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Portland Nike Coach of the Year Clinic Culture Presentation

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This past weekend I had the honor of speaking at the Portland Nike Coach of the Year Clinic on Building a Championship Culture Using Core Values and “The Process.”  It was a great experience and I am very honored so many great coaches sat in on the two sessions I did.

Several coaches in attendance asked if I would share the presentation so I am going to post it here.

Here is the link: http://bit.ly/2mS3Yv4.

I am in the process of doing a screencast for the presentation for coaches that couldn’t make it.  I did a quick 10 minute screencast prior to the clinic that you can see below.  I plan on doing a full version in the near future.

 

To Bench Him, or not to Bench Him, that is the Question

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rickcauley

For those of you who haven’t read this article on the decision by Murphy High School’s Rick Cauley to sit his starting blue chip quarterback against their rival school, it is worth the quick read.  So many coaches think to themselves that they would make this decision only to back down when the hypothetical becomes reality.

For most coaches, the decision to sit their starting quarterback would have been tough, much less with the pressure of having no back-up available and playing your rival high school.  I don’t know Coach Cauley but, while not a pleasant decision, I am guessing it was a clear choice for him.  If discipline is a core value of your program, and you’ve set policies in place for your program surrounding your “process,” the choice is simple, but not easy.

As we get into the middle of the season, it is easy for many to lose the focus they had in the off season to the program’s core values and process.  As Mike Smith says in the book You Win the Locker Room First, you really need to focus on the root before the fruit.  We had a tough loss this past week but what I can say is that our kids played with tremendous effort.  With relentless effort being a core value of our program, we have something to build on.  I am confident that if we focus on living our core values and maintaining our daily focus from our “process,” the score will take care of itself.

Sun Tzu said that, “battles are won in the temples before they are ever fought.”  Bill Walsh taught the tough tactical decisions of football should be made in the quiet and calm of an office rather than in the heat of battle.  Coach Cauley didn’t make the decision to bench his starter when the player missed practice.  The decision was made a long time in advance of the event that precipitated it.

The importance of having core values is that they serve to provide focus and perspective to your program.  When we are faced with making the perceived tough choices, such as Coach Cauley’s on Friday, having core values helps provide the clarity we need to maintain our integrity and provide the example that our athletes need.

 

The Process: Creating a Hierarchy for Success

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the process“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”                                            – Nick Saban

In his book Saban: The Making of a Coach, Monte Burke goes into some depth on Nick Saban’s introduction and adherence to what’s known as “process thinking.”  During his time at Michigan State, Saban became allies with a professor of psychiatry named Lonny Rosen.  Process thinking is the breaking down of things into smaller parts that can be handled without stress and lead to bigger and better things.  Process thinking is something that you can apply to workouts, meetings, practices and to entire seasons.

This past off season, I spent a lot of time working on what our “championship process” would be for our football program.  I’d like to outline what that looked like in the hopes that it might demystify it for those that are wanting a more organized and specific path to their goals.

First, the resources that I used to help me with what we came up with were:

There are six steps or levels on our “process pyramid.”  We start with on the bottom with what we do the most and and have the most control over.RDM_Process_Pyramid

  • Live Our Core Values
  • Fundamentals of Elite Performance
  • Daily Focus
  • Game Focus
  • Season Milestones
  • Season Vision

 

Live Our Core Values.  We had the program develop a set of core values based on what we think we represent, what we want the “5 minute test” to be, and how we want to represent ourselves.  I pushed a Google Form to the kids and they answered questions that I used to select works like “Toughness” and “Relentless” as our core values. I have written a whole post about this process alone but, my one take away I would offer is that if your kids can’t write down your core values on an index card on demand, you don’t have core values. You have to sell these every day to your program. A great way is each day has a different theme a la “Win Forever.”  We used an acronym of “P.A.N.T.H.E.R.S.” to help our kids remember them and we’ve made 500 posters with them we’re giving to everyone that will take them.

