Chris Ross, Offensive Coordinator, Tarleton State, and former Texas High School Head Football Coach.

Full video on Glazier Drive:  Being a Head Coach is Not an Individual Sport

OVERVIEW

This lesson, presented by Chris Ross, focuses on the fundamental shift in mindset required when moving from assistant coach to head coach. The core message: being a head coach is a team sport, not an individual one.

THE ROLE CHANGE

As an assistant, you executed the plan. As a head coach, you now produce results through the efforts of others — athletes, assistant coaches, parents, boosters, and administration. Leading adults is profoundly different from leading players, and requires an entirely new skill set.

SELLING YOUR VISION

A head coach must sell their vision to every group in the program. This means communicating not just where the team is going, but showing each individual — especially athletes — that they will personally benefit from the journey. People will work hard if they believe it will be worth it.

DELEGATION AND STANDARDS

Great head coaches delegate responsibly, then train and evaluate consistently. You must define success for every group, set clear roles and expectations, and establish standards for how your program prepares, practices, communicates, and conducts itself.

HIRING AND PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

Hire for character first — intelligence, creativity, and high character matter more than sport-specific knowledge. Coaches rarely get fired for aptitude; it’s almost always attitude. Also remember: every hour your staff gives you is time away from their families. Respect it by being productive, not just busy.

CULTURE

Culture is your beliefs and what it feels like to be part of your program. It starts at the top but must be owned at every level. If you don’t define and consistently reinforce it, it will drift — and that can unravel a program quickly.

This video is courtesy of Glazier Academies

In the 2-minute video, Frank DeLano delivers a powerful message taken from his full presentation “Everything They Don’t Tell You About Being a Coach” from Glazier’s Head Coach Academy.

Being put in the middle of difficult situations is seemingly a daily occurrence for coaches. There is no one answer or policy that is a guide to working through these tough calls, we can all benefit from having the mindset to examine all problems that deal with kids from as many sides as we can.

In this video, Coach Delano gives us his thoughts on dealing with the following scenario:

One of your athletes is an at-risk student who really needs to be a part of something that you can offer them. At times, those needs can conflict with what is best for the team.

Coach DeLano has won six state championships and definitely plays to win. As you will see in the video, he also has the heart to serve students.

My lesson from the video is that we need to look for a third alternative that helps the individual and that we are still able to do what is best for the team.

Click the play arrow to see the two-minute video.

Here are a few more of my takeaways from his entire presentation on Everything They Don’t Tell You About Bring a Coach:

• Dealing with everything they didn’t tell us is not in our job description.  However, putting thought and concern into each individual challenge that you are faced with is what will allow us to achieve maximum impact for our athletes.
• Coaches must adopt a fireman-like mentality.  Firemen train themselves to run toward fire to be able to put it out.  Coaches need to have that same mindset when dealing with issues that affect their athletes and their program.
• No matter what is going on around us, as coaches we need to remain calm.  More importantly than that, we need to help everyone else to remain calm.
• Try as we might, there will still be times when there is no resolution.  When faced with that, we need to be the leader in the healing process.
• No matter how many people are around us during our workday, having to make decide what is the best course of action can lead to a feeling of being alone and lonely as a coach.

To close, I offer a thought that I heard from That Matta (former Ohio State and current Butler Men’s Coach) at a coaching clinic in 2001. That was when we were both “young coaches.” 🙂   I made it the number one priority for our program.  He said, “I am very goal-oriented.  The number one goal for our coaching staff is to establish a life-long relationship with our players that can never be broken.”

Helping coaches develop a way of thinking that can be applied to all the issues they face is the purpose of Glazier Academies. The curriculum provides coaches across all sports and at all levels with the preparation and tools to tackle the most challenging and important issues they face today.

 

 

BORING is good when you want to be good

Written and contributed by Dr. Chris Hobbs ( Follow him on Twitter @Dr_ChrisHobbs)

 

My youngest daughter is a 14 year old aspiring athlete. Early on in her sport endeavors she’s demonstrated strength, grit, commitment, and some explosive athletic ability. I don’t know how accomplished she’ll become but she puts her all into her athletic participation. She loves it. Practices, games, tournaments, and training sessions are why she gets out of bed each day. Much of me agrees with her; like father, like daughter! She recently came home from an after-school strength training session with the qualified strength coaches we have at our school. I asked her how her session was. ‘Dad, it was boring. We do the same exercises every time.’

