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Experience Based Approach to Program Development

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Several years ago I had the opportunity to have a phone conversation with Bruce Brown about program culture change.  During the conversation, he mentioned that one small college he worked with created a list of experiences that the institution wanted all of their student-athletes to come away with.  At the time, I struggled with the exact list of experiences that I wanted our programs to provide that I really liked.

Recently, after reading a few books and having conversations with some great coaches such as Rick Jones and Randy Jackson, I’ve been able to sit down and come up with a list of experiences or take-aways that I would be proud of if all of our athletes were able to take those experiences with them when they left our program.

I created a Google Presentation to share some of these ideas with my coaches in the future and recorded a screencast (see below) to help organize my thoughts and to share here.  After some contemplation and revision, I came up with a list of five experiences or skills that I wanted kids to come away from our program with.  This is by no means a finished product but I thought by sharing, you and your coaches can start a conversation that might lead to you developing your own vision of what you want kids to come away with.

  • Develop Leadership
  • Build Relationships
  • Being a Selfless Member of the Team
  • Growth Mindset
  • Focus on The Process

Before you watch the screencast, just be aware that I really had to rush through it to keep it around 15 minutes.  Hope you find something useful here.

Be Good or Be Different

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Sometime around 2005 or 2006, I was reading a recap of the NCAA National Wrestling Tournament and saw an infographic on the number of aliDivision I All Americans by State of Origin.  Up at the top of the list as I recall was Pennsylvania.  In this particular year, not only were they at the top of the list, there wasn’t a state that was even close to them in total AA’s.  The question that popped into my mind was, “What are they doing in their high schools that no one else is?”

Be Good or Be Different.  I have developed the general philosophy of “be good or be different.”  The idea behind this is that we want to either be one of the best at what we do or have the ability to be the best at what we do.  If we don’t feel we have the ability to be the best at it,  we will search for an alternative to gaining an edge on our competition.  I don’t understand why so many teams now run the “offense du jour” regardless of talent and coaching.  It is logical to me that if you have the personnel to run the spread, or you have an expertise that leads you to believe that you can get your players there over time, it makes sense.  However, if you’re in league with three teams from bigger schools, with a higher SES and they all run Air Raid, I don’t think it’s in your interest to follow suit.

A great example of this has been discussed on a recent episode wilt-chamberlainof Revisionist History when Malcolm Gladwell examined the absurdity of Wilt Chamberlain shooting free throws underhand for a season (including his 100 point game), seeing a huge improvement and inexplicably going back to an overhand shot the next season.

“Chamberlain had every incentive in the world to keep shooting free throws underhanded, and he didn’t. I think when people don’t do the thing they ought to do, we assume it’s because of ignorance. This is not that. This is doing something dumb even though you’re fully aware that you’re doing something dumb.”                                                                                -Malcolm Gladwell

It begs the question: if players like Shaquille O’Neal and DeAndre Jordan could significantly increase their effectiveness in close games (and in the process make themselves even more valuable to their team and sponsors) don’t you think it would at least be worth a try?

Another great example of how being different can provide huge benefits has been the University of Oregon.  It is still hard to believe that Oregon has played for two national championships over the past few years.  If you had followed the program 20 years ago, I am not sure if you would have thought it possible.  But between practicing differently than everyone (No Sweat Thursdays, music throughout practice, using GPS on players during practice), their uniforms looking different from everyone and their offense running differently from everyone has netted them a lot of success. (I understand that a lot of teams have followed suit but I think being different has been a big part of the Ducks’ success since the arrival of Chip Kelly).

The Pareto Principle.  In his 2001 book, Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about General Electric CEO, Jack Welch’s decision to review everything that GE did at the time and cut every division where it was determined they couldn’t be #1 or 2 in the industry.  The principle behind that decision is the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule which states that 80% of your production comes from only 20% of what you do.  If you can focus and grow the 20%, your 80% is going to grow as well.

Wrestling with Being Different.  Back to my obsession with Lehigh Valley high school wrestling.  It turns out that while Pennsylvania is consistently one of the best wrestling states in the Union, the year I found that aforementioned infographic, was a bit of an anomaly.  However, it spurred me on to do some deep thinking about the system that I was teaching and why I was teaching it.

