guide us as we bat around difficult issues in our heads.

Strong leadership. Perhaps we’ve got great captains or involved assistant coaches, whichever it is, they’ll be crucial as we step into the bat cave for a bit to figure out what the next steps our programs take should be.

A connected coaching staff. For those of you blessed with full-time assistants…I’m jealous! My assistant coach is also a professor on campus. While he has another role, he is very connected with our players and often gets to see them in a light that I don’t. Beyond that, the players know that he genuinely cares about them and their welfare. Because of that, the burden of always being the person the players come to is lifted off of my shoulders…and I get to be strategic!

If we don’t take time to plan for the direction of our teams, I’m afraid we’ll be disappointed by where they end up.

Teamwork Is The Secret To Success

Practice, Team chemistry

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A lone cook in a kitchen can come up with a delicious combination of flavors, but to win big, you need to excel at teamwork.-The Secret Sauce of Teamwork

There are a couple of things I love as much as I love talking about coaching: gardening and cooking…especially on the grill. So when I saw that Harvard Business Review’s blog had an article that combining barbeque and teamwork, I knew I’d bring it on over here.

Putting a different twist on the quotation above: A lone player can be magnificently skilled and a joy to watch, but to win big, we’ve got to excel at teamwork. This thought process has played itself out time and again on every successful team I’ve coached. On paper, we may not be better than the opponent. Maybe even in warmups, we look like we’re going to get creamed…but something magical happens when the right mix of team chemistry combines the right mix of players.

The secret sauce.

3 keys for turning our teams into great teams

Come together. The whole purpose of a team is to do something that couldn’t be accomplished by one person alone. That’s why we come together. Beyond that, we’ve got to define what we want to accomplish…those are our goals. Our teams need goals when they come together at the beginning of the season and believe it or not, our teams need goals to stay motivated to come together each day for practice. Our job as coach is to give our players a reason to come together over a series of weeks and months.

Stay together. There are many reasons teams stay together. The aforementioned need for others in order to complete a specific goal is one reason…but that could be any soccer/volleyball/lacrosse team at any institution. Why should your particular team stay together? I’ve talked about this before but making sure each person on the team has a defined role is crucial. Each player on our team has to believe that they’re part of the secret sauce of our team…that no one else could perform their role as well as they can. This creates players who are invested and teams that stay together.

Work together. Practice after practice, day after day, week after week, and month after month…we ask that our teams work hard. It’s part of that ten thousand hour theory that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Outliers. As our teams get used to one another, they learn each teammate’s strengths and weaknesses (as well as their own), they learn how each player is motivated, they learn to test the edges of their ability. And eventually…they learn how to work together in order to become a successful team.

The secret sauce? It’s just understanding that individual talent cannot trump team success. Once our teams understand that, they’re on their way to winning big.

The 4 Stages Of Team Development

Team chemistry

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If you’re like me, you’re always on the lookout for ways to understand team development. Jeff Janssen does a good job explaining the stages in his Championship Team Building book and I enjoyed the S-Curve Trend of Team Development from a team building blog called, Create Learning. I believe that winning and losing hinge on team development, which makes it a critical piece to any coach’s season planning. Team development is as much art as it is science and I’m sure we’re all looking for fresh ideas to tackle an on-going issue.

The four stages that teams go through

  • Infancy. This is when our teams are developing an orientation toward one another, feeling each other out. During infancy, trust is established and each person is trying to figure out where they fit in relation to the team. For coaches, the focus isn’t necessarily on performance, but making sure everyone has a role and understands how to execute it.
  • Growth. This stage is a time of high productivity. Goals are clear and everyone on the team is committed to achieving those goals. For coaches, the focus is on increasing team chemistry and synergy. Synergy is when a group of two or more folks get together to achieve a goal that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish solo.
  • Maturity. This is when our team’s attention is on sustaining the high productivity from the growth phase. Maintaining a high level of team output is the key to maturity. For coaches, this is the time we should start thinking about preparing for the next s-curve to begin.
  • Decline. While the word “decline” sounds bad, it’s really a time for assessment. What worked and what didn’t? Should you have a player switch positions? What could the coaching staff have done better? Was the team properly prepared for success? Should we build a season plan similar to this one or scrap it and start new?
  • (Bonus) Secondary s-curve: Then the team starts up again the next season…now armed with the knowledge they’ve accumulated from previous years. In theory, each s-curve should be higher than the last as your team grows together. That’s why, more times than not, a team of seniors will experience more success than a team of freshman.


