Monthly Archives: January 2014

The 3 Types Of Great Coaches

Coaching nerds

sports coachsource

I’m a big fan of the book, The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. Because of that, I follow his blog, because I can always find good stuff there. The Best Kind of Coach is a great post that talks about the power of great coaches. Check out his different types while keeping in mind that they all have the potential to be great.

Behavior
Coyle calls this the “old-school” coach. I had some shut-up-sit-down-do-what-i-say-and-we’ll-win-games coaches in my life. The upside to these types of coaches is the players know where they stand and know exactly what is expected of them. The downside is the players may be afraid of their coach. Also, there’s a rigidity of thought and system with this type.

Knowledge
Coyle calls these Teacher Coaches. I think I’d fall into this category. I always tell my team that my time on the court is over, so they are my chance to keep playing at a high level…by getting the knowledge out of my head and into theirs. When I first got into coaching, I remember calling my old high school coach, who was a behavior coach. Frustrated, I told him that my players had a million questions and wouldn’t just do what I said because I said to do it. He agreed about this new (at the time) generation of athlete and he said that’s why he got out. Now I enjoy explaining the hows and whys of my sport. And I enjoy an athlete who wants to delve deeper into how they can become better.

Soul
Coyle says these coaches have an innate ability to see people in ways that they do not see themselves. They do this in three ways: they connect, they communicate their belief, and they work to make that belief come true. I wonder if this is what happens when teams get a new coach and all of a sudden a team that was underachieving turns into a powerhouse. In that situation, there’s clearly more to the story than X’s and O’s. That’s part of it, sure, but what (or who) makes those same players who were losing games believe that they shouldn’t be losing? That they have what it takes to win? And win on a large scale?

I suppose we’d want to be a combination of all of these, in a perfect world. So what kind of coach are you?

Feedback That Gets Results

Coaching strategy

feedbacksource

“I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.” —The Simple Phrase that Increases Effort 40%

That’s it.

That’s the magical feedback.

4 reasons this works

  1. Authentic. We can’t give this particular feedback to every player on our teams, just the ones we really believe can help the team achieve its goals. I’d imagine we would lose our credibility if the impact players heard us deliver this line to a teammate who was clearly not a player of influence.
  2. Crystal-clear signal of social trust. It makes the receiver a part of a group (impact players) and shows them they are special.
  3. Belonging. This phrasing shows the player that they not only belong to the group, but are an important piece. Beyond that, it shows them (and their teammates whom they’re bound to tell) that the coaches have high standards for the team.
  4. High expectations. Plain and simple, if you say this phrase, you’ve got to make sure you give the player a task that can be accomplished. Challenging, but realistic.



Check out the article, it’s very good. As coaches, we’re always looking for ways to connect with our players and to show them we care about them. This seems like a good place to start.

Leading The Resistant Player

Coaching strategy

resistancesource

I’m sure we’ve all coached a player who has been tough for us. It can be for many reasons. It could be because they’re not friendly with their teammates. It could be because they’re only concerned with how the team can help them. Or it could be because no one has taken the time to point out how their actions impact the team.

I always fall on the side of the last explanation. I like to think that players aren’t being bad teammates because they’d rather be bad teammates. I like to think that they don’t understand they’re driving everyone crazy and it’s my job to guide them along the way to being a great teammate.

Don’t know if you’ve got a resistant player? Check out these scenarios:

Coach: Let’s go over our new offense for the season.
Resistant player: My high school coach ran a different offense and we always won.
Coach: *sigh*

Coach: I need everyone to sign this birthday card for Susie.
Resistant player: Me and Susie don’t get along, do I need to sign?
Coach: *sigh*

Coach: The sky is a beautiful blue today!
Resistant player: Technically the sky isn’t really blue.
Coach: *sigh*

These resistant players not only represent gray hairs on our heads, but also opportunities to mentor a young person. I like to think of players as flowers. We don’t know if we’re planting the seeds of teamwork in them (and therefore much less likely to benefit from the beautiful flower in their future) or if we’re weeding an already well-tended garden. The earlier we are in the process, the more frustrating that player will be.

