Month: October 2016

“Push yourself again and again. Don’t give an inch until the final buzzer sounds.” – Larry Bird

“The greatest accomplishment is not in never failing but in rising again after falling” – Vince Lombardi

1. 50% Face-off wins. Ideally this would be much higher, but last year we hovered around 30% so 50% would be huge. One thing we’ve done much better this year is we brought in a coach who is a face-off specialist and we’ve spent 30+ minutes practicing face-offs in every practice. The cool thing we discussed in the meeting was that this is a 3-man goal, because in lacrosse face-offs are often won by the one of the two wings winning a groundball. Last year we would just track who took the actual face-off and not pay attention to the responsibility of the wings. One thing this conversation did point out was that next week we need to spend more time practicing and teaching the wings the best way to position themselves.
2. 50% or our goals be with an Assist. Again long-term this number should be higher, but 50% would be a huge step forward for this team. This was another good conversation, as the boys asked would it count if you made a pass then that player makes a good one-on-one move to score. Since the main reason for this goal was to encourage team-play and for the players to realize good offense involves passing and making good choices instead of selfish ‘hero-ball,’ and considering one-on-one dodging in lacrosse is still an important element of the game, we agreed that we would consider a possession where the ball has moved in our offense and then a player gets an opportunity for a good shot, we would consider this assisted. We’ll see how this goes in the tournament and can modify it for the spring.
3. Zero turnovers on shots on goal where we have no one behind the goal to retain possession. (For those not familiar with lacrosse, it’s different from most sports in that if you take a shot on goal and the ball goes past the goal and out-of-bounds, the team with the player closest to where the ball goes out of bounds retains possession.) Last year we gave up too many possessions where we either had players out of position or a player rushed a shot early in the possession before we could set up a player behind the goal.
4. We have an offensive slow-break play which we are supposed to run every time down the field that is not a fast-break. It requires all the players focus and remembering to run it, and we were horrible at having everyone execute it last year. So we set a stretch goal of running the play at least 6 times per game.
5. 90% successful clears with Zero offsides penalties. This is mostly a matter of focus and awareness, but considering you are have a 4 vs. 3 number advantage on clears, you should successfully execute most of them.
6. Zero dumb penalties. This was another interesting conversation. We discussed that penalties arising from aggressive plays by playing physically on defense and going hard after groundballs, while no penalty is ideal, we could live with a few of them per game. What we can not live with are retaliation penalties where a player is just frustrated and takes a cheap shot at the opposition. We left it with the coaches having discretion as to what a dumb penalty was.
7. Communication after first couple possessions. Just like in basketball, communication on defense in lacrosse is imperative. It also is a sign of discipline and is very intimidating to the offense if you have 7 defensive players all loudly communicating their responsibilities. What we observed last year was our team would do this the first few possessions of each half and then it would wain. This is a little tough to quantify and track, but we agreed this would be a top goal. The coaching staff then challenged the non defense players that they could affect this as well even though they don’t play defense. All of the leadership team needs to set the example of the importance of communication in everything we do. Call each player by name when calling for the ball, address the coaches by their full name (not ‘Hey Coach’), and make sure they know the name of all of the new players and call them by name during practice.

Week 6 – Head coach buy-in

No leadership meeting this week as we got rained out. But there was still a lot going on. A few updates:

Head coach buy-in
Last week we finished the week with our leadership meeting coming up with consequences for missing practices. I wasn’t overly satisfied with the solutions we came up with, but did feel like it was a start and a move in the right direction. I passed them on to the head coach at the beginning of our first practice this week and asked for his thoughts. They were not positive to say the least. Without mincing his words, he felt that it didn’t fix the problem at all so we weren’t going to do it. This opened my eyes to the fact that the head coach and I weren’t on the same page with what we were trying to get done. I had a feeling this was the case, but this verified it. I consulted with several of the members of the culture mastermind I am part of, and it is apparent I need to set up a time to grab a coffee with the coach and get back on the same page. It has been a little awkward with me doing the leadership activities without much involvement from him, so this is a good time to make sure he understands I am not trying to undermine his authority and I have no desire to take over coaching this team. I’ll share next week how this meeting goes.

