Athletic Directors Toolbox

Plan Your Day Like You Plan Your Practice

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By Mandy Green,

Mandy is the Head Soccer Coach at The University of South Dakota. She is also an Author, Speaker, Trainer and Consultant. She has posted many useful tools for coaches on her site Busy.Coach

I am speaking in a few weeks to all of the amazing coaches who will be at Camp Elevate. As I am preparing my Time Management 101 speech, I am remembering a conversation that I had with a coach while we were out recruiting a few weeks ago.

It went something like this. “Mandy, I know that I am stressed, overwhelmed, busy doing random stuff all day, and not making the progress I want with my program. I know I need to manage my time better and get organized, but I don’t even know where to begin.”

My response to this coach was that I believe all coaches need to approach time management in exactly the same way that they approach their practices.

For a typical practice:

  1. Every minute of practice is accounted for and no time is wasted.
  2. Everything is proactively planned in advance and organized.
  3. Top priorities to work on take up the majority of practice and are worked on first.
  4. Tasks have been delegated to other coaches based on their strengths.
  5. There are water breaks in between activities.
  6. Whistles or horns sound when it is time to move onto the next stage of practice
  7. Coaches reflect after practice is done on what went well and what didn’t so they can make tomorrow better.

BUT, for some reason when it comes to getting work done in the office, a lot of coaches just simply go into their office with no plan, react to everything around them, take no scheduled breaks, and choose to do whatever grabs their attention next until it is time to leave the office! Doing things this way is very inefficient and a lot of time is wasted. And worst of all, no progress is made towards building the program of your dreams!!

The more structure you have during your work time means you get more work done. It means you get further ahead with your program. It means you have to work less outside of your work time.

Ok, let’s plan your day in the office tomorrow just like you would plan practice.

When you start planning your day in the office, just like you would when planning practices for your team, make sure to strategically think about and write down what you could do during the day to move your program forward.

  1. Plan everything in advance the day or night before. While there are exceptions to the rule, generally you can’t expect to just show up for practice with no plan of what you are going to do for the day and have it be a good productive practice. The same holds true for the office. Write down on a master to-do list all of the tasks you need to get done the next day.
  2. Then decide which of those tasks that need to get done are the most important for moving your program forward and then schedule them into your calendar. Everything else can wait.
  3. Coaches tend to set up their practices by doing their most important drills when they know their team is focused and has the best energy. Do the same for your most important work in the office and you will produce higher quality work in a shorter amount of time.
  4. When a time limit is put on a drill, it creates urgency for coaches so they will work like crazy to get as much productive stuff done with their team in the time allotted. Like you do for your drills at practice, schedule all office tasks in 15, 30, 60, or 90 minute intervals and then keep to the clock.
  5. How much more do you accomplish with your teams when they are paying attention and putting all of their focus and energy into what you are working on in practice? The same holds true for getting stuff done in the office. The quality of your work declines and the time it takes to get tasks done increases when you not 100% focused on the task at hand.
  6. Avoid multi-tasking. You would never jump from drill to drill as new drills pop into your head. Once you start working on something in the office, continue to work on only that task until it is finished.

I could go on and on but you get the idea.

For you coach, once your to-do list is organized based on your goals and vision for your program, it becomes a map to guide you from morning to evening in the most effective and efficient way. This guide tells you what you have to do. It also helps you decide what is urgent and what is not, saving you a lot of time. Time that you might have otherwise wasted on less important busy-work that isn’t necessarily going to move your program forward.

 

Does Your Team Have Grit?

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This article can be found at the Coaches Toolbox, a great resource for coaches of all sports

Living with a 99% Effort

I got this list from entrepreneur and business author Harvey Mackay’s book “Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty.” (If you click on the name of the book, you can see a portion of the book from Amazon) In the book, he gives credit to Armond Bouchie for using this list in his job application portfolio.

If we had to live with 99% effort, we would have:

 

One hour of unsafe drinking water every month,

Two unsafe plane landings per day at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport,

16,000 pieces of lost mail every hour,

22 checks deducted from the wrong bank account every week,

500 incorrect surgical operations every week,

12 babies given to the wrong parents every day,

20,000 incorrect drug prescriptions each year, and

800,000 credit cards with incorrect information.

A 100% effort makes sense.

 

This next portion of the post contains some of my takeaways from Texas A&M Women’s Assistant Bob Starkey’s Coaching Blog Hoop Thoughts Blog

HOW DO YOU MEASURE ON THE “GRIT” SCALE?

Mitch Cole

Some educational researchers have defined GRIT as “passion and perseverance to achieve long term goals”. When struggles come, do you get more DEJECTED or more DETERMINED?

Studies have shown that the attribute of GRIT, is one of the most powerful indicators of success. The most GRITTY people usually succeed on and off the playing field or court.

Teams can become selfish during good times and turn on each other during tough times. Teams that stay together can resist the temptation to be selfish, can withstand tough times, and even conquer insurmountable odds.

