Successful coaches are passionate about mastering their craft – not just the Xʼs and Oʼs of their sport. Sport specific knowledge is important, yet it doesnʼt separate average coaches from great coaches. There are a lot of brilliant people in every sport who canʼt coach a lick.

Great coaches realize that there is so much more to their craft. They study and understand group dynamics, motivation, personal growth, goals, communication and so forth.  They love the game, they love learning about the game and this feeds how they teach the game.

Check out this excerpt from a recent article about Jim Caldwell, first year head coach of the Super Bowl bound Indianapolis Colts.

A book-strewn table in Caldwell’s office is testimony to his intellectual energy and insatiable curiosity.

“The Drunkard’s Walk” is one of the titles. It’s physicist Leonard Mlodinow’s plain-speaking examination of probability theory and random events and their impact on human existence, from physics to football.

Another is the Bible. This is the one for which Caldwell reaches first after arriving at the Colts’ Northwestside complex, usually between 5 and 6 a.m. What he reads is grist for meditation during the pre-dawn run that comes next, weather be darned.

“Exalt thyself and be humbled, or humble thyself and be exalted,” he might say in a team meeting a few hours later. Or perhaps, “Talent beats hard work only if talent works hard.”

Said safety Jamie Silva, “I bring a pen and pad into our team meetings and write down the things he says. Somebody could write a book if they followed him around for a while.”

Caldwell’s curiosity didn’t arise with his appointment as an NFL head coach. It was evident throughout the 32-year apprenticeship that brought him to that position.

As an obscure young assistant coach at Southern Illinois, he began writing letters to college head coaches, anyone who did something unusual, especially if they did it unusually well. Caldwell typed his question at the top of a sheet, left space for a scrawled answer and included a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Bear Bryant answered. So did Tom Osborne, and a legion of others.

Caldwell sought, studied, sorted, absorbed. He came to believe that speed is crucial, particularly at this time of year, when fatigue is prevalent and a step or two can be decisive.

For nearly a third of a century, he took notes on every meeting conducted or talk given by the half-dozen head coaches under whom he worked. The notebooks, about 50 of them, fill a shelf in his office and box on box in a storage facility in Winston-Salem, N.C., where he maintains a home.

No wonder then, Colts defensive Robert Mathis would say: “A first-year head coach just coming in, he’s about the most prepared a guy could ever be. He’s on top of everything.”

That’s a good thing, because his players were watching.

“When you’re dealing with a guy like Tony Dungy, which is the highest of the highs, and then you have a new coach come in, you’ve almost got to have a drop-off,” linebacker Clint Session said. “We did not have a drop-off.”

Source: Phil Richards, IndyStar.com, 1-22-10

I’ve found this same theme in each of the interviews I’ve conducted for Inside World Class Coaching.  The five coaches who combined have won over 35 National Titles – time to hit the books!

We can get so consumed with our sport that we forget to have fun. Even before we reach high school, many of us are taught to repress fun as we go about the serious business of scholastic sports. Yet the physiology of fun is a close profile to the “zone.”

Laughter, humor, and play are powerful forms of recovery. They enable you to move almost effortlessly from negativity into a positive energy state.

Laughter is a natural breathing technique, and it has a cleansing and revitalizing effect as well. It originates in the solar plexus, the seat of bodily energy. Laughter alternatively relaxes and tightens your muscles and leaves them in a state of relaxation. It releases endorphins, which cause euphoria and reduce pain. Increasing evidence suggest that laughter is good medicine for both the body and the mind.

Here’s a great exercise for you and your athletes to kick off the New Year (& decade)

• Take a blank piece of paper and divide it into 4 columns
• Going left to right, name the columns as follows:

1. 1. 2-5 minutes
   2. 5-30 minutes
   3. 30 minutes to ½ day
   4. ½ a day or more

• Jot down the things that are fun for you. Put them into the columns below according to the amount of time they take.
• Time how long it takes you to run out of ideas.
• Draw a line when you find the ideas are no longer coming quickly and you have to stop and think a while between ideas.

How many activities did you come up with? You might be interested to know that most busy adults run out of ideas after they’ve thought of 10-15. Ten year olds have easily generated 55 ideas in the same amount of time. How many could you think of quickly before having to really search for ideas?

Count up how many ideas you have in the first two columns and how many you have in the last two columns. Which is the larger number? What does this tell you about the problems you are having finding time for fun on a daily basis.

The last two columns give you ideas for your summer break. Continue to brainstorm ideas in the first two columns so you’ll have plenty to choose from this season.

Smile!

Teamwork is always a hot topic in sports.  Some coaches scour the land looking for the latest tips on team building while others feel team building games are a waste of time.  So the question remains, “Do team building activities lead to improved teamwork?  It depends. It depends on what stage your team is in.  Sport psychologists often refer to four stages that teams go through. These stages are typical of most teams and groups. Surprisingly one of the normal stages teams experience is fighting!

The four stages, “forming,” “storming,” “norming,” and “conforming” were first developed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965.  It is one of the best-known team development theories.  It’s useful to keep Tuckman’s stages in mind as you progress through the season.  They will help you select appropriate team building activities and/or they may explain many of the behaviors that drive you crazy!

