Selflessness

For Christmas, I received a book written by John Wooden as a gift. As with most books by Coach Wooden, it was fantastic with a lot of examples, nuggets of knowledge, and suggestions. I don’t have the book in front of me as it’s been leant to a fellow coach, so I don’t recall the title. However, the theme of the book revolves around role models, what it takes to be a good role model, and why. While I’ve read a lot of books written by different coaches, they were mostly about seasons they’ve had, coaching situations, etc. However, this one was quite a bit more inspirational for me as it went beyond coaching. Coach Wooden has not only been inspired by his own coaches and teachers as he was growing up, but he was also inspired by some of the players he has coached, and even non-basketball people like his wife and Mother Teresa. It was absolutely fascinating to read about the reasons as to why he selected the individuals, along with the traits that he admires about each person. I would highly recommend reading the book if you get a chance….sorry about the title…

One of the things that struck me about the people he selected was a trait I called “selflessness”. While all of these people had a different impact on his life in different ways, they all exhibited a trait of placing the needs of others in front of their own desires. That’s definitely not an easy thing to do, and frankly, it’s not the way a lot of our society is designed to work today. There is a lot of “me before we” behavior in today’s society, and I think it far too often carries over into sports when it comes to playing and coaching. Professional sports is probably the worst example of this type of behavior, and I think it’s most noticeable in the NBA. You look at the emphasis on star players, individual statistics, individual highlights, and when you dig down deep into your soul, I think you have to question whether this type of behavior belongs in team sports. Unfortunately, I believe it corrupts the way players approach how they play, and it corrupts how coaches make decisions.

For a long time, I have been a very team oriented coach. I haven’t always had the most talented individuals, but I’ve still had very successful teams. The secret behind it is actually quite simple. I’ve developed a system and style of coaching where each player knows their role and what I as the coach and the other members of their team can expect from them. A form of "selflessness" if you will. Is it a difficult way to coach? Absolutely! Today’s “win at any cost” view of the world puts a lot of pressure on coaches to take shortcuts to victory. However, I will also tell you that this style of coaching is one of the most rewarding aspects of coaching for me. At the end of the day, if you’ve helped young athletes learn how to fit into a group bigger than themselves and understand and accept their role in the group, you’ve set them up for success in life. As I talk to former players, we rarely discuss wins and losses or championships. We often talk about what they experienced with their teammates, and what a great group of people they belonged to while our team was together. You know, deep down, that you’ve made a difference in their life.

As I was reading John Wooden’s book, it came to me that I have been trying to teach “selflessness” in the players that I coach. I can’t say that this style of coaching has contributed to my climbing the ladder of coaching as far as coaching positions go. However, I can also say that it really doesn’t bother me either. Maybe it’s my age…maybe its insanity. Who knows? I don’t care. However, I thought I would take some time to write about some things I find helpful in coaching “selflessness”.

I think the hardest part of this style of coaching happens when you have a very diverse level of talent on a team. I can say from my experience as an assistant coach for high school boys, this age group (15-18) is where it is most difficult. You get players that have played on state championship teams at the competitive level all the way down to players who have enjoyed recreation soccer for most of their life. It’s very difficult to have the talented players to accept the limitations of their teammates, while at the same time, it’s difficult to get the less talented players to not feel overwhelmed by the expectations. The easiest thing to do is to focus on the very talented players, and hope that they can cover for the less talented players when it comes to practice and games.

However, this is also the fastest way to destroy the team. The very talented players are never forced to accept their lesser talented teammates, and their lesser talented teammates are find it hard to be accepted as part of the team. If you focus too much on one group or the other, or worse yet separate the players based on talent level, you set yourself up for disaster. The key is to have an appropriate blend of talented and less talented players working together when it comes to practice and scrimmages. It’s important to emphasize to the talented players that the success of the team depends on their ability to help their lesser talented teammates get better. It also helps the lesser talented teammates to push themselves to get better. The worst thing I’ve seen coaches do is to always have the lesser talented players sitting off to the side during practice drills and scrimmages. They never get the chance to get better, and the gap between them and the talented players grows wider. Eventually, this erodes the team, and things fall apart.

I have long been a believer of the phrase “hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard”. Give me a player that wants to work hard, and I can make them a better player. Nothing is more frustrating than a player that is talented, and is well aware of their talent. This gets even worse when that player’s parents have spend their entire playing career telling them how great they are compared to everyone else on the team. It’s very difficult to motivate this type of player because they’re already better than the rest of the team and they fail to see why they have to practice or work hard. In these situations, a reduction in playing time will sometimes do the trick. In some cases it works, in some cases it does not. However, what it does is send a message to the rest of the team of what you’re willing to sacrifice in order to build the kind of team you are trying to build. If the talented player, also known as egomaniac, never gets it, that’s their problem.

