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Archives for July 2018

How to Coach the Entitled iGeneration Athlete

Adapting to the iGeneration

6 Minute Read or Listen

Many coaches are  struggling with the growing sense of entitlement in the iGeneration. If you aren’t then you are ahead of the pack!

Where do they get this sense of entitlement? Well, children aren’t being born differently; they are being raised differently.  So, who or what is to blame? Parents, technology, or is it just a mean prank of evolution?

Instead of asking questions that blame others, we need to ask ourselves: What can I do about it?

My Parents’ Tough Love

During my 6th and 7th grade years of school, my parents did something very simple, but very hard, that a lot of parents and coaches aren’t willing to do. My parents set an academic standard for me: All As and Bs. No Cs.  And while I wasn’t the sharpest crayon in the box, it was very achievable with a little effort.

In 6th grade, during basketball season, I let my grades drop below that standard. And then my parents did something so few parents do. They didn’t yell, beg, or complain. They didn’t give me more chances. They did something simple…

They enforced the standard. That was it. They just suspended me from the basketball team until I got my grades up.

It didn’t matter that our biggest game of the season was that week! Or that the coach begged and pleaded for them to give me another chance. Or that I cried and told them I hated them. They pulled me from practices and games and every night, they helped me study and get my homework done perfectly, so I could get my grades up.

But I was hard-headed as a kid and I didn’t learn my lesson the first time. The following year, I dug myself a deeper hole, got an “F” in Latin class, and my parents pulled me off the football team. Since I was the star quarterback, the coach was just as upset as I was and without a doubt, other parents were critical of my parents as well. Still, they enforced the consequences of failing to meet the achievable standard they set and then they worked with me to get back up to that standard. Once again, there were no lectures about the importance of taking school seriously.  There was no pleading or begging for me to do my work.  Just a consequence.

After being pulled from the football team in 7th grade, that was it for me. Never again would my parents have to pull me from a team. I knew the standard and I wasn’t about to miss out on a single practice or game after that.

iGeneration

“They are not willing to confront players when they are not exerting maximum effort in achieving maximum performance because it’s a stressful, uncomfortable situation.”

—Anson Dorrance

My experience is far different than that of most of the newest generation (iGeneration). Today’s parents are afraid to enforce standards, so they are left with pleading and lecturing kids to work hard in school and act responsibly.  I don’t remember the last time I saw a parent pull a kid from the team due to academic performance or other behaviors.

Sometimes, it’s their fear of letting the team down, other times, it’s their fear of their child losing their spot on the team or their chance to get a college scholarship.

And it doesn’t help that today’s coaches are afraid to enforce the standards—they are so shortsighted, they rarely bench their top players who don’t meet team standards. I see coaches offer rewards or run kids to get them to practice hard, but rarely do you see a coach send a player home for the day when they fail to work hard. Why? Because coaches are afraid to lose their jobs, they’re afraid of kids transferring, and they’re afraid of parents criticizing them.

The lack of standards in sports for our newest generation not only fails to capitalize on the opportunity to develop character in sports, but it also breeds a sense of entitlement. Young people are not stupid; they understand what they can get away with and as much as they may not like a lecture, most lectures are not a painful enough consequence to get them to change their behavior.

The entitlement that comes from a lack of standards is only compounded by recruitment, as well as pressure that both coaches and parents are guilty of. My parents made me work for privileges such as basketball shoes, camps, and travel teams. Now, parents are pressuring and bribing athletes to work out and practice. I have seen parents punish their own kids for a lack of effort by making them run, while others offer promises like a new pair of shoes if they will “work harder”. Coaches aren’t any better, as they grovel and desperately plead with athletes to join their team. They try to entice them with new uniforms and team gear.

And we wonder why young people feel entitled!

The Effect of Enforcing Standards

My parents helped encourage and motivate me by enforcing a reasonable standard in a loving way. I didn’t want to be pulled from the team. I didn’t want to spend my evenings working with my parents on my homework. None of that was enjoyable. So, they created a scenario where the pain of NOT changing my work habits in school was greater than the pain of changing my habits. Thus, I started to change my actions, which helped develop good habits, and, in return, a strong work ethic. Ultimately, I developed character.

But something else happened as well. I became more grateful for the opportunity to practice and play basketball. I viewed basketball as a privilege, and as something I had to earn.

Take Action

So, how do we coach—or even parent—the entitled athlete?