On a more positive note – I am continuing to challenge the players to communicate better by calling other players by names and the leadership team is picking up on this and doing the same. There is definitely a more positive vibe starting to happen in our practices. I also complimented one of the players who often can be a little tougher to coach at the end of practice on Wednesday because he had a great practice and was really focused and showed great effort – and the head coach thought I was being sarcastic and said ‘Really?’ – and when he realized I was being serious he went and gave that player a high five. Positive end to our week.

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I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.

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If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. We recently had our first meetings this past Wednesday, and it was energizing and exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.

Week 5 – Leadership Meeting Part 2 of 4 – Commitment & Accountability

This week we had our 3rd leadership meeting with the players. As a reminder, in our first meeting we brainstormed about what our goals were for this team, and then decided to break down the next 4 meetings into diving into some actionable improvements as follows:
1 – Excellence in Practice
2 – Commitment & Accountability
3 – Communication
4 – Keep eye on the prize: Team>Individual

Commitment & Accountability
This week we had a shorter meeting, which we spent diving a little deeper into last week’s discussion around players’ commitment. Specifically around practice attendance and being involved in our two fall fundraisers.

• Practice attendance: We decided it was too cumbersome to track each player’s attendance for allowing them to participate in our Thursday scrimmages. After brainstorming, the boys really thought having to run additional laps at the end of the practice was the best incentive to not miss practice. We did also discuss that many of the players have jobs, tutoring, or other commitments that were also important and would be excused absences. So the consensus was that if a player was going to miss practice they had to send an email or text to one of the 4 coaches ahead of time for it to be excused. If they do not, they will run 2 sprints at the end of practice. I’m not a huge fan of using exercise as a punishment so I don’t totally love this solution, but we are going to try it for the remaining 3 weeks of our fall session. I welcome any feedback or suggestions for a better way to do this in the spring. Ideally, practice attendance should not be optional and peer pressure and playing time should eliminate this being an issue. But we’re not there yet, so we’ll see how this band-aid goes.
• Fall fundraisers: This was a good discussion. The expectation is that every athlete attends both of our fundraisers, the only exception being several of our seniors are taking the ACT on one of the dates. We agreed that we are going to hold everyone else accountable for 100% participation and attendance and not really give anyone the option of not being there.

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There still has not been a natural leader step up in this group. It’s an interesting challenge because the most talented players are not natural leaders, but instead several of the slightly-less talented players are starting to step up and become more vocal. I really look forward to the coach training we are going to do as a staff in November and December and discussing how we can use a program like Lead’EmUp to train our captains for the spring. Choosing the captains will be an interesting process because of the lack of selflessness and team-first attitude our best players struggle with.
I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.

If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. We recently had our first meetings this past Wednesday, and it was energizing and exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.

“You don’t handle people, you work with people” -John Wooden, when asked how he was going to handle one of his players

One of the favorite questions I ask every coach I interview is: ‘What is the best thing you have ever learned or stolen from another coach?‘
7 Character Development Lessons:

1. You’re not developing an athlete, you’re developing a person
2. It’s not about you being a great coach, it’s about you knowing and developing young men and women
3. ‘It’s not what you get from playing, it’s who you become because you play’ – Character development is the key in coaching.
4. Make whoever you are talking to feel like the most important person in the room
5. Talk TO/WITH your players, not AT them
6. Ken Stuursma shared a story with me about a conversation with an old-time cowboy, Lou Skeridan – who taught him that kids come to you with their hearts wide open, and you have 2 choices:
   1. You can build into it and make their heart bigger, or
   2. You can crush that and make their hearts smaller
7. Robert Murphy shared a story about Coach Mike Denney – He taught Robert the importance of character and creating a family environment. He lived it too – he recruited Robert out of high school, and Robert chose to go to his rival – and yet every time he saw him he always came over and shook his hand and said hi.

