Three to ponder...

Coaching education never seems to stop. Scroll social media and there are thousands of people chiming in, some opinions based on fact and others based on..well...opinion! But there is no shortage of content, in it's various forms, for coaches to glean from.

Humbly, here are three recommendations for you to ponder.

First is one of the best coaching books to come out in some time. Doug Lemov is a teacher of teachers and has written extensively on the subject of teaching more efficiently and successfully. In December he released a book for coaches called "The Coaches Guide to Teaching." Upon the books release and promotion, COVID forced teachers to change how they taught and Lemov pivoted and focused his energies on students learning from Zoom and video and the hybrid styles of learning that teachers were being forced into. In some ways, this may have cost Lemov some readers but this book is invaluable. 

Most coaching books talk about many of the same things, just with different acronyms and stories that sell the same ideas. In Lemov's journey, he touches on things that many of us don't think about. For example, there is a significant number of pages dedicated to forgetting. The idea of your athlete taking in everything you said at practice and implementing it at the next one is, in a word, absurd. He candidly talks about how much we all forget and how to help teach after the forgetting happens.

Lemov dives into this idea of learning and focuses much of his book on Coaches becoming better teachers, and uses both field and classroom examples you can pull up on YouTube as a companion to the point he is making. 

The book is practical, well written and devoid of fluff. Every coach should look into Lemov's ideas to become a better teacher and this book is a valuable asset in that journey.

Another less obvious choice for coaches this summer is a play turned into a streaming movie. Illusionist, card shark and memorist Derek Delgaudio's one man show, called "In & Of Itself" was recommended by Coaching Guru John Kessel. 

Delgaudio forces viewers into the notion that too often, we see people how we want to see them and often how they want to be seen. But in a thoughtful progression of stories and audience participation, we realize that we are not just one thing. We are so many things and in an extraordinary exercise midway through the film, we see the transformation of people before your very eyes.

Think of how many times we have looked at an athlete and branded them with our perception? "She is slow," or "He is lazy," or "She will never be a setter!" Who gives us the right? More importantly, why should that athlete be boxed into someone else's perception?

Delgaudio forces you to look at how we put people into categories and how we can upend those ideas with a little more effort., kindness and opening of our minds.

The film is riveting, funny, irreverent and will have you thinking about it for days after. 

Finally, while many of you probably already subscribe to this podcast, Ryan Holiday's "The Daily Stoic" is a quick and rich daily thought about the ideas of stoicism in your busy life.

Holiday has taken the tenets of Stoicism and put them into several best selling books that are often sprinkled on a coaches shelf. Those include, "Ego is the Enemy," "The Obstacle is the Way" and "Stillness is the Key."

In this 3-4 minute podcast, Holiday takes an idea from the Ancient Stoic's writings and philosophy and helps you implement those ideas into your daily rigor. The four ideas of what they called virtue: wisdom, justice, temperance and courage and sifting them into your coaching practices may help you cement your coaching philosophy going forward.

Holiday's podcast also offers many in depth interviews with a range of people, from authors and athletes to scholars and historians. But the three to four minutes spent with Stoic philosophy can help open your mind to a better athlete centered coaching style.

If you have some recommendations like these, please share with us and the other coaches. 

Find a way...

At the end of every season, UCLA coach John Wooden would sit down with his coaches, pore over his statistics for the season, talk with his players and come up with this question: "What do I need to get better at?"

It might have been in bound plays, it might have been isolation sets or maybe just how he interacted with players in certain situations. In the era before the cell phone and internet, Wooden would write letters, make calls, drive to camps to watch other coaches and discuss the things Wooden thought they were better at then him. He would take these ideas and changes, put them into his upcoming season and then do it all again the next summer, win or lose. 

For most of us, our seasons are over. 

What do you need to get better at? 

Can you sit down objectively and make a list of the things you did well and the things you did not? If you DO make that list, show it to your assistant or head coaches for their honest feedback. Show it to your club director, mentor or coaching friends. Show it to your players as they are the ones that will have the best feedback for you.