This made me smile. We have highly qualified and passionate strength coaches and an elite weight room so the workouts were not my concern. What my daughter was experiencing was the paradox that boring is good when you want to be good. We live in a day and age when we have almost no tolerance for boredom. If something becomes boring, we move on quickly. We can skip commercials, check a different social media network, communicate with whomever we want whenever we want, or scroll our phones while standing in lines.

We have almost completely purged boredom from our lives and that has consequences. One of those consequences is we have forgotten how many boring repetitions it requires to become proficient in a task or skill. Skill development in athletics is a great example, but it has many other applications like earning a degree, losing weight, or saving money for a big purchase. Getting good is boring!

As I worked through my doctorate, I would estimate that 75% of the things I was involved in were boring, but it would not have developed the understanding of content or process necessary to do what was required to finish the doctorate (write a dissertation) if I had not navigated a lot of boring. Boring is not bad if you want to be good at something.

There are a couple of ways to navigate boring while pursuing something good.

1. Check off the completion of tasks as you are working through boring phases. Jerry Seinfeld used to keep a calendar above his desk and cross off each day that he spent 30 minutes working on new jokes. His goal was to create as many unbroken rows of x’s on his calendar as he could. I’m sure writing jokes day in and day out go boring, but we don’t have the humor of Jerry Seinfeld without his tolerance for boring.

2. Develop practical reminders of where you are heading. Post it notes on mirrors, home screens on phones, and daily journals are all great ways to remind yourself of why you started on a boring path to something good.

3. Do boring with other people that are headed your same direction. I spent 3 years working towards a particular goal in strength training during my 30’s. There was a lot of boring days, hard lifts, and failed programs. I kept going many times because I was having a blast being miserable with the two guys I was training with. We did boring together and it was quite so boring.

Mother Theresa is quoted as saying, ‘be faithful in the little things because it is them that your strength lies.’ Boring is hard to tolerate when it comes to commercials and lines but that doesn’t mean that boring is bad. Boring is good when you want to be good. Ironically, when you remember that boring is required to be good, boring becomes exciting!

Keep on, keepin’ on, friends!

‘Bite Down and Don’t Let Go’ is a collection of writings on being intentional about life in a way that produces great persistence. Read about it more here.

Dr. Chris Hobbs is an educational leader and Director of Athletics at The King’s Academy in West Palm Beach, Florida. He’s earned a few degrees and won some awards. He’s happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have three teenage children. Life is messy and complicated most of the time. You can follow him on Twitter for all sorts of inspirational thoughts and good laughs.

 

Body Language Self Awareness Exercise with Mental-Coach Josef Spiegal:

“Based on my unconventional path of life, I am able to combine my experiences to see performance enhancement in sports from different perspectives thanks to:

– my passion for basketball, which I have been now over 25 years around (up to 1st Bundesliga AUT),
– my psychological expertise, which I gained through various educations and my work as a psychotherapist and sports-mental-coach and
– my experience in building a work ethic focusing on details, in order to grind out edges in a highly competitive environment as a former professional online poker player for many years.”

We are providing this to give you ideas on how to enhance your current program. The idea is not to implement it exactly as is, but rather to tweak it to make it fit your system

There is sound with the video, so please make sure that your sound is on.

This is a Vimeo video, so you will need to be on a network that does not block Vimeo videos.

If you would like to see more information about Coach Spiegal’s entire presentation, click this link: Unconventional Ways in Performance Enhancement

Thad Wells is the head high school football coach at Richlands High School in Virginia. Thad is known for his creativity and thoughtful approach to life and the game of football. The way he runs his program is unique, his offense is unique, and how he teaches the game is unique.

Thad was a 2018 AFCA 35 Under 35 selection and he won a state championship in just his 2nd year as a head coach.

“Books have changed my life as a coach.

Several years ago I started to notice a pattern among the world’s most successful people throughout history. Over and over again I would hear stories about how important reading was to their success. So I decided to follow suit and it has turned out to be the best decision I could have made for my career.

I put together my list of the 101 most influential books that I have read so far in my life. They are ordered in terms of importance for me. The point of the list is to not encourage you to go out and read all of these books. Instead, I just want to provide an idea of all the different types of books that I believe could potentially help a coach. Pick one and just get started. After you read a few, stop looking at the list and just ask questions. Then go find a book that can help you answer the questions you face.”

There is sound with the video, so please make sure that your sound is on.

This is a YouTube video, so you will need to be on a network that does not block YouTube videos.

If you would like to see more information about Coach Wells’ entire presentation, click this link 101 Influential Books for Coaches