A Coach's Diary

Steve Kerr has had one of the most successful runs in professional sports history. He played with some of the all-time great basketball players, including Michael Jordan and Tim Duncan, and he played for two of the most successful coaches in basketball, Phil Jackson and Greg Popovich. Kerr knows what drives winning. Before he started coaching, Kerr said he had visited several coaches, and NFL coach Pete Carroll had asked him, “How are you going to coach your team?” Carroll told him the kind of culture you want to build, the values you want to have, and how you want to make them come alive is more important than Xs and Os. Carroll asked him, “What is the most important thing in your life? What are the most important values in your life?” and he then said, “They have to feel the authenticity of you.”  When you have genuine, real values and make them come alive, that is when the culture starts to form. Coach Kerr came up with four words that defined him and his approach to life the ...

Source:  Well-Oiled Operations Podcast The most valuable lesson I’ve learned this week is the concept of multipliers vs diminishers. Liz Wiseman is a leadership coach who says leaders fall into two broad categories: Multipliers grow, energize and get the best out of others. Diminishers shrink, drain, hold back, and don't get the most out of others (often unintentionally). She says, “The best leaders don’t know everything; they know how to bring out the best in others.” What is a Multiplier? A Multiplier is a leader who brings out the best in others. Instead of relying on their own intelligence or doing everything themselves, they create an environment where people feel engaged, capable, and motivated to contribute. Multipliers amplify the talent, energy, and thinking of the team. Three Things We Can Do to Be Multipliers Fully engage the team. Set clear expectations, show belief in people’s capabilities, and create an environment where individuals feel trusted and challenged to d...

How do you get people to want to be a part of the team and stay on the team? A former HR person once told me, "People leave people [coaches, principals, and leaders] before they leave teams and jobs." He was writing his dissertation on retention, and he was studying why people stay at certain jobs and how to get them to stay. His favorite thing to talk about was Job Embeddedness Theory. The theory states there are three powerful forces that keep team members attached to their jobs and less likely to leave: Links, Fit, and Sacrifices. Links are the relationships and connections you build. One of my goals is to have the most connected team because it's harder to break away from and leave strong connections and relationships. Fit is how well someone fits in with the group, and how aligned their are to the values and goals of the team. It’s harder to leave something when you feel like you fit in well. Sacrifices are what they would be leaving if they left the team. It’s the v...

"I love coaches who resist the responsibility of coaching because they are easy to beat.”  - Mike Tomlin What do you do when the people you are coaching and leading don’t listen, don’t respond, or don’t do what you are coaching them to do? You just keep coaching. Mike Tomlin, the head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, is one of the most respected coaches in all of sports. His interview with The Pivot Podcast is one of the few interviews I recommend to all coaches because of how clearly he is able to communicate his philosophy of coaching and how important relationships are to creating a championship culture that leads to success. One of my key takeaways comes at the 33:33 mark where he talks about how he manages, leads, and most importantly, just keeps coaching. He says when trying to compete at the highest level, you have to know how to bring out the best in the group, and in order to that, you have to be able to manage the group and the individuals in the group. He t...

If you do things well enough that other people can see it, feel it, and say it back to you, you are doing things the right way. " Coach Greg Carvel In a podcast interview, National Champion Hockey coach, Coach Greg Carvel from the University of Massachusetts talks about how he has built a championship culture through the way he recruits, trains, and leads his athletes. When Coach Carvel was hired as the head coach, they were the worst team in the country, and just 5 years later, they won their first national championship in 91 years. UMass hockey has created a distinct culture that helped them go from last to first, and it focuses on character over skill. Coach Carvel says, “Culture relies heavily on leadership, and leadership trickles down. John Maxwell says, “Everything rises and falls on leadership; everything.” Identity They created an identity based on 3 words: Fast, hard, and prepared, and he wanted them to play to their identity so well that the opposing coach said their id...