Around that time, a friend was hired as the new head coach of one of the top programs in the state.  I had hired him in the past to do camps and clinics for me as he was a college coach and a multiple NCAA All-American.  I taught a lot of the same system he did and when he became a high school coach and became an opponent, I thought to myself, “How do I out teach him using his system?”  After all, I had only barely placed at the NAIA National Championships as senior in college and he had been on the Olympic Ladder.

daveCI started doing a lot of research on high school wrestling in Pennsylvania.  I was able to get VHS tapes and some DVDs of clinics by Ray Nunamaker, Rob Rohn, Mike Powell and others.  I was able to convince my wife to drive two hours out of the way from our trip to NYC in order to sit down and visit with Dave Crowell for three hours after taking the red eye from Portland to Newark.  Subsequently, I was able to bring Dave to our school twice to do a coaches clinic as well as a camp for my kids.

Coaches in our league told me that they had to dedicate significant portions of practices to prepare for us and several of them had named techniques after our school.  Over time, we found that kids who were otherwise below average wrestlers could find a way to be competitive because their opponents had a hard time adjusting to their style.  I’m not saying that we forsook fundamentals and were different for the sake of being different.  What we did was went outside of our bubble, found what we liked from those coaches and programs and, built a system that was unique and effective.

A Football Coach with Cauliflower Ears.  When I became the head football coach in 2012, I spent a lot of time thinking about what scheme we should run offensively.  My best experience professionally had been as an assistant coach for Craig Ruecker whose Multi Pro Offense has netted him 283 wins and two state titles (and counting) during his career.  So why didn’t we run that offense?  The two main reasons were that we were unsure about what kind of quarterback we were going to have and more important at the time is that there were three good teams in our league that were better at running it than we were.  A lot of that decision was based on my insecurity as a first time head coach but, what happened a year later helped prove my point.

After our first season where we went 11-1 and advanced to the semifinals of the State Playoffs for only the second time in school history, we had to deal with the fact that almost the entire Class of 2014 had transferred to a brand new school in our district.  We went from 25 seniors on our varsity team in 2012 to less than 10 in 2013, and only one of whom actually played football the season prior.  To add insult to injury, our quarterback who was the lone shining light in the senior class, transferred to the other high school the day before we left for a contact team camp.  It was an awful experience.

As a result, we ended up shifting our offense to the Single Wing.  For those that may not know, the Single Wing is an offense that dominated college and pro football through the first half of the 20th Century.  However, with maxresdefaultthe exception of a few holdouts, the offense fell into obscurity and nearly into the dustbin of history.  Needless to say, we are the most unique football program in the entire state.  We brought in Apopka High School Coach Rick Darlington to help us install the offense and since then, we’ve gone 14-6.

This past season, we went 8-3 (lost twice to the eventual state champions) and had 5500 yards of total offense.  We did have talent but, running the Single Wing has allowed us to cover up issues that come with being among the smallest teams in our division in a league with the largest teams.

I am not writing this to try to come off as being smarter than the average bear.  I’ve done plenty of dumb things both as a wrestling and football coach.  What I can say though is that by finding a way to create and edge for myself and the program, I have been far more successful than if I just did what everyone else did.  Regardless of sport or endeavor, I think it is a very valuable exercise to sit down and map out exactly what your “20%” is and how you can maximize its impact on your program.

Understanding Habit Loops to Improve your Team’s Performance (and maybe lose a few pounds along the way)

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In 1994, the NAIA held their National Tournament in Butte, Montana in early March.  Wrestling for Pacific University, I and my nine other teammates, piled into a van and drove the 12 hours from Forest Grove, Oregon to thejohns bike tournament.  I learned a lot during my first season as a college wrestler but the memory that sticks with me most is that of a teammate of mine, riding a goofy travel version of a stationary bike in the stands to cut weight.  The bike was one that perhaps a traveling salesmen would use when jonesing for a workout prior to the day when every hotel in America having a workout room available for guests.  As a wrestler who ran off his weight (something that has dignity), and staying at a hotel where we had not only a workout room but a sauna, I didn’t quite understand why he wanted to ride that silly bike in front of every wrestler in the tournament.

