A Coach's Diary

If you look in the transfer portal, you can see that there is a need, now more than ever, to take a deeper look at the human side of coaching and sports, and a need to build winning cultures that put people first and that people want to join and stay a part of. Workhuman is an organization that helps build winning cultures. Their research says that we can increase performance by 32% by creating a culture of thanks and recognition. We can build better athletes and better teams by giving and receiving thanks and by valuing what they bring to the team. When we make our people our 1st priority, success will follow. Shawn Anchor, a happiness researcher, and bestselling author wrote, "Each and every person has the right to lead a happy life at work." As coaches, we can change that to say, "Each and every teammate has the right to lead a happy life on our team." This doesn't mean that everything will be easy. We can and should still have high expectations and hold them...

We have a saying that everybody is great and happy when the shots are falling or when the bats are hitting, but who can we count on when the storm comes and we have to navigate through and around adversity? When the storm comes in a game and the coach has to call a timeout, it's interesting to see how the huddle, the players, and the coaches react and respond in the heat of the moment. Wins and losses aren't determined by our mistakes; they are determined by how we respond to mistakes. An important word and concept to learn and live by is the concept of de-escalation. Deescalation is calming someone (or yourself) down so that they can respond appropriately instead of reacting emotionally. Something happened - it could have been a made or missed shot, a turnover, an injury, or anything else, and responding with empathy, even in the moment, will help respond in a way that shows empathy in order to get to the heart of the matter. Dr. Bruce Perry  is a researcher, clinician, and te...

While the coach and the leaders of a team share most of the responsibility in creating the right culture and climate, everybody on the team is a co-creator of the team's culture and climate. That responsibility is not just on the coaches and best players but on everybody. Everybody impacts culture - good or bad - by the way we act and interact with each other. Ask yourself, "Am I a culture-builder?" Ask yourself, "Is my team's culture better because I am on it?" The best teams have cultures where everybody feels like they belong and valued for the uniqueness that they bring to the team. When everybody has that sense of belonging, research says that teams work harder, smart, and more together, and they outperform teams that don't have that same sense of belonging. Having the right culture can and will lead to more success and wins. How can you impact culture? We all impact our teams' culture by the way we act and interact with each other. It starts wi...

Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) is the idea that students learn better when the material and teaching connects with their culture, their backgrounds, and their experiences. Instead of just giving students materials to learn from textbooks and worksheets, learning improves when we help make meaningful connections between the students and what we are teaching. When we help make these connections and build relevance between what they are learning and their lives, we can increase rigor, we can develop high-level academic skills, and dive deeper into the learning. The same can be said and should be said when we are coaching. When a lot of us were growing up, we were at the mercy of our coach. Whatever system he/she wanted to run is what we ran. We didn’t have much of a say-so and the coach was the judge, jury, and executioner. We are learning in the classroom that helping students connect with the learning increases achievement, and the same is seen in sports. Inst...

Many coaches have great ideas, but how you communicate those ideas and how the players receive and buy-in to those ideas are what is really important.   Its always good to see how different coaches present their ideas/thoughts/philosophy and how the players receive it. Here, Coach Porter Moser talks about the “Wall of Culture” that he had made for the Loyola-Chicago basketball locker room. This was the cultural impact Moser hoped for when he came up with the idea for the wall shortly after arriving at Loyola in 2011. Four seasons on the staff of late coach Rick Majerus at St. Louis taught Moser to fixate on fundamentals. Majerus could have written a dissertation on a jump stop. “When I got the job and was writing down all these things I wanted to do philosophically, all these details from notes when I worked for Rick, I was like, ‘Let’s just put it up there so they see it every day and buy in,’ ’’ said Moser, 49. “This was a blank wall when I got he...

All credit of this article goes to Stephanie at LifeBeyondSport.com. via here : I attended a women’s basketball game recently in which the home team sought to win the regular season conference championship against the visiting perennial conference power. I didn’t know anything about either team—their strengths or personnel. The first few quarters were close, but the home team led. At the beginning of the third quarter, I predicted to my friends that the home team would fold and the visitors would walk away victors. My prediction was based solely on what I observed of each team’s culture. The visiting team had a winning culture. Here’s what it looked like: players on the bench were animated and enthusiastic—standing, clapping, screaming for their teammates—they were very clearly FOR each other communication was off the charts; the players would huddle on the court between plays and had tremendous vocal leadership and eye contact when a player went down, teammate...