Fundamentals of Elite Performance.  The next thing we emphasize are what we call the “Six Fundamentals of Elite Performance”: Nutrition, Rest, Strength/Conditioning, Time Management, Relationships, Mindset. Each one of these fundamentals could make up an entire post.   The main idea is that if your athletes (and coaches for that matter) don’t take care of these six things, they are limiting their ability to be their best. Mindset could be “faith” or “spirituality” but I chose mindset because I think it’s a little more inclusive.  We talk about these six areas along with our core values before our strength and conditioning workouts or prior to practices.  By enumerating these “fundamentals,” it provides us a way to be specific about our expectations for being healthy individuals, not just high performing athletes.

Daily Focus. We have three things we emphasize here: 1. Go 100% from A to B 2. Finish everything 3. Have a one ____________ focus.  The first two points I’ve taken from Urban Meyer’s book “Above the Line.”  The last point is really “The Process” in a nutshell.  We want to have a one play focus as players, a one game focus as team, etc.  We don’t want to be playing the last game or trying to win a game on one play.  One way to measure the first two is to grade practice and game film based on three categories–Did they get two hands on the ball carrier/assignment?  Did they chase the ball carrier/assignment? Did they loaf?  The University of Houston does this and coaches who were new to working with Coach Herman have said it’s the best thing they’ve learned from him.  Again, this is something athletes have total control over.

Game Focus.  We had discussed as a staff using Tony Demeo’s meaningful stats for this part of our process but we instead chose to go with “The Plan to Win” that Gary Anderson uses at Oregon State and that he got from Meyer when they coached together at Utah.  We made this decision because we felt it gave us better flexibility in how we set our game targets. The Plan to Win consists of five main categories:  1. Score in the Red Zone; 2. Protect the Football; 3. Play Great Defense; 4. Win the Kicking Game and 5. Win the 4th quarter.  There are metrics out there to illustrate how that works but I like this because it allows us to come up with metrics for what that means for us. It provides some flexibility with how we measure success in these areas.  This starts to get out of the control of individuals and shifts to a team focus.  However, if we collectively perform at our best, we should be able to hit these targets.

Season Milestones.  I started with the number of league wins we needed to make the play-offs but I changed this to season milestones after reading the book You Win the Locker Room First which I highly recommend. Basically, you set goals or milestones week to week to focus on based on where you’re at during that time.  There is nothing worse than having a goal that you’ve plastered everywhere and on anything that is unattainable after 3 games.  This allows you to adjust over the season.  At this level there is even less control by our team as you can’t control officials, conditions and the level of competition. Again, the focus is that if we take care of the root, the fruit will be there.

Season Vision.  These are all outcome goals–Win the State Championship, make the playoffs, practice on Thanksgiving, etc.

Enjoy the Moment/Ignore the Noise/Trust the Process.  I framed our “Process Pyramid” with these three phases because I think they represent an important part of the philosophy with which we operate our program.

Enjoy the Moment encourages our players to enjoy the big and little successes and experiences that we have throughout the season.  We don’t want to be so driven by our ultimate goal that we don’t appreciate our time together or success as it comes.  Probably the best explanation I’ve heard of what I’m trying to express came from Pete Carroll on an episode of Michael Gervais’ Finding Mastery (I can’t recommend subscribing to this podcast enough).

Ignore the Noise is my way of expressing that we need to look within ourselves and to our team to evaluate who we are and how we are doing.  Well meaning people whether they are fans, media members or parents, tend to exaggerate how good or bad a team or season is.  Who we are as a team or as an athlete is independent of the good or bad opinions of others.  Further, we do not want to compare ourselves to others in either a positive or negative way.  As Frosty Westering said we measure who we are versus the version of our own best self.  Which leads us to…

Trust the Process.  We want to focus on what we can control and start with the small things.  As Brian Cain says, excellence in small things is excellence in all things.