What he was doing, was focusing on every variable that he could control.  The year prior, we had two wrestlers on the team who struggled to make weight because over the course of the season, they had relied on saunas to cut weight.  When they got to the national tournament, their hotel didn’t have a sauna and they weren’t used to running to drop the pounds.  At the most important tournament of the year, they were feeling the worst they had all season long.  My teammate had cut weight on a bike all season long, and he was going to make sure that he would make weight riding a bike at the national tournament.

The secrets of success are found in our daily routines.  Elite performers and teams are made through steady progress and daily discipline.  Habits and routines help us as people in critical ways that you may not be aware of.  Habits emerge because they are your brain’s way of saving effort. According to scientists, if left to its own devices, your brain will try to turn as many things into habits as possible so that it can ramp down.  It allows us to stop “thinking” about basic activities and devote more mental energy to analysis, creative thought, etc.  If you can analyze your day or practice week for all of the things you need to cover, building habit loops and routines into your day/week, can ensure that you cover all of your bases and maximize your preparation.

The Habit Loop.  In his book, The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg details what he contends are the three primary components of a habit:  Cue + Routine + Reward = Habit.  If we do an after action review on my use of Myfitnesspal.com, why was I successful using it as opposed to the myriad of other weigh loss methods that I had tried in the past?  The answer is that I replaced an old habit with a new habit.

In the past when I tried to lose weight, I would put strict guidelines on what I was going to eat.  If I happened to cheat, I often would just bag my eating plan for the rest of the day or say to myself, “I’ll just start over on Monday.”  When I started to journal my meals, I found that it gave me a lot of information to help me over time, make better decisions about what I was choosing to eat.  Let’s apply the habit loop to my eating habits:

  • Old Habit: Cue-I’m hungry; Routine-Eat what I feel like; Reward-I’m full.
  • New Habit: Cue-I’m hungry; Routine-Log my meal on Myfitnesspal.com and make an intentional choice whether to eat the meal as planned or adjust; Reward-Feel good about hitting my macros for the day and over time, I feel full because I’m refining meal choices based on both satiation and nutrition.

It may be worth mentioning that there is a little bit of gamification with the above example.  Tracking my meals becomes a sort of game that has a double reward: a) losing weight and b) hitting a daily goal.  Additionally, it’s an example of what Brian Cain calls knowing your numbers.  He likes to say “measurement is motivation, ”  and researchers know that in any study where they measure something, they are going to see an increase in the measured behavior.  Give anyone a Fitbit and you’ll automatically see an increase in how much they walk.

I think if you subscribe to the idea that you have to improve yourself before you can improve others, this is a great concept to ponder and attempt to apply in your own life.  But, since we’re looking at how alternative ways of goal setting may improve your program, let’s look at an example.

Let’s use an athlete or team’s pre-competition nerves as an example of how you might be able to create a habit loop in order to improve

Russell Wilson July 29, 2013 Photographed by Peter yang
Russell Wilson July 29, 2013
Photographed by Peter yang

performance. One thing I have noticed over the years is that coaches often times require players to report at one time but then don’t have anything structured for players to do once they are taped and dressed.  What usually happens is that they find ways to burn off nervous energy. How they burn that energy off can often time either drain them physically or cause them to lose focus.

A possible solution for this could be having highlight videos set up in a team room, or access to a mat room for players to lay down and relax.  If you really had some guts, perhaps you’d have players do a self guided “breathing exercise,” the way SMU Football and the Seattle Seahawks do before each practice.  Let’s look at the habit loop in this example:

  • Old: Cue-Nerves before the game; Routine-Goof around outside the locker room until warm-ups start; Reward-More relaxed
  • New: Cue-Nerves before the game; Routine-Players report to the mat room and listen to music, perform relaxation/breathing exercise; Reward-More relaxed and FOCUSED

Duhigg says that after reviewing hundreds of academic studies, “The evidence is clear that if you want to change a habit, you must find an alternative routine.”  The key part of that statement is that you have to change the routine.  You can keep the cue and reward the same but it’s essential to change the routine.  Another suggestion that is given to help change habits are the use of groups.  This is obvious but when you have negative habits on your team, using groups to help change them for the positive may be something you want to consider further.