4-step intervention process for the resistant player

First: talk to them. It could be that they don’t understand how they’re coming across to teammates and coaches.

Second: take something away from them. If you’ve talked to them (and talked to them), maybe you’ve got to take away playing time or a leadership position to show them you mean business.

Third: empower them to stay or go. You can present it to them like this: Look. I know you’re sick of me talking to you about this and, quite frankly, I’m getting tired of saying the same thing. Do you really want to be on the team? If they say yes, give them parameters for remaining in good standing with the coaching staff. If they say no, well, that’s the downside of giving them the choice.

Fourth: don’t let them off the hook. It’s easy to think that your job is over after step three, but if you don’t stay vigilant, you’ll be back to step one again.

We don’t manage the resistant player with tough love because we like confrontation or being grumpy. We do it because we believe it’s what’s best for them in the long run. I’d go as far as saying we’d be hurting their player development if we didn’t stay on them.

8 Qualities Of Great Team Leaders

Captains, Leadership

follow the leadersource

Captains are important and serve a unique function on our teams, so I enjoyed this article from Leadership Freak, The Three Power-People You Need On Your Team. I don’t want to get into whether you choose captains or you let the team, or whether or not your captains are always seniors, or whether you don’t have captains at all. I want to focus on what qualities we should look for, and what we should coach the team to look for, in our team leaders.

What we should look for in team leaders:

  • Hard working. I don’t know about you, but my best captains have been the hardest workers. When they asked the team to run through a wall, their teammates knew the captain would be right there with them…leading the way.
  • Strong opinions and emotions. They should be passionate about the sport, about the team, and about their teammates. Ideally they’re able to harness that emotion into motivating their teammates.
  • Unflinching alignment with organizational values. What is it you value as a coach? Does your team know? Do your team leaders/captains? Is it being on time? Is it extra film study? Is it supporting teammates who play a second sport? Whatever it is, make sure you make it known.
  • Comfort saying no. Good manners are nice but not essential. I had a young lady who was a natural born leader. She was strong and she spoke her mind. One preseason, she came in and it was like a quiet, mousy alien had abducted her. She was worried that she was too strong and was scaring the team. I did my best to tell her the qualities she was trying to hide were her best qualities. And not only that, they were assets our team was in dire need of.
  • Dedication to serve the organization before serving themselves. There’s that servant leader concept. Team before self. The teams I’ve had who have suffered through lack of success were always lacking that team-first leader.
  • Strength to confront brutal facts. What if your star player is out all night long making a fool of herself (however you deem it) before a big game? Will your team leaders address it? My best leaders squash problems before I even realize it’s going on.
  • Openness to change. Let’s say you’ve got a team captain. She’s pretty good, but you see with a couple of tweaks in her personality or how she communicates with the team, she could be amazing. Hopefully, she’s open to getting better…not just on the court, but off of it as well.
  • Loyalty. To the program, of course, but more importantly, to their best selves. That may come across as kind of cheesy, but sometimes our team leaders are put in tough positions where they’ve got to make a decision that may be unpopular. I’d hope they believe in the type of leader they are and can stand by it.



Once we’ve found these folks and they’ve been identified as team leaders, it’s our job to train them to lead. So often we assume our players know how to lead, but they only know what they’ve been exposed to. What if you showed them leadership videos on Ted or youtube? What if you read them great leadership quotes and asked them what they meant to each one of them? What if you picked a leadership book and read it with them?

Training our leaders may be just as important as training our sport skills.

Teams Need Conflict To Function Effectively

Female athletes

dramasource

It’s no secret that I don’t believe in “girl drama”. I always put that phrase in quotations because I know that folks understand what I mean when I say it, but I still want them to know I think it’s a myth. In my opinion, “girl drama” happens when conflict management goes awry.

This Harvard Business Review article, Conflict Strategies for Nice People, talks about why conflict has a place on teams. I’d go a step further and say it’s imperative for women’s teams to understand and embrace conflict. “Girl drama” isn’t the absence of conflict, but rather the absence of communication about the conflict.