We teach them to be grateful and to see sports as an opportunity they must earn, both on and off the field.

Set a standard and then enforce that standard with love and support. Don’t break or drop your standards, either to avoid conflict with athletes and parents or to buckle under the pressure of winning.

Stop desperately pursuing and pressuring players to play a sport or join your team. Instead, invite and encourage them to join—as long as they are willing to earn the opportunity, both on and off the field or court.

—J.P. Nerbun

The Hard Feedback Coaches Need

Avoiding the Truth

5 Minute Read or Listen

    It was one of those coaching moments when you are so humiliated, you don’t want to speak to a soul. My team had just suffered a crushing defeat to our crosstown rivals at home on a Friday night in a packed gym. The hardest part for me as the coach wasn’t the rivalry, but that we were, without a doubt, the more talented team. We had underachieved. And does anything feel worse?

    And so, I tossed and turned all night, humiliated and ashamed. I knew what most people were probably thinking and saying: He got out-coached. In these moments when I knew I got out-coached, I was never the type of coach who would blame the players. At least, I didn’t think so, because I thought taking ownership was looking at what the players and the team had failed to do that ended up costing us the game.  And then, I would try to devise a plan to make sure it never happened again. I’d make up for those deficiencies with a tough lecture and a hard practice the next day. “I’ll make sure we don’t lose that way again,” is what I would tell the players and myself.

    At that point of my career, I thought I was taking responsibility by taking ownership of my role as a coach. But now, I know that what I was really doing was still shifting the blame to the players’ lack of effort, focus, mental toughness, or leadership. I became good at avoiding hard truths.

3 Hard Truths I Avoided

    1. I wasn’t out-coached tactically, but mentally. I was a reactionary, result-oriented, transactional coach. It wasn’t a couple of bad “chess moves” that cost us, but my lack of self-awareness and self-management skills to keep my emotions in check (emotional intelligence). I would excuse my actions with the belief that, “This is the price you pay when you are a passionate coach.”

    2. I lacked the courage to admit to myself and others that I screwed up. I knew I had been out-coached but had someone criticized me or given me this feedback, I wouldn’t have listened. I would have defended myself and made excuses. I had been giving my best effort and wasn’t screwing up for lack of trying.

    3. I lacked an understanding of how to coach better. I was doing the best I could with what I knew. I could have been more courageous if I knew what the solution was, but it is really scary to say, “I screwed this up,” when you don’t know how exactly you screwed it up, what the solution looks like, or what steps or actions you need to take to fix it.

Telling the Truth versus Leading Them to the Truth

“The transformation came when she realized that getting people to engage and take ownership wasn’t about ‘the telling’ but about letting them come into the idea in a purpose-led way, and that her job was creating the space for others to perform.”

—Brene Brown in Daring Greatly

    Sometimes, we just need time and a lot of negative consequences before we will change. This was not the first time my team underachieved. I had received some hard feedback and criticism before, but I never listened. I had become skilled at shielding myself from valuable criticism.

    Well, something different happened after this game. The next morning, I was in my office at the gym, preparing for that day’s practice, when my athletic director came by to ask my thoughts on the game. Now, even though he had built up a relationship with me over the last two years, I could tell he was beating around the bush as we talked. Something was on his mind.

    After I had given the usual rundown of reasons for losing: A lack of execution, a lack of mental toughness, and a poor night’s shooting, he turned to me and asked a question I will never forget.

“Did you notice how calm and in control the [opposing coach] was late in the game? I wonder how our boys might have responded differently, had you chosen a similar approach?”

I don’t remember if I responded at all, but I do remember that his question and tone made me feel support in that hard moment—not judgment.

    Still, the question was incredibly painful to hear. Physically, I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. I knew the truth and it was hard to swallow. But the feedback I had just gotten felt more like a diagnosis from a doctor telling me I had a potentially fatal illness than a sentencing from a judge. He didn’t tell me the truth; he led me to the truth with a powerful question that encouraged me to reflect on my actions and my choices.

    Great coaches, leaders, and mentors know this:  People don’t need to be told more truths about themselves; they need to be led to the truth.

Putting it into Action

1. Surround yourself with people who will lead you to the hard truths—not with people who are going to shield you from the truth or make you feel ashamed. I was blessed to find and hire a mentor a few months later who was truthful with me about my negative coaching behaviors without ever making me feel like I was a bad coach. Still, to this day, I try to surround myself and engage with people who aren’t going to make me feel bad about who I am but are going to make me feel good about who I am becoming.