I think it’s interesting to look at these kinds of things as we think critically about our teams, our seasons, and how we’ll prepare for success.

6 Reasons Kids Quit Sports

Youth sports

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Writing a post about how kids shouldn’t specialize in a particular sport when they’re too young may seem a bit disingenuous for me. After all, as a college coach, I directly benefit from our culture’s obsession with organized youth sports. In my opinion, most kids in youth sports aren’t playing because they have a deep and lasting love of their particular sport, but because their friends play and their parents make them go. Sport should be fun for even the most highly skilled young athletes.

Beyond fun, parents and coaches should encourage youth athletes to play all sorts of sports so that their bodies can rest. Young kids can play volleyball in the fall, soccer in the winter, and run track in the spring. They’re still working out and being healthy, but not overtaxing the same muscle groups by playing the same sport year-round. You can read more about this by reading Dr. Geier’s blog post, How Young Is Too Young?.

So what makes kids decide to quit playing?

They’ve lost interest. After a year of playing, maybe your eight-year-old realizes that soccer isn’t as great as she thought it would be…that’s probably okay.

They’re not having fun. Even for my college athletes, I think fun is important. We play games, not works, sport should be fun.

They’re tired of playing. Think about the youth sport carousel: practice a couple of times a week after school, get up early on Saturdays and Sundays to play in tournaments…it can be a grind. I always wonder how the parents balance it all, maybe it would be a similarly good question to wonder how the kids manage it.

There’s too much emphasis on winning. While I believe in the value of teaching winning and losing with grace, if the coach or parent is just focused on winning (at all costs), I’m sure it can be taxing on the kid. I certainly don’t think everyone should get a trophy at the end of the day, but we’ve got to teach the children that there are winners beyond what the scoreboard shows.

They want to participate in other activities. Hopefully we want to create well-rounded children who play basketball and lacrosse…but who are also artists and singers and members of the orchestra. Participation in sports shouldn’t exclude our children from loving other things.

They feel too much pressure. It’s probably the coach in me saying this, but pressure from the moment (needing to hit a free throw shot to win the game) is a great life lesson. Pressure from their mom and dad in the car on the way home as they dissect every moment of the game is probably not the best.

Of course, there may come a time for middle or high school aged kids to focus on a particular sport, but there’s no need to rush it. Ultimately, we all want kids to love sports. We believe that sports are great for many reasons, let’s make sure we don’t steal the love of the game away from our kids.

If you liked this post, check out Y Is For Youth Sports: 5 Reasons Kids Should Play Sports, 4 Reasons Our Children Should Play Sports (Or My Love Letter To Athletics), and 3 Reasons Why Sports Are Awesome.

What Are The Most Desirable Traits For Leaders?

Captains, Leadership

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Did you know that there are twenty leadership qualities common to most organizations? Neither did I, that’s probably why I found this article very interesting. As we think of coaches we admire or players we’ve coached that have inspired us…it’s sometimes hard to put their leadership traits into words. This list is designed to give us words for what we know intuitively about great leaders.