Love ’em up! Next week we’ll share great ideas on practice formats.

Leadership Meeting Part 1 of 4 – Excellence in Practice

This week we had our 2nd leadership meeting with the players. As a reminder, in our first meeting we brainstormed about what our goals were for this team, and then decided to break down the next 4 meetings into diving into some actionable improvements as follows:
1 – Excellence in Practice
2 – Commitment & Accountability
3 – Communication
4 – Keep eye on the prize: Team>Individual

Excellence in practice
We went through our practice schedule from start to finish and came up with the following improvements to implement immediately. The head coach joined us for this session, but let me lead the session and let the players do 98% of the talking. Here’s what we came up with:

• Communication: I asked the players if any of them knew all of the other players names, particularly the new kids. None of them did. They agreed to make an effort to learn every players name, and equally important to start calling each other by name as they communicate. This included the coaches. Instead of ‘Hey Coach,…’ they committed to ‘Hey Coach Craig,…’ They also committed to try to call one of the new kids by name each practice and tell them they are glad they are here.
• Not cutting corners: We start each practice by jogging 4 laps around the field. There are varying speeds with the athletes, and I asked if we should run this together or continue to run in small groups based on speed. This was a really interesting discussion, but they agreed there was a social aspect to hanging out with their buddies and didn’t find it important for practices to run as a group. They did agree that for pre-game runs they should do it together, just not for practice. The one area they did agree was to stop cutting the corners on the runs. If the lines weren’t obvious, they asked for 4 cones for the fastest runner to lay out the first time he goes around the field.
• Organize the ball-hunt: In lacrosse there are usually several times in each practice where you send the team out to go look for stray and lost balls. Two improvements they came up with: 1 – If you make a wild pass or shot, regardless of the drill, you should immediately chase your own. 2 – They came up with a system to organize how the balls are retrieved instead of chaotically throwing them back towards the middle.
• Positive energy – We discussed the importance of having fun while working hard. I asked if they wanted to end practices having a couple players share something good they saw someone else do in practice. There were a few who expressed concerns of ‘sappy’ or ‘cheesy’ to this, but they all talked and agreed it was worth a try.
• Practice attendance – Since it’s an optional fall session, we agreed that there were excusable reasons for missing practices. But random inconsistency was agreed upon as not being acceptable. Several players suggested punishments for kids who miss such as running laps. i threw out there the idea of instead of punishing unexcused absences, instead creating a reward for players who didn’t miss practices. We came up: Players who have no unexcused absences that week get to participate in a scrimmage that will be the last 45 minutes of our last practice of the week. Players who have an unexcused absence will do other drills during that time. An unexcused absence was defined as any absence where the player has not emailed our head coach ahead of time explaining why he would miss practice.

It was fun to watch the team during our next practice implement some of these new procedures. Particularly calling other players by name. Of course being high-schoolers they over-emphasizes this sarcastically, but it still added a fun element to the practice. There is slowly starting to be a more fun, positive culture. It’s amazing how just talking about everything is starting to have a positive effect on the team. Next week we’ll talk more about commitment and accountability.

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I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.

If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. We recently had our first meetings this past Wednesday, and it was energizing and exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.

“A good coach will make his players see what they can be rather than what they are.” -Ara Parasheghian

One of the favorite questions I ask every coach I interview is: ‘What is the best thing you have ever learned or stolen from another coach?‘
Check out these 6 tips to become a better teacher:

1. It all starts with being organized and prepared
2. Keep things simple
   • Keep things simple and only run a few plays and then practice them over and over again until you have perfected them. The details are important. RUN LESS PLAYS!
   • Be great at 1 or 2 things vs. being good at 6 to 8.
   • Having a very simple playbook – and letting the kids name the plays so they can remember them
3. Whatever level you are coaching at – get to know the coaches at the next level, and ask them about expectations for new players – then implement some of these standards and let the kids know you are doing it to prepare them for the next level
4. When teaching skills – break everything into 3 steps. Using this you can see progress every practice, not just at the end of the year:
   • Practice walking through it. You can do this without even including a ball at first.
   • Practice with slight opposition
   • Practice in game-type setting
5. Talk softly around kids – Instead of yelling so the kids can hear you – train them to listen by talking softly
6. Showing is much more effective than telling – use video recording of the athletes on an iPad or phone so they can see the corrections you are making (in their mind they almost always think they are doing it correctly already)

Teach ’em up! Next week we’ll look at lessons learned on character development.