The cost of avoiding conflict

  1. You don’t get your alternative perspective on the table.
  2. You can’t challenge faulty assumptions.
  3. You don’t have the chance to highlight hidden risks.



Why conflict is good

  1. It allows the team to address difficult situations. Teams are wrought with difficult situations. A teammate could be slacking off in the weight room. Texting through a video session. Or just not working hard in practice. While I would certainly intervene, I’d hope my team leaders would feel comfortable interjecting themselves into the narrative.
  2. It creates a space to synthesize diverse perspectives. Years ago, I had a team with very different ideas about the way the team should conduct themselves after games, especially after losses. One camp was the “hush your mouth and don’t say anything to me” group, while the other was the “that game is over so no need to be down-faced about it”. They were able to come together and find a happy medium that worked for everyone.
  3. It pushes the team to make sure solutions are well thought out. Not communicating is easy, because it doesn’t involve compromise. Once we start talking and hearing diverse opinions, coming to a thoughtful resolution is harder, but will have more buy-in since there was compromise and communication.
  4. It is the source of true innovation. Sometimes the way we’ve always done things needs to change. Just because we’ve always done it doesn’t mean it’s best, right, or effective.
  5. It is a critical process in identifying and alleviating risks. Conflict puts us into a space where we’re hearing differing opinions. Those different opinions give us, as coaches, a more nuanced view of our team. We should embrace a little conflict among our staff to make sure we’re making the best choices for the benefit of our teams. Our coaches have to feel free to challenge us on our decisions or what’s the point of having them there?



Commit to conflict

So we all agree that conflict is good, right? Don’t go away just yet! Now you’ve got to teach your players effective conflict resolution strategies or you’ll have a bunch of feuding cliques on your team. Check out this post, Feeling Comfortable With Conflict, for some ideas.

Why Do You Coach?

Coaching philosophy

What-why-howsource

“Once you know your greater purpose, there are lots of roads that will take you there.”
—Where There’s a Why, There’s A Way

I’ll start.

I coach because I believe in it. I coach because God created me to coach. I coach because I’m good at it. I coach because I believe sport creates better humans than those who don’t participate. A bit judge-y, I know, but it’s how I feel. I coach because I enjoy working with young people and watching them transform themselves into better players, teammates, and friends. I coach because it’s amazing to watch a group of people accomplish a goal. I coach because I think it’s important for young ladies to learn about leadership, winning and losing with grace, conflict management…all the stuff of teams.

So that’s my why.

Check out the article linked above, it’s very good. I completely agree with its premise that there are many ways to skin a cat, many roads that can take you to your why…many “hows”, if you will. In my case, I could coach club, I could coach high school, I could coach at any level as long as I’d be able to accomplish my why. It’s the why that’s important, not the where or the how.

Coaching truly is an amazing profession. Challenging? Sure…but it wouldn’t be fun if it were easy.

Your turn.

I’ll ask again: Why do you coach?

The Importance of Sleep For Our Players

Coaching career,

sleeplessnesssource

On a team long, long ago, I had a player with a troubled friend in her dorm. This friend would have episodes which involved seizures and scary blackouts. My player, ever the mother hen, felt it was her duty to stay up with her friend even though these episodes happened during the wee hours of the morning. This would happen night after night.

No sleep for days.

And she expected to be able to function well in the classroom and in the gym. She would tell me, “Don’t worry coach, I don’t need much sleep.” Huh?

Not every scenario is as crazy as this one. Some are just your players stay up too late doing homework. Or they aren’t able to get uninterrupted sleep. Or they think they can party the weekend away and pay the homework piper on Sunday.

This should be important to us not only because we’re counting on our athletes to perform, but also part of our role in their lives is to teach them how to be functioning adults.

What’s the problem?

According to this Harvard Business Review article, Sleep Deficit: The Performance Killer, there are four parts to sleep that affect performance. The first part is our natural drive to sleep. We think we’re in control of it, but essentially, our bodies will force us to sleep if we put it off too long. The second is the amount of sleep we get over the course of a few days. The third is the part of us that says, “Oh, it’s light outside, it’s time to get up.” Finally, there’s the groggy wakeup. Apparently, we need about twenty minutes in the morning to get our bearings.