2. Instead of telling people the truth, lead them to the truth. Whether it is with players, coaches, or parents, use questions instead of statements to help them become aware of their behavior’s impact on themselves and others. People need your support more than they need your judgment. As you walk with them on their journey, continuously remind them of who they are becoming in the process.

—J.P. Nerbun

How to Determine Playing Time for Your Team

Playing Time

12 Minute Read or Listen

Unless you have been the coach responsible for who plays and who doesn’t, then you don’t understand the challenges and pressures of setting lineups and making substitutions.

Coaches are faced with many conflicting feelings, desires, and challenges. You want to win. You want everyone to enjoy his or her experience. You want to reward the hardest workers. You want to do all these things while keeping your job and avoiding player and parent criticism.

Baseline Rewards

So, I have written about the importance of creating an intrinsically motivated environment in various articles (Why We Fail To Motivate) and spoken on the podcast (Episodes 20-22). Research has shown that extrinsic rewards (carrots and sticks) are dangerous and can extinguish intrinsic motivation, which is fostered in an environment of 1) autonomy, 2) mastery, and 3) purpose.

Still, Daniel Pink in his book Drive also discusses the research on how some extrinsic rewards are essential. These essential extrinsic rewards are called “baseline rewards.” In the workplace, this is a person’s salary or wages.

“If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all.” – Daniel Pink in Drive

Essentially, it doesn’t matter how hard we work to create an environment of autonomy, mastery, and purpose if we fail to have adequate baseline rewards.

So, what are the baseline rewards in an amateur sports environment? Playing time. We play sports to play sports.

Yes, the sport we choose and the team we choose will be influenced by a variety of other factors, but not playing in games makes it really really hard to be happy with your experience.

Just think about it in the working world: people will only and can only show up to work for so long in an unpaid job. At some stage, no matter how much they enjoy their work, they need to get paid. And the same is true for sports, at some stage, they need to see the court or field. So, playing time is an important topic we need to have a lot of discussion about.

A Very Common Challenge

Only this past year I was coaching a boy’s basketball team at my church, the 7th and 8th grade “second team” to be exact. The cards were stacked against the team from the start, as the program did not have a strong basketball tradition and half of our players were sixth graders.

So, I was quick to voice my concerns to the parents at the very start, we would struggle to win a game even if I was to only play the players who gave us the best chance of winning. But at this level, I knew it was important that everyone got a chance to play. I shared this challenge and my initial philosophy with the parents in our parent meeting at the start of the season.

Now, initially I had hoped playing each player at least a quarter would be sufficient motivation and enjoyment. However, by the mid-point of the season, I realized they were not motivated by winning basketball games but wanted more than anything to just play in games.

With 11 players on the team, I faced a decision. Should I do what I gotta do to get this team a win? Or do I focus on making this enjoyable for all the players by playing everyone?

In the end, I chose to try and create an enjoyable experience for all the players, in hopes of nurturing a love and passion for the game, because that is far more important. While not everyone got equal playing time, I looked for more balanced minutes and would play our “best” team late in the game in an effort to close the gap. As a result, the “buy-in” from the majority of the players grew. Even though we still didn’t win a single game, many kids called it one of their best seasons ever.

What Youth Leagues Can Do to Help

Last month I wrote about Why You Should Love Your Reserves and 7 Ways to Show it. But many of the strategies I suggested work really well at the higher levels but aren’t applicable at lower levels. While kids need to learn about sacrificing for the team and all that important stuff, at the youth level, the most important thing is that they enjoy their sporting experience.

Recently, I listened to a podcast with Belgium Soccer director Kris Van der Haegen, and he spoke about how they started doing 2 on 2 soccer leagues at younger ages. At first, I thought this was a crazy idea. How could they learn how to pass or learn about team work?

But his explanation was fascinating, they wanted to create an environment all about the players’ enjoyment, and kids want to dribble and score. In 2 v 2 leagues, everyone plays, everyone dribbles the ball, and everyone scores goals every day! In his opinion, changes like this were what took them from being 60th in the world to #1 in the world.

We need to design youth sports leagues in a more beneficial way that helps to alleviate some of these pressures and challenges for coaches.