I heard a superintendent tell a group of coaches this last week.  It had to have been one of the best compliments that a coach can hear, especially coming from a boss.  In a world where parent complaints and transfer rates are seemingly at all time highs, and when every other week we see articles where coaches either resign or are fired because of parent issues, hearing your superintendent say something like this has to be a reassuring and rewarding gesture. Having a parent genuinely feel this way about the time that I spent with their athlete is one of my ultimate goals as a coach.  I want them to feel like I helped their kid become a better athlete and a better person, and I would love for them to be grateful and appreciative of the time and energy that I gave to their athlete. But how do we get to this point?   It starts with focusing on growing our athletes and helping them become the best people and athletes that they can be, and we ...

Success is smart – it will test you at many turns.  Its biggest test is failure.  Success wants to know if you will quit.  Remember that failure is a part of all successful team and individual journeys.   Don’t fear failure because it happens to the best of the best.  If you fear the consequence of failure, put equal fear to the consequence of never trying.  What would happen if you tried and it actually worked out?  At some point, it will!  Imagine if you knew you would succeed but you didn’t try.  How would you feel then? Try, and don’t quit.  Act, and don’t quit. Don’t define success by wins and losses.  Define success by starting, trying, acting and giving your best effort.  If you do those and ‘win,’ then great.  If you do those and ‘lose,’ its still great as long as you learned from your mistakes, got better, and didn’t quit.  Eventually you will win, and with the right attitude, you will proba...

Youth sports is about fun, creating an active life-style, and teaching lessons through games. It is important to teach competition and to teach early on that there is a winner and a loser, but its important to do that within context.  Teach winning and losing in terms of strengths and weaknesses, in terms of work ethic and commitment, and in terms of how to humbly deal with success and how to appropriately bounce back from defeat. As long as a kid keeps playing, as long as a kid keeps improving, and most importantly, as long as a kid keeps having fun, then good things will happen.

The article below is about how Greg Popovich, and the man who first hired him at Division III Pomona-Pizter College, Curt Tong.   It is a good article about the lasting influence of a coach on his players, and how that influence trickles down through all of the people that those players come in contact.   Live right, do the best you can, and take care of your family and friends, and you will be okay in coaching and in life.   You can find the article in its entirety here . Coach’s Expire Every Day, They Never Die Those are the details, and they are important details. They are a life’s work, in and out of the office. On and off the court. But details never tell the full story of a coach’s life, because a coach—a teacher, by any measure—is more than the sum of his life’s accomplishments. A coach is his own life, and every life he has ever touched, his words and his lessons melting down through generations, outliving him by decades. Coaches expire every day, but they...

Photos of St. Joseph boys basketball coach Gene Pingatore, who has 999 career wins as of Feb. 9, 2017.   The following article is about the career of Coach Gene Pingatore, a legendary coach at St. Joseph’s high school.   I was first exposed to him as the coach in the movie Hoop Dreams.   This gives a very different side of coach than what was presented in the documentary.   Below are some key parts that I took away.   You can read the article in full here or after the jump. -  Kathy Taylor excused herself Thursday at St. Joseph High School because Taylor knew if she talked any longer about the generosity of her boss, high school basketball legend Gene Pingatore, the tears would begin to flow. -  The same emotion oozed out of the woman behind the welcome desk who, unsolicited, shared the memory of Pingatore sending her son souvenirs at the hospital without even knowing him. Longtime St. Joseph assistant Bill Riley, at Pingatore's side for 34 y...

Tom Brady Celebrates Another Touchdown The article below is full in excerpts from a Sport Illustrated article that you can find here .  I originally came across this article on Facebook through a Huffington Post article.  My biggest takeaway is this: - You have to make a decision on what type of person that you want to be.  Do you want to dedicate your life to this and be the best, do you want to put in the work to be great, do you want to go with the flow and be average? - In all things, you have to find balance and stability while still searching for the best practices available to help you grow and become your best self.  Don’t settle for status-quo ‘just because.’ - Its important to have stability in a world that is constantly changing.  The Patriots having a constantly changing roster, but have stability at the key parts of the organization: ownership, head coach and quarterback.  Though all the pieces around Brady on the field is cons...