20 leadership traits common to virtually all groups

____ Ambitious: Having a strong desire and determination to succeed.
____ Broad-minded: Open-minded to and tolerant of differing opinions and suggestions.
____ Caring: Compassionate and concerned with maintaining quality relationships.
____ Competent: Having the required knowledge or skill to perform a task successfully.
____ Cooperative: A team player who is interested in working toward the team’s common goal.
____ Courageous: Bold, daring, fearless, gutsy, brave.
____ Dependable: Reliable and trustworthy, someone the team can count on.
____ Determined: Not afraid to make a tough decision and willing to stand by it.
____ Fair-minded: Someone who is impartial and just.
____ Forward-looking: Someone who is up on the latest trends, ahead of the game, a visionary.
____ Honest: A trustworthy and sincere person.
____ Imaginative: A curious and creative person.
____ Independent: A self-reliant person who doesn’t depend on others to make decisions.
____ Inspiring: This person can uplift the group with their positive energy.
____ Intelligent: A reflective and thoughtful person who uses sound judgment.
____ Loyal: Someone who is unswerving in their allegiance to the team and the program.
____ Mature: A wise person with a depth of experience.
____ Self-controlled: Self-disciplined and restrained, able to control one’s actions and emotions.
____ Straightforward: Honest and direct, you’ll know where you’re standing with this person.
____ Supportive: A natural comforter, this person willingly provides encouragement.

Different ways to use this list:

  • Self-assessment of leadership skills,
  • Pre & post leadership training for team leaders/captains,
  • Ask team to put qualities in order of importance regarding captains,
  • Ask team to put qualities in order of importance regarding coaching staff,
  • Ask each team member to pick their favorite from the list and explain their reasoning to the group,
  • Pick seven words that describe yourself,
  • Pick seven words that describe your ideal leader.


Challenge yourself

  • Pick the five qualities you believe are your personal best from the list.
  • Pick the five qualities you would like your team leaders to master.


I’ll step out on a limb for this one. My five: I am ambitious, competent, determined, honest, and self-controlled. (This is tougher than it looks! All of these traits are great, so it’s hard to choose. As I go through the list, I feel as if I’m making judgments on the validity of the other traits, which certainly isn’t true.) My top five for team leaders: ambitious, broad-minded, cooperative, courageous, and inspiring. Give it a try and see what you think.

This could be a great tool for coaches to use with their staffs…to see how they complement one another as well as with your team captains/leaders. It seems that finding all of these traits in one person would be difficult to impossible…but it could definitely happen with a group of people.

11 Ways To Stay Up When Things Bring You Down

Coaching philosophy, Team chemistry

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It could be a losing season. Or an injury to your star player. Or the death/sickness of a player or someone close to the team. Or a player with an eating disorder. Whatever the adversity your team is facing, we’ve got to know how to get ourselves, as well as our teams, through it with minimal damage.

11 ways to stay awesome when things don’t go according to plan

  1. Ask for advice. Hopefully we can find someone who has gone through what we’re going through and they can tell us how they handled their adversity. Hearing other folks talk about a similar situation is good for brainstorming, but it also lets folks know they can approach us about whatever bad situation is going on with our team.
  2. Reframe it as a challenge. Adversity is real…but it’s also how we approach it. If we tell ourselves that this is the worst thing ever and our team will never overcome this obstacle, then we’ll be pretty down about our situation. If we tell ourselves that it’s not that big of a deal, then we may not be living in reality. I think a good response to adversity is somewhere in the middle. Accept the challenge, figure out how to learn/grow from it, and don’t let it beat you.
  3. Tell your success story in advance. Think about a year from now when we’re well past our adverse situation…whatever that may be. Think about how awesome it’s going to feel to tell people about how down we and our teams were and how we managed to grab victory from defeat. Thinking about the inevitable success we’ll experience is invaluable in making it through the muck of a challenging situation.
  4. This is a necessary part of your story. Success generally doesn’t happen in a straight line. It ebbs and flows, with peaks and valleys. So we can see this adversity as just a normal and necessary part of our story. The bummer of a yin to the amazing yang that is bound to happen.
  5. Refuse to whine. Just like we don’t let our teams wallow in feeling badly for themselves after they’ve played poorly, we can’t let situations turn us into the person everyone runs from in the office. It’s okay to feel sorry for ourselves momentarily, but if it becomes central to who we are…something’s got to change!
  6. Be lucky. Are unlucky people really unlucky or just finding what they’re looking for? I’ve been around some Negative Nelsons who make a living out of finding the negative in any situation. I can guarantee those folks aren’t lucky…at least not the good kind. Lucky folks don’t waste their energy being negative, but search out positivity. Positive folks make their own luck.
  7. Seek out positivity. It could be an author we like or chatting with your pastor or going to church or working out…whatever it is, make sure it lifts you up. When your team is in the dumps, the last thing you need is to make it worse by reading/watching/listening to negative things.
  8. Don’t beat yourself up. If our situation is a losing season, it doesn’t mean that we’re the world’s worst coach. If it’s a player injury, it doesn’t mean that we did anything wrong in practice or game preparation that make them get hurt. Bad things happen and it’s not always our fault. And even if it is, learn from it and move on.
  9. Realize you’re not the first or last. This one is huge! Just because it’s our first go ‘round with this particular challenge, doesn’t mean no one has experienced it before. Like we talked about in number one, go out and find advice from people who’ve been there and done that.
  10. Get perspective. It may seem morbid, but things can always be worse. In the grand scheme of life, how bad is our problem really?
  11. Help someone else. Helping others is a catch-all feel good. Volunteer at a soup kitchen to get some perspective (see #10) or help a friend move. Not only is it a good thing, but it’ll get our minds off of whatever challenges our teams are facing.