  1. Small rosters.

  2. Small sided play – 3 on 3 leagues (basketball), 2 v 2 and 6 v 6 soccer leagues, etc.

  3. League rules around equal playing time.

Now, whether leagues help alleviate these challenges or not, playing time is an unavoidable challenge and we need to be CONTINUOUSLY clear in our mind and in our communication to the players and parents about how we determine playing time.

So, how do we determine playing time? Below are some different approaches and strategies. I use examples from basketball, soccer, and golf to help clarify.

7 Ways to Determine Playing Time

  1. The Best Players by Position: Selecting and playing who you believe is the best for the needed positions. Without a doubt, this is the most popular method when it comes to most sports. In basketball, traditionally you pick your best 1 or 2 big men, the best point guard, best shooter, etc. In soccer, while a coach may change formations to better suit personnel, typically they are choosing between a few players for certain positions. In golf, coaches may make some changes based on the course or conditions, but they rarely change their lineup.

  2. The Best Players: Selecting and playing who you believe is the most talented. In basketball, you would select your five best players, soccer your best eleven, and golf you would select your lineup based on top overall scorers. Some coaches build a system where their offense and defense are flexible enough to play the best players without consideration to “position.”

  3. The Best Team: Different than the most talented or top players but taking into consideration who plays well together. In many team sports, rarely is your best team your most talented group of players. On court, chemistry, selflessness, and ability to execute as a unit all play a big part in these factors. Arkansas Women’s Basketball coach is a BIG believer in this approach.

  4. Competitive Cauldron Winners: In sports like Golf and Tennis, using a competitive or challenge system in practice, players are ranked. However, some coaches have brought this approach to team sports as well to increase the competitive stakes at practice by recording wins in practices to determine playing.

  5. The Process Team: An approach rarely taken by coaches in team sports, but the coach essentially picks the players who are most committed to working hard in practice and putting in time outside of practice. Still, nearly every coach requires some basic commitment to the process to play. For example, players must practice to play in games.

  6. The Core Values Team: Similar to the process team, a coach decides who best represents the team/coach’s core values i.e. selflessness, hard work, and resilience and plays the players who best live out their values.

  7. Everyone Plays Equal: Equal playing time for everyone or some playing time for everyone. This can be done as a hybrid with other approaches, some leagues have rules that equal playing time is required in the first half of play or in the whole game. An approach taken more often at youth levels but problematic on teams with large rosters.

3 Additional Approaches

  1. Set Lineup – The coach determines a lineup and players must either screw up to be dropped or a player must step up big to be pulled up into the lineup. The benefits are that players can feel safe in their role, knowing if they have a couple of bad games or practices they won’t be losing their spot.

  2. Fluctuating Lineup – Players must prove themselves day in and day out. A bad game or practice could mean losing their spot to someone else who has stepped up recently. The benefits are that it can help to maintain high standards in games.

  3. Alternating Lineup – When you have large rosters, rather than trying to play everyone in every game, you pick a certain roster for each game. Benefits to the reserve players is that instead of just playing a little bit of time each game, they rather play a lot of minutes one game and none the next, so they can get into a flow.

5 Factors in Deciding Your Approach

  1. Winning – Winning the upcoming game is the most important thing.

  2. Peaking – Sometimes, you suffer the risk of losing games to develop the team so they can peak at the end of the season. While certain players may bring more success today, you may need to go with a roster more likely to develop into a team that will bring more success tomorrow.

  3. Development – The long-term development of the athlete is valued above winning.

  4. Culture – My previous articles discussed ways through which we can build our culture by valuing the role player. Even when you do those things, remember who plays and who doesn’t and how you decide your roster all send a profound message that will impact your culture.

  5. Values – Every lineup is actually a reflection of your TRUE core values. While you may claim to value hard work, resilience, selflessness, leadership, and other qualities, if you play the most talented players even if they are the lazy and selfish individuals, what do you really value?

Take Action

“If you want to become a transformational leader, you must constantly analyze your system to make sure you are rewarding and valuing the process and who people become in the process.” – Joshua Medcalf and Jamie Gilbert in Transformational Leadership

While salary is not the only means we reward and value an employee, it is one of the first ways in which a company does so. And while playing time is not the only way we can reward and value players, it is the most obvious one to the players, parents, and fans.

If you want to build a culture that is about results (winning), then you need to play the people that give you the best chance of doing just that.