With the mix in talent levels of the team, it’s very important that each player clearly understand their role on the team. In some cases, this is very difficult because in competitive situations, you’re going to have players that do not play very much. However, it’s important for those players to feel that they are an essential part of the team’s success in the way that they practice, and push the starting players or players that play significant minutes. It is often said that the team is only as good as your weakest player. This is absolutely the case. You need your weakest players to be able to push their teammates as hard as they can. This only happens when they feel as much part of the team as the players who play a lot of minutes during the game.

Along with understanding roles, I think it’s important to emphasize that every position on the field is critical in one way or another. In a game like soccer, almost all youth players that play the game expect that they should play forward. The reason is that the forward scores the goals, which is the most noticeable aspect of soccer for people that have a tough time understanding the complexity of the game. Unfortunately, this mentality can be very difficult to correct because a lot of parents offer rewards to their kids for scoring goals. With teams of younger players, this is especially difficult. This past fall, I was coaching a team where I was having tremendous difficulty getting players to play defense. I finally asked them how many of their parents “bribed” them to score goals. Eight of the ten players on the team raised their hand. I was certain that I already knew the answer, and their response confirmed my belief. It can be quite a struggle given the situation with the parents, but you have to continue to emphasize the importance of all positions. One of the ways to take care of this is in the pre-season meeting by emphasizing with the parents to try not to “bribe” their kids to play better. If I, as a coach, am doing my job, they will play better provided they want to play and want to work hard at their game.

One of the most important aspects of coaching to encourage teamwork has to do with a concept I call “standardized discipline”. It’s critical that the rules be enforced equally for all members of the team. The hardest part of coaching is to have to discipline one of your most talented players by benching them for a critical game. However, nothing will destroy a team faster than “skipping” the discipline for the talented player in order to win the game. You have to be able to accept the result, as painful as it might be, knowing that in the long run it will be better for the player and the team. Some players will test you by violating team rules a second or third time to see if you’ll hold to your policies and punishment. In many cases, it’s more important to punish the second or third offense as it is to punish the first offense. You have to be consistent regardless of the player’s role on the team, or the number of times that they’ve violated the team rules.

As a coach, there is something that you can do that will quickly undermine everything else you are working on. It’s a dirty word called “recruiting”. In college, recruiting is part of the system, but this covers the pre-college ages. You’ve worked hard with your team all season, and have seen good results in teamwork and improvement in the players. At the end of the season you’ve, hopefully, set expectations for the upcoming year for returning players. Now, just before the new season, you find a player that you want to be on the team because it helps your chances of winning. While you may not think about it this way as a coach, what you’ve basically done is sent a message to the team that “they’re not good enough” so you have to go out and find better talent. Immediately, this creates a rift between the players that are already on the team, and the new player you’ve been recruiting. Whether you like it or not, you’ve just drawn a line between the existing team and the new player. Once that happens, it’s VERY difficult to recover from it.

Typically, when you recruit, you’re doing so to get better so that you can win more games. However, often in the heat of recruiting, you may overlook how that new player will fit in with your existing team. You’re setting yourself up for failure. In principle, I do not recruit players. If players express an interest in playing for the team, I will encourage them to tryout for the team. However, I will not approach a player that has not first shown interest in playing on the team. It just sends a subliminal message to the team that you’ll eventually have to deal with. This can be a very difficult situation from a coach’s perspective because any parent that wants to win badly enough is going to try and convince you to recruit new and better players. The key is if you can resist the temptation to sacrifice the team in order to win. For me, the choice is easy. Don’t recruit and save yourself a lot of headaches.

I think John Wooden has lead by example in this area. Even in college, he did not recruit players. He would talk to and visit players after they had expressed interest in UCLA. However, even then, he made no promises regarding playing time or anything like that. He focused on the opportunities the recruit would have both in basketball and academically. Even though he didn’t recruit, John Wooden still had a tremendous track record both with number of players that graduated, and with his team’s success on the basketball court. When you read his books, even though he may have a talented player that chose to play for him, he was always looking for ways to mix that player in with other combinations of players to get his most effective squad on the floor. As he openly tells you, he didn’t always play his best players, but he played the players that fit well together.

With that, I’ll finish off this blog entry. Even though there was a focus on the concept of “selflessness”, I think it’s very important to look at that in the context of how you manage and operate your team. Just like other aspects of coaching, there is no “one size fits all” answer. You have to do the best with each situation you have to deal with. However, hopefully this gives you a framework to start putting some of these things into practice.