I hope that outlining what we did to flesh out “The Process” is helpful for your program.  This is a work in progress and I’m excited to continue to add, amend and flesh this out as we implement it into our program.

Establishing Core Values Part 1 – Non-negotiables for the Athletic Department

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A few years ago, I was involved in a conflict between a coach and a parent that was particularly ugly.  While I knew the coach was doing a good job generally, and feedback from players was pretty positive, there were definitely some areas that we needed to address.  Further,  it became clear that one of the major underlying problems was the culture within our  athletic programred_mtn_core_valuess in general.

I had read a Facebook post from Proactive Coaching about a high school program that had undergone the process of changing their athletic department’s culture using a three or four year process.  I was very interested and gave Bruce Brown a phone call to ask about the process and how to get started. During our phone call, Bruce advised me to do the following:

  • Year 1: Develop a set of “non-negotiables” that all coaches and programs would be held to.
  • Year 2: Get the highest performing programs on board by having them implement core covenants into their programs.
  • Year 3:  Get all programs on board with core covenants.

To start that process, I sat down and brainstormed all of the problems that we were having in our athletic programs and then wrote down what I felt were the solutions.  It was a little like Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and about as effective.  We had a department-wide meeting to go over the “non-negotiables” as well as some specific ways to implement those standards.  Here is a Google Slides presentation that I used to give the information.  The information was well received and I got a number of “attaways” from the administration and coaches but there was one problem:  no one could remember it.

Lesson number one I learned about implementing Core Values is that if NAUyou can’t remember them, and your coaches can’t remember them (or athletes if they’re for your team), you don’t have Core Values.  You have a piece of paper.  The non-negotiables I came up with were good ideas but they were tough for me to remember on demand so I know if I asked coaches about them, I’d just get blank stares.  Around December and January, I was looking to revise and refine what we would move forward with.

In trying to refine what our expectations were for our athletic programs, I came across two people who really helped me with the process.  This first was Randy Jackson, the Head Football Coach at Grapevine, Texas.  I had heard Randy was a master at intentionally building culture so I contacted him and set up a visit during their off-season strength and conditioning class.  We talked about what they were doing at Grapevine and he pointed me in the direction of Brian Cain Peak Performance.

Brian uses what he calls the “MVP” process (Mission, Values, Purpose) to help programs develop their “championship culture.”  We spent half of a day at an Athletic Director’s event learning how to do this so it would be too much for one blog post but, in a nutshell, the idea is to select three to five characteristics that your program is going to build upon.  For teams, this process involves meeting with the stakeholders and deciding a) what do you need to do to be your very best and/or b) what you want your program to represent.

Using what I learned from Bruce, Randy and Brian, I sat down and really thought about what I wanted our athletic program to be about.  First, I wanted the department core values to be an expectation between our administration, myself and our coaches.  I wanted them to be clear, concise and easy to remember so that when push comes to shove, we could return to our foundation and put things in proper perspective.  One of the major values in taking part in this process is that as Mike Smith and Jon Gordon talk about in the book You Win the Locker Room First, it helps us “focus on the root before the fruit.”

Ultimately, I decided that our department core values would be the following:

  • Culture
  • People
  • Process
  • Purpose

To help myself and our coaches to remember this, we’re using the abbreviation “C3P.”  My intent in selecting the above four core values was so that regardless of the sport, talent level, experience level of the coaches or players, I feel I can objectively evaluate the culture of a program, how a coach is building relationships with players and parents (as well as between players), whether or not and to what extent there is a process in place and finally, what is their purpose or core values.

I feel that if I can sit down with a coach and see these four things are present or developing in a program, we’re going to provide the athlete with a growth opportunity that is a positive extension of their overall educational experience.

One issue that I am worried about is “core value” burnout with multi-sport athletes.  My approach may not fit your situation.  You may find that a number of your coaches/programs want to share the same set of core values and in that case, you can dovetail that process with the process I’ll discuss in my next post on the development of team/program specific core values.

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