A Coach's Diary

A couple of weeks ago, I was helping coach a new team, and a girl kept dribbling the ball with her left hand even though the right side was open. I told her that she would never get better at driving right if she never did it. I told her that she was going to mess up at first and make mistakes, but mistakes are okay and an important part of learning. She looked at me confused and asked, "So you are telling me it's okay to make mistakes?" This poor kid has been playing her entire career afraid to mess up, and it had been stunting her growth. I have been on teams where athletes were so afraid to make mistakes, they shut down.  I have also been on teams where the athletes were encouraged to try new things, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. This kind of team has what professor  Mary Murphy calls, A Culture of Growth . My youngest daughter plays on a competitive soccer team. While most coaches emphasize spacing the field and using passing to beat your defenders, h...

In 2007, we were still trying to figure out who Kobe Bryant was. The US National team was coming off an Olympic loss to Argentina, and a World Basketball Championship loss to Greece, and they needed leadership. To answer this need, they went out and recruited Kobe Bryant. Nobody brought more baggage to the Olympic basketball team at that time than Kobe. He ran Shaq off of the Los Angelos Lakers, everyone thought he was selfish, and he demanded a trade from the same Laker team in the parking lot of a grocery store.  It was an exciting point in his career. He had taken a few hits and was fighting to regain his place and restore his name. He had to prove to the NBA and to the world hat he was a good person and a team player.  Kobe told a reporter "I'm glad you're here; you're going to see something. You're going to see the USA be great again. This is my challenge; this is bigger than anything I've ever done." The same reporter then said,  "This was the s...

Kobe Bryant was hungry to learn, and he was always looking for people from which he could learn. Here is what he said about his relationship with NBA legend Bill Russell: “I knew there was a reason Bill Russell had more rings than fingers. Years ago, then, I picked up an autobiography of his and devoured it. There were a lot of valuable lessons in there. There’s one anecdote Bill shared that stuck with me. He recounts how people always said he wasn’t a good ball handler, just didn’t know how to handle and shoot the ball. He said sure, he could do all of those things, but why would he lead the fastbreak when Bob Cousy was playing with him? Why would he shoot jumpers when Sam Jones was on his wing? The message was that if you want to win championships, you have to let people focus on what they do best while you focus on what you do best. For him, that was rebounding, running the floor, and blocking shots. I thought that teaching was simple, yet profound. It was an insight I had never hea...

When you go from elementary to middle school, people start going through important changes. Around the 5 th , 6 th , and 7 th grades, you start to figure out who you want to be. Before that, your parents pretty much dictate everything, and you just followed. But around middle school, you start to make those decisions for yourself. When you get to high school, those decisions become more and more your own, and the decisions you make begin to set you up for life beyond high school. Take some time to think about who you really want to be. For the rest of your life, you really have to be aware of who you are, who you want to be, and the gap between the two. Make sure that every decision is aligned with who you want to be. People around you will start making all kinds of choices, good and bad, and you will have to choose which path you want to go down. In Matthew 18, the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who then is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Jesus brought a little...

One of my good friends has a son who is a high-major athlete at a power 5 school. The advice he gives to parents of athletes going through the youth sports experience and recruitment process is, "Just make sure they are good enough. If they are good enough, they will have an opportunity to play on top teams and play in college, but the second they stop being good enough, the opportunities stop too." In his book, The Mamba Mentality, Kobe Bryant writes that he learned a lot from studying and watching Muhammad Ali. Here is what he wrote about Ali: One of the main takeaways was that you have to work hard in the dark to shine in the light. Meaning: It takes a lot of work to be successful, and people will celebrate that success, will celebrate that flash and hype. Behind that hyp, though, is dedication, focus, and seriousness - all of which outsiders will never see. If you stop being dedicated to the craft, the commercials and contracts will all fade away. Success comes down to ha...

My favorite part about coaching is watching my athletes grow because when we grow as people, the potential for the team grows. But we have to believe in ourselves, believe in each other and in our leaders and believe in the process. The good thing about belief is that it doesn’t have to be big or deep at first. Just believe enough to show up, keep showing up, and do the next right thing. If we do that, if we keep showing up, our confidence, belief, and our ability will grow together. We have to have faith. In Matthew 17, a crowd was waiting at the bottom of a mountain for Jesus and his disciples. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, “Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn’t heal him. (Matthew‬ ‭17:14-16‬) The boy had a demon inside of him, and after Jesus healed him by removing the demon, the disciples asked privately, “Why couldn’t we cast out that demo...

When I am going through long periods of stress, like a losing streak or a shooting slump, my body starts to shut down, fatigue starts to kick in, and all I want to do is sleep. It’s harder for me to get out of bed, I stop exercising and meditating, and I spend more time on social media than reading good books. In his book Do Hard Things , Steve Magness writes that these are signs of Give-Up-Itis, learned helplessness that is the clinical expression of mental defeat. When we don’t feel like we have control over our situation, we start to shut down mentally. What we think is a lack of grit, toughness, and motivation is actually a lack of sense of control over our lives, and apathy and hopelessness take over. So how do we overcome this? Magness wrote that psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl noted that when he was in Auschwitz, another prisoner told him that to increase his chances of survival he should do two simple things: shave and stand tall. In other words, control what ...