If you want to build a culture that is focused on the process, you better play the people that are bought into the process.

However, you decide playing time, remember it speaks louder than anything you SAY about your values as a coach.

—J.P. Nerbun

Why We Shouldn’t Model Winning Coaches

2 Issues with Modeling a Winning Coach

8 Minute Read or Listen on iTunes

If you followed this year’s college basketball March Madness Tournament, you were probably like me and were cheering for Loyola-Chicago, who was this year’s Cinderella story. Every year, there is that special team, but Loyola-Chicago seemed a little extra special, with their backstory and their team chaplain, Sister Jane, the elderly nun who stole the spotlight.

People love to follow and study the winning coaches in search of their “secrets” to winning. And this year was no different as Coach Porter Moser’s “Culture Wall” was popularized in the media, but it also became the topic of many Twitter and coaching forum discussions. In the same tournament, Jay Wright won his second National Title in three years, and everyone seemed even more intent on studying Moser and Wright than ever.

Let me be clear: I have profound respect for both Moser and Wright—not because of their winning, but because of “the way they do things”. With that said, I have two issues with the “flavor of the week” approach to learning from these coaches:

Issue 1: Winning is Largely Out of Our Control

“We are inclined to see history through the lives of great men. That inclination blinds us to the real complexity…”

—John Kay

When we see a desired outcome—such as two national championships in three years or a special Cinderella NCAA Tournament run—we often look for reasons why they were successful. But in truth, it is a multitude of reasons; some reasons the coaches can explain and some they cannot.

We believe that a good or bad outcome is the result of good or bad leadership decisions. But we ignore luck. In his book, Obliquity, John Kay reflects on the history of Winston Churchill, a man whom many would argue was one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century.

Churchill inspired a nation when he declared that Britain was set not just on survival but victory. He was inspirational, but the truth was that at the time, he did not have a realistic plan for how it could have been achieved without American participation. He could not have predicted or planned the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought America into the war.

Loyola-Chicago’s basketball team does a lot of things well in their culture, without a doubt. But I know there were a lot of other teams that did things well in their culture this season and didn’t make it to the final four—or even to the tournament.

This season, the South Carolina Gamecocks’ outcome was nothing like it had been the previous season (their first final four appearance in school history for coach Frank Martin’s basketball team). They didn’t even make the tournament this season.

The outcome of a game (winning or losing) is way more out of our control than most people choose to believe. Even as good as Loyola-Chicago was this year, how much of their success could have been impacted by their seeding, match-ups, time of the game, or even something as trivial as what the other team ate the night before the game? All those things are largely out of their control.

Everybody wants to buy the latest championship coach’s book; we are interested in how they did it and that is fine, but we need to approach these winning coaches with a grain of salt. Even if the way they do things is beneficial for them, this does not mean it will be the best approach for your context at your level. Whether it is the latest offense, defense, drill, or mantra, it may not be right for you.

Issue 2: Winning Isn’t the Ultimate Goal

We study coaches who experience outcomes that society desires (winning) instead of the coaches who share our values and a desired process. Yes, we can learn from Villanova’s Jay Wright and Loyola-Chicago’s Porter Moser, but we can learn from them because they are coaches with strong values and a great system (culture)—not because they won championships. Teams pull off upsets and teams win championships all the time, and often, those coaches have far less to teach us than a coach who has not won a championship.

Rick Pitino is one of the most successful coaches in NCAA men’s basketball history. While I’m not going to cast judgment on him as a person, I will cast judgment on his process and the undesirable outcomes it produced for him personally and for Louisville basketball.

I have a shelf full of books by Bobby Knight, the famous Indiana Hoosiers coach who was fired for his “uncivil, defiant, and unacceptable behavior”.  I ask myself, “What value is there in reading these books?” I know, I know… he was one of the greats, a brilliant coach, and a winner. But his winning record means little to me if I simply do not desire his process or the outcomes that he and his team experienced because of his process.

Put it into Action

How many basketball teams will build a culture wall next year? How many will look for a team chaplain like Sister Jane? How many will try to mimic Villanova’s offensive or defensive system? Far too many, in my opinion.

Once again, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t copy or model winning coaches at all. I’m suggesting we shouldn’t copy these coaches just because they win.

It is easy to get caught up in the hype around the latest winning team. But we need to model coaches who model and build a high-character program—not just a winning program.

—J.P. Nerbun