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts” – John Wooden

One of the favorite questions I ask every coach I interview is:
‘What is the best thing you have ever learned or stolen from another coach?’

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This week we launch a new 7-part series that will share 40 responses I’ve received to that question during the first 91 WYC interviews. We’ll break the series up as follows:
1 – Teaching & Coaching Styles
2 – Developing character
3 – Practice format
4 – Mental Toughness & Learning from mistakes
5 – Game Strategies
6 – Culture & Commitment
7 – Parent coaching

4 of the answers to this question actually directly addressed upping your coaching skills by learning from others:

• From Coach K – Go learn everything you can, but then make it your own. ‘You’re going to write your own story, make sure you use your own pen.’ – Paul Niggebrugge
• Everybody steals most of their ideas, the key is to make it your own and individualize everything based on the needs of the team/person – Corey Bridges
• Go to other teams/coaches’ practices! At every level. – Lee Miller
• Alan Stein: When watching someone else do a drill that you are going to implement- Ask:
  1. Why are you doing it?
  2. How are you doing it?
  3. What is the end result supposed to be?

Think about the learning curve we are getting by picking the brains of the mentors of 91 of the best youth coaches! Get your notebooks out and we’ll dive deep next week!

Week 3 – Player Honesty – “I hate being on this team”

No meeting with the leadership group this week, our next one is scheduled for next Tuesday, where we’ll analyze everything that happens from start to finish in practice and come up with actionable plans for improvement.

I did have an interesting conversation with a player after practice yesterday. He came up to me and I said “I hate being part of this team. I sometimes hope I get hurt so I won’t have to come to practice and see these guys.”

Wow. Heavy stuff. This player is an upperclassman and has been around this group for several years. I dug in and tried to focus more on listening than providing an immediate solution. I would say I did a pretty good job of listening 80% of the time and talking 20% (something that doesn’t come naturally to me, just ask my wife.)

I asked him, without pointing out specific players, if he could identify what makes him hate being part of this team. While talking through several different things, it seemed to keep coming back to selfishness by some of the team’s players, and nothing being done about it. He did not feel like the players on this team cared for each other and there was no excitement for building relationships and working towards a common goal.

I let him know that we, as a coaching staff, acknowledged there was a lack of chemistry with this group, and specifically that is why we established my role as a culture coach. We discussed that this culture will not be changed overnight, and I reminded him what I shared at the first leadership meeting, that as a leader you have to be willing to do what it takes to change the culture, even with the knowledge that it might not be completely fixed before he graduates. Great culture isn’t built overnight and it will be a slow process working to turn things around.

He honestly shared that the selfish behaviors he observes makes him fall into the same trap and want to play for himself too. I challenged him here to be part of the change he wants to see. I told him that if a few of the leaders and the whole coaching staff starts building positive energy and rewarding the right types of behavior, it will slowly start turning the tide. I told him he took a great first step by telling me what he was feeling, as burying these types of feelings and keeping them inside will eat you up.

Tough conversation, and a pretty big smack in the face as a coaching staff to have someone tell you they hate playing for the team you coach. But as I have shared previously, it was not totally surprising. The culture on this team has a long, long way to go. But admitting you have a problem and getting past denial is step 1 – so we are going to get there!

Thanks for following this journey with me, it will be life-changing for everyone involved!

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I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.

If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. We recently had our first mastermind meeting, and it was energizing and exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.