It can be scary to be examined like this. Your defensive hackles will rise up, your excuses will pour out of you- we are, after all, human. But what can you do to make this exercise work? If you struggle with taking criticism or compliments, do it through text or e mail. If you can handle it in person, it is much more pure and free of interpretation. But find the way to get the information and feedback and then act upon it.

There are thousands of coaching books- most of them on tape as well. There are more podcasts now than books in the New York Public Library- many volleyball pods. But also, coaching pods, sports psych pods, motor learning pods, etc.

If you don't have coaching friends, make some. Talk to some higher level coaches and ask for advice. Ask to take them to lunch or coffee and pick their brain. Find a team you liked and admired from last season that did the things well that you didn't and talk to that coach. 

Find a way.

Like many coaches, some sharks must keep swimming and moving forward or they will drown and die. Coach, either start your journey or continue it, but being a life long learner is paramount to coaching success. 

As always, our most important coaching tool is the mirror. Look inside- what can you get better at?

Resemble or rebel?

There is one gift than any coach should be excited to receive. It would be motivating, eye opening and hopefully generate self reflection that makes us better teachers AND better learners.

It's not a video series, a book or a cool leather organizer with clipboard, lineup wheel and small white board inside. It's much simpler.

A mirror.

As a player, working hard- hustling and running and hitting the floor, what does it tell them when the coach is sitting...SITTING on the other side of the court watching and shouting instruction?

What does it tell a team when a coach enters  and plays in the drill while eligible players are left to stand off, waiting their turn to get better at a sport they might now be falling out of love with? 

How about the beach coach that pulls up a chair in the shade and sits down, watching the kids in the clinic sweating and running through their drills and workout under the blazing sun.

Put yourself in their shoes for just a minute. How do YOU feel about the boss that flies first class but leaves you in coach? How about when she decides to take the afternoon off to be with her family but doesn't allow you the same opportunity? Or the manager that makes you wear a mask while you are working but then never wears theirs? Can you feel your blood starting to boil just reading these scenarios? 

American Statesman Adlai Stevenson once said, "A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation."  

Look in that mirror and check yourself. If you were an athlete, would your posture, your body language, your conduct be that of which your athletes would want to resemble or rebel against? If a player sat down in your team huddle, what would be your response? 

A culture is only as good as the model of it's leader. As a coach, you have a chance to significantly impact your culture, your athletes and how they represent the sport you are coaching. Hypocrisy is a curse upon culture that is an ever opened wound.

Let's see our reflection and be the intention.

Finding the grace in the random...

 In the evening of April 2nd in San Antonio, random was exposed.

It happened again the next evening in Indianapolis and again the evening after that back in San Antonio.

Hearts shattered and redeemed, coaches vilified or christened in just 17.6 seconds across three of the most important basketball games in the lives of these programs. And they all fell to one thing:

The last possession.

It’s that moment where coaches moonwalk on a razor blade. It’s where a player’s confidence, future and brand can be enriched or scuttled. Every coach wants it and hates to have it taken from them, like spoiled toddlers fighting over a toy. And in three days in early April, with the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Division I basketball Championships on the line, it took 17.6 seconds over the ending of three games to prove something that we all must embrace.

Random rules!

As coaches, we play to our strengths. If we have a good serving team, we want the ball in our hands serving at 24-23. At the higher levels, we want the ball served to us so we can run our offense. The last possession is the stomach churning, nail biting crescendo of sports.

And as much as we think we can control it, random wins more times than not. Arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan had 18 last shot opportunities in the playoffs over his career.

He made 9. The greatest player of his generation made 50% which is a remarkable number, but still just half.

Most of us coaching would LOVE to have MJ taking the last shot in our playoff game. We love to have our best server at the line at 24-23. We would love to have our best rotation receiving serve at 24-23.

And here is where the place card holder for Random is placed because sometimes, as the game goes, you will have your best server at the line, and sometimes not. At that point, the volley gods are in control.

Players miss serves, balls get blocked or hit out of bounds, passes get shanked or in rare cases called in when they are out or vice versa. The randomness of sport is the DNA by which we exist. We train and practice so those moments WILL work when called upon on that last possession, but even with all the training and reps and experience, sometimes random wins.