The first stage, “forming” is also known as “testing.” In essence, team members size each other up. Players make judgments about the coach, the strengths and weaknesses of the other players and where they themselves fit in with the team.

The next stage is called “storming,” also known as the “infighting” stage. During this stage, there is often arguing, tension, conflict, and rebellion. Players are competing against one another and trying to establish their position on the team. They wonder:

• Will I make the team?
• Will I start?
• What does the coach think of me?
• What’s my role on the team?

The third stage is the “norming” stage. It’s the quiet period that follows the storming period.  Ideally everyone now knows their role on the team, and they have accepted there place on the team. If players continue to express dissatisfaction with their roles, the team will not be successful. The main focus now is TEAM not ME.

The last stage is the “performing” stage. At this point, each team member is genuinely concerned about the welfare and progress of teammates. When one player experiences success, other teammates are genuinely happy for them. In fact, teammates help each other to achieve success. In this stage, there is a high degree of trust.

Arriving at the “performing” stages means weathering the other stages. It means patience, persistence, hard work and constant re-commitment on the part of the coach and the team. A coach needs to know the stages of team development to reflect on honestly assess where a team stands in their progression, and in turn, what to work on to attain their next level. The good news is what might appear as discouraging, may actually be the team reaching an essential milestone in their cohesion toward their next level of evolution as a “performing” team.

Fall is in the air and scholastic sports are in full swing.  Post competition comments are also flowing freely.  In the last few days I’ve heard the following comments from various coaches:

• “We had our chances there. We just didn’t execute well”
• “We just didn’t execute the way we wanted to”
• “We just didn’t finish off the drives, you know. We had one little thing go wrong. We have to get all eleven on the same page”
• “We tried to battle it out, We had a game plan all week. We just didn’t execute I guess”

So what you ask?  I finally figured out what irritated me about these lines – they sound like excuses.  They remind me of an athlete saying “my bad”.

Saying “We just didn’t execute” is letting yourself and your team off the hook.  The conversation needs to go deeper.  Why didn’t you execute?

Winning in competition is about executing skills at a high level, at high speed, at less than optimal conditions and under pressure.  It requires consistently making the right decision about when, where and how to execute the skill.

If you are coaching at the varsity or collegiate level, it’s doubtful your team suddenly lost their ability to execute (the how to’s).   If they still have the ability to execute, then what got in the way?  Tactical mismatch?  Mindset?  Mental toughness?

Rarely is a team sport athlete going to execute their skills with technical excellence – there are too many variables (opponents, weather, field conditions etc.)

If “poor execution” pops into your mind following a competition, challenge yourself to dig deeper.  Look beyond the scoreboard and stat sheet.  What else was going on?  Why was this game plan beyond their ability to execute on this day?

Watching the 6^th ranked Golden Bears get blown out by the Ducks on Saturday left me shaking my head.  What happened?How can such a competent team suddenly look so incompetent?

Broadcasters talk about the “Big Mo” in sports.  Momentum.  Athletes can feel it on both sides of a big play, teams feel it when they come back late in a game and fans feel it when their team catches fire or goes cold as ice.  I sure felt it on Saturday.

There are a lot of opinions in the sports science literature about the existence of momentum.  It’s a difficult phenomenon to nail down cause it’s difficult to measure.  As a coach, I’m much more interested in what to do about it than I am in its measurement.

I like the Multidimensional Model of Momentum proposed by Jim Taylor and Andrew Demick.  They define psychological momentum as “a positive or negative change in cognition, affect, physiology, and behavior caused by an event or series of events that will result in a commensurate shift in performance and competitive outcome”.  They go on to talk about the six key elements to what they call the “momentum chain”.

1. Precipitating Event.  Examples include an interception or a fumble.  The impact of these events on athletes varies depending on how they perceive it and their level of self-confidence.
2. The precipitating event leads to “changes in cognition, physiology and affect.”
3. A “change in behavior” stems from these internal perceptions of the athletes.
4. Next comes a “change in performance”.
5. Momentum is a two-way street and needs a “contiguous and opposing change for the opponent.”  In other words, if after a fumble, the recovering team celebrates and increases their psychological momentum, but the opposing team does not experience an equal negative psychological momentum shift then the immediate flow of the game should remain unchanged.
6. Finally, if momentum gets this far, there will be “an immediate outcome change”.

My question is how do we break the “momentum chain”?  Well stuff happens in sports so there’s no stopping “precipitating events”.  It appears to me that the key to breaking the chain lies in step 2.  It’s the old stimulus – response phenomenon.  The brief moment between a stimulus and our response to it is the key to maintaining one’s Game Face under pressure. Top performers learn to control their reaction in the moment no matter what’s just happened.

Part of our coaching responsibility is to train our athletes not only in the “X’s” and “O’s,” but also in how to adapt, shift, and respond to stimulus or game-time situations. The window of training time between stimulus and response is short but there are a multitude of training opportunities through out the day – on and off the playing field. We must be vigilant with our athletes and train them to respond to all potential negative stimuli (mistakes, comments, grades, teachers, parents, weather etc) as challenges not problems.

The more we can get our athletes to respond to “life’s stuff” with their Game Face, the easier it will be for them to handle the ups and downs of competition.