What can we do about it?

  • If we schedule morning practices, we’ve got to give them time to truly wake up. If I go in the morning, I usually do some sort of conditioning first. That way, they don’t have to tax their brains until later in the practice.
  • We’ve got to talk to them about how important sleep is to their performance.
  • If there’s a way to show them they’re not being heroic by staying up all night writing papers and studying, we’ve got to show them.
  • Sleep has to be equated to going to the training room, getting strong in the weight room, and watching film…it’s what we need to do in order to be good.



The article equated lack of sleep with drunkenness. We wouldn’t tolerate our players being in a perpetual state of intoxication and we shouldn’t tolerate sleeplessness either.

Teaching Our Teams To Handle Pressure

Coaching philosophy

high pressuresource

There’s a possibility that I’ve been wrong about how I go about teaching my team to handle pressure. I’ve always told them, do what you gotta do to figure out how you best handle pressure. If you’ve got to convince yourself that there is no pressure, then go for it. On the flip side, if you’ve got to tell yourself that you eat pressure for breakfast…you thrive on it, then that works too.

Turns out, there’s some research that says one is definitely better than the other.

According to the post 3 Words to Improve Pressure Performance (and 3 to Avoid) on the Talent Code’s blog, a test group that embraced the excitement of a pressure situation performed the best. Better than the group that admitted nervousness. And way better than the group that pretended to be calm.

I’ve always told my teams that whether you embrace pressure or pretend it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t matter because they’re both mind tricks. Now it seems that, while that assertion may be true, one certainly has a leg up on the other.

So when your player is standing at the service line on game point, you want her to tell herself that she is excited about the moment.

Check out the post and see what you think.

A Recipe For Success

Team roles

recipe booksource

My little girl just had her one year doctor’s appointment and the doctor gave me all sorts of interesting information. The stuff about teaching my child to be a good eater is what stood out to me. Why? Because I think it’s similar to what it would take to teach a player to be a good teammate.

The sheet said, “Don’t get your jobs mixed up with your child’s jobs. If you don’t do your jobs, your child will eat poorly and not behave at the table. If you get bossy and try to do her jobs, she will fight back and not eat.” The sheet then goes into detail about each of our (parent & child) jobs. For example, the parent’s job is to choose what to buy, cook, and put on the table. The child’s job is to come to the table hungry and ready to eat.

Teaching our players to be good teammates

For our purposes here, I would say, “Don’t get your jobs mixed up with your player’s jobs. If you don’t do your jobs, your players will be unprepared for competition. If you get bossy and try to do their jobs, they will fight back with complaints and lack of effort.”

Coach’s jobs

  • Have well thought out practice plans.
  • Choose what skills will be taught and when.
  • Enjoy the ups and downs of the season.
  • Keep practices competitive.
  • Never stop coaching.
  • Give your players space to make mistakes.



Player’s jobs

  • Come to practice with a willing spirit and open mind.
  • Stay positive during the course of the season.
  • Don’t whine to coaches or teammates.
  • Don’t talk badly about your teammates…to anyone.
  • Always give your best effort.
  • Have high expectations for yourself and your teammates.



Being on a team is hard work…especially if folks don’t hold up their end of the bargain. It’s often said, coaches coach and players play. This is just a more detailed version of that statement.

9 Tips To Help Your Team Achieve Their Goals

Goal setting

successsource

“Decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.”

That’s a quotation from Harvard Business Review’s article, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.

Let’s dive right in, here are the 9 things:

  1. Get specific.
  2. Seize the moment to act on your goals.
  3. Know exactly how far you have to go.
  4. Be a realistic optimist.
  5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good.
  6. Have grit.
  7. Build your willpower muscle.
  8. Don’t tempt fate.
  9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won’t do.



How can we use this within our programs?

  • In evaluating our coaching staff, to keep us on the right track.
  • To empower our players to achieve their goals. This list gives an intangible activity a bit of tangibility.
  • Monthly check-ins within the program. Each month within the season, we should revisit goals and training strategies to make sure we’re getting the desired results.