Culture Journey Week #5

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.