A Coach's Diary

I try to stress to my kids the importance of putting in the work. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book where he said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. While the over/under on that varies from athlete to athlete, the mindset behind the idea is powerful. You can't be great over night. It just takes time and consistency. To put in the time, consistently, it takes an extreme amount of focus. It takes focus on your goals, focus on the work in practice, focus on the details, and focus on doing the work the right way. One of the things that people said that made Michael Jordan great was his ability stay focused and present in the moment. Work ethic and focus leads to sustained success and greatness.

Below is a great article from Philly.com on how Jay Wright treated the Final Four as a business trip, keeping players away from all distractions, so that they could ensure maximum focus throughout the final days of the tournament.  You can read the article in full here . When Jay Wright arrived in Detroit for his first Final Four as Villanova coach in 2009, he wanted his players, coaches and support staff to enjoy the experience. But when the Wildcats went out for their national semifinal game that weekend against North Carolina, he knew that plan had major flaws. "It was about 10 minutes into the game and I knew," Wright recalled last week. "You could just see the focus in Carolina. You could see our guys were just playing a game. I knew I didn't get these guys ready. "Obviously, [Tar Heels coach Roy Williams] had been there many times. They were ready. They were playing on a completely different level than we were. We were there to play a fun g...

In Chapter 3 of Pete Carroll's book, Win Forever , Coach Carroll talks a lot about the importance of athletes achieving a 'peak performance' in competition by playing with a 'quieted mind.'  A quieted mind is when a player is completely absorbed by the task, free of distractions, and the game is moving in slow motion. I once had a 'peak performance' in an interview.  I was approached to apply for a position as an assistant principal in my district.  It was a position that I probably was not completely ready for, as I was still a young teacher, but the administration in my district thought that I would be good for the position and that I should go for it.  I was fully prepared to answer any and everything that they threw out at me, and I did a good enough job to earn the position because of my performance.   I remember being in a zone in while they were firing questions at me, and the biggest reason for that was the way that my principal at the time hel...