The inspiration for this article came from a business blog post called, “34 Ways to Stay Awesome When Things Suck”. Check it out, though there’s some saucy language…you’ve been warned.

If you liked this post, maybe you’d like these, too: 5 Questions That Can Prevent Tragedy From Attacking Your Team, The 4 Most Important Steps Required to Guide Your Team Through Crisis, and Losing Is Lonely: Encouraging Yourself In Tough Times.

See How Easily You Can Increase Your Team’s Attention To Detail

Coaching strategy

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I’m sure we’ve all heard those crazy stories about what stars demand for appearances. Here’s a few of them:

  • Apparently singer Barbara Streisand asks for peach colored toilet paper because it matches her skin;
  • Mariah Carey asks for a new toilet seat to be installed in all of her hotel rooms;
  • I guess Beyonce asks for her room to be exactly seventy eight degrees.


There are lots more on this site and I certainly don’t know if they’re true or not, but that’s not the point. The point is demanding attention to detail from the people around us…most importantly our teams. I always thought celebrities were being prima donnas by asking all of this stuff, but it turns out there’s more to it.

In his post, No Brown M&M’s! David Lee Roth and the Power of Checklists, Tim Ferris gives us some insight into why celebrities sometimes make eccentric demands. Stars give their hosts a checklist of hundreds of things, ninety nine percent of which is vital to making their appearance successful. The one percent of eccentricity is designed to find out whether their host actually read the checklist and followed through. For David Lee Roth, having brown m & m’s in his room meant there could be other, potentially life-threatening, mistakes on the horizon…so a full inventory of the checklist had to be completed.

So how does this apply to us as coaches? Think about the long checklist of duties we have for our players:

  • Work hard
  • Give 100% effort
  • Support your teammates
  • Lift weights
  • Go to the training room
  • Come early
  • Stay late
  • Hang out together outside of practice
  • Get good grades
  • Compete for your position
  • Be a good leader
  • Be a good follower
  • Workout over the summer
  • And the list goes on and on!


Surely, we believe that all of these things (and more) are important and essential for our teams to thrive. It’s a lot for one person to remember, now think about what we have to do: manage these expectations for ten to twenty players!

So what am I suggesting? Most importantly, that our players need to know (and see) what our expectations of them are…maybe put them in the team handbook. It’s much harder to miss the mark when they know where the target is.

The idea behind all of this isn’t to drive our players crazy, but to hold them accountable.

Can you think of accountability tactics coaches could use with their players? What would our “brown M & M’s” be? Hit me up on Twitter if you come up with any ideas!