April 2^nd in the Alamodome, the last 8.2 seconds of their NCAA Women’s semifinal, South Carolina’s Aliyah Boston stripped the ball from Stanford’s 6-4 Freshman Cameron Brink. Boston saw teammate Brea Beal streaking down the court and shoveled the ball to her. Beal ran the left side of the court in three dribbles and put up an 8’ falling away layup attempt that caromed off the back of the rim into the hands of Aliyah Boston who gathered and pushed up a 7’ shot at the buzzer…that was an inch too long. It bounced off the back of the rim and Stanford was heading to the National Championship game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySPdzkYSrnY

While so much is going on in this last 8.2 seconds, three players’ lives were casually altered by random. The Stanford Freshman Brink would have been devastated if one of the South Carolina shots had fallen. On the flip side, both Boston and Beal might have been heroes if their shots had connected. The road less travelled…

As it was, Boston has probably made that shot thousands of times in practice and in games, Beal’s layup is probably something she has shot and made hundreds of times in her career and Brink, at 6-4, probably doesn’t have the ball stripped from her all that much. But that night, that 8.2 seconds, random ruled and Stanford went on.

The next night in Indianapolis, the Men’s #1 seed Gonzaga saw their game v. UCLA in the semifinal tied in overtime when UCLA’s Sophomore Johnny Juzang put back his own shot with 3.3 seconds left. Gonzaga immediately inbounded the ball on the run to Jalen Suggs, a 6-4 freshman guard who raced up the court in three dribbles and pulled up 40 feet from the rim, in front of the outstretched arms of UCLA’s 6-4 David Singleton and extending his legs and arms, launched the ball which arced into the back of the glass and banked through the net. Gonzaga was moving on to the National Championship game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sx3LuhZOFn8

The Monday morning quarterbacks might have wondered why Juzang didn’t take a little more time off the clock before his shot? Why didn’t UCLA pick up Suggs full court defensively and make him burn time running around defenders. And if Singleton had maybe timed his jump a little differently, maybe he gets a finger tip on the ball that changes that shot enough to force a second overtime.

The What if’s…Why didn’ts…They should’ves….I would’ves…

The moment is fraught with energy, pressure, fear, excitement, split second decision making, reading the play, past experiences. Sitting in a broadcast booth, it’s easy to criticize or lionize, but in that moment often times random is king.

In the Alamodome on April 4^th, it happened once again. This time, the University of Arizona was playing Stanford for the National Championship and again, Stanford was forced to relinquish the last possession. With 6.1 seconds left and Stanford up 54-53, the Wildcats inbounded the ball to their All American guard, 5-6 Aari McDonald. The inbounds play lobbed it into McDonald’s outstretched hands at almost half court. She was the reigning PAC 12 Player of the Year and Stanford probably knew the ball was going into her hands.

She was quickly double teams as she snaked her way toward the three point line and stepped in front of it but a wall of Stanford defenders stood tall as a third Cardinal swept in to help. With 1.6 seconds left, McDonald stepped back, turned around and let the shot fly over 6 outstretched arms as the arena stopped breathing.

The ball hit the back of the iron and fell away as the buzzer sounded. Stanford survived not having the last possession once again, this time with a National Championship. Aari lowered her head and began to cry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vfiH0U9WUs

All three of these shots, so important to so many, were decided by millimeters, by the push of an arm to much or too little, by the friction of a fingertip: those micro moments deciding the fate of players, coaches and programs for years to come.

Embrace her or disregard her, be arrogant enough to think you have control of her, but random owns us at times. And while the sports world loves to blame and second guess, rarely do they speak of the randomness of the game.

It’s important to note one more thing. In South Carolina’s loss to Stanford, the first person to console Aliyah Boston was Assistant Coach Fred Chmiel. The first one to console Aari McDonald was Wildcat head coach Adia Barnes. And when Suggs hit his 3 pointer at the buzzer, Gonzaga coach Mark Few shook his head in disbelief, walked calmly to shake hands and embrace a gutted UCLA coach Mick Cronin and let his team have the spotlight for their performance.

Great Coaches and coaching staffs aren’t random. They are caring, hard working, forward thinking men and women who find the grace in the random.

It’s a lesson for us all.