Most people can appreciate a team or athletes that refuse to give up no matter what the circumstance. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from difficulty and in some cases, be better than before. This can happen when the other team goes on a run and things look most bleak, or even within a season. Teams that “Fight” and show tremendous Resilience over and over again have the best chance for sustained success.

When winners get knocked down, they get up, champions get up a little faster.

“Being relentless means constantly working for that result, not just when drama is on the line. Clutch is about the last minute. Relentless is about every minute.” -Tim Grover From “Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable”

U of Penn Duckworth Lab study found that “grit” (passion & perseverance for long-term goals) is best predictor of success. “Grit is unrelated w/ talent.”

The Duckworth Lab focuses on two traits that predict success in life: grit and self-control. Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals. Self-control is the voluntary regulation of behavioral, emotional, and attentional impulses in the presence of momentarily gratifying temptations or diversions. On average, individuals who are gritty are more self-controlled, but the correlation between these two traits is not perfect: some individuals are paragons of grit but not self-control, and some exceptionally well-regulated individuals are not especially gritty. While we haven’t fully worked out how these two traits are related, it seems that an important distinction has to do with timescale: As Galton suggested, the inclination to pursue especially challenging aims over months, years, and even decades is distinct from the capacity to resist “the hourly temptations,” pursuits which bring momentary pleasure but are immediately regretted.

In terms of Big Five personality, grit and self-control both load on the conscientiousness factor, which also encompasses dependability, punctuality, and orderliness, among other facets.

Some educators typically prefer the umbrella term “social and emotional learning,” whereas many other educators, as well as philosophers and positive psychologists, embrace the moral connotations of “character” and “virtue.” So, grit and self-control are facets of Big Five conscientiousness, but are also conceptualized as dimensions of human character, social and emotional competency, and non-cognitive human capital.

That Extra Effort

For another angle on the importance of a 100% effort, click on the image below for a very inspirational video:

think you are really going to like this video that shows us that there is not a lot of physical difference between top performers and also rans. The big difference is in their mental strength and persistence! Click on the icon to see the video. You will need scroll to the bottom of the page after you click.

Secrets of Productive Coaches

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This article and other helpful coaching tools can be found at Coach Dawn Writes

By Dawn Redd-Kelly, Head Volleyball Coach at Beloit College.

I read a lot of business blogs and magazines, because I believe there’s a strong connection between coaching and the business world.  Teamwork, leadership, excelling within a group construct…I think we coaches can learn a lot from the CEO’s and presidents of the world.  This article on Inc.com, Secrets of the Most Productive People I Know, is one of those that I think is valuable to coaches.  Here’s my take on that post:

4 keys to being the best coach you can be

They have a life.  I know we coaches take pride in “getting after it” and working ‘til all hours of the night, so much so, it almost seems like we wear not taking days off as a badge of honor.  But what if doing something of value outside of our jobs made us better at our jobs?  Maybe you teach a Sunday School class at church, or take guitar lessons, or landscape your yard nicely.  Whatever it is, having an outlet to take our minds off of the grind keeps us refreshed and excited for work when we get back to it.

They take breaks.  Like assembling a thousand piece puzzle of the sky, our teams can present us with challenges.  When we’re working on that puzzle and staring and ten pieces that look like they should fit, but don’t, sometimes we get up from the table, push our chair in, and come back to the puzzle later.  In the same manner, when our team is experiencing a problem, sometimes we need to step away from racking our brains trying to find the elusive solution.

They’ve often worked in different industries.  Whether it’s coaching at multiple levels or even different sports, it’s helpful to have a different perspective of what “normal” is.  It seems that a lot of coaches come from the playing ranks (like me) and don’t necessarily have experience with different ways to skin a cat.  Early on in my career, I would watch other sport coaches with their teams.  I’d take notes about how the coach set up their practice, how they interacted with their team, how their drills flowed into the next, how they opened practice, how they closed practice, everything.  Even for established coaches, challenging our norms is a good thing.

They have great outside collaborators.  I’ve got a coaching friend that I can text with my random questions about our sport.  I’ll ask her if it’s crazy to do whatever it is I’m thinking about and she asks the appropriate questions and we can work it out.   I’ve got coworkers whose offices I can pop in when I’ve got a coaching dilemma and they help me work through whatever it is I’m contemplating.  Our team won our conference tournament a few years ago, but I remember slumping into a chair in another coach’s office after the very first game of that season and telling him that I knew we had a problem.  And we did.  He and I talked and he gave me great ideas about the situation.  With his help, I was able to solve the problem early on which made the championship possible.

While each of these points is different, the common thread is connectedness.  Whether it’s being connected to something significant outside of work or having great coaching friends that we can count on…we can all be more productive if we use these tips.

 

22 Tips for Coaching Today’s Athletes

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This article can be found at Coaches Toolbox, a collection of resources for coaches of all sports

By Alan Stein.

As Notorious B.I.G. once said, ‘Things done changed.’

Players today are different than they were when I was growing up… and I’m not even that old. I know every generation says that… but it’s true.

One of the biggest changes to our society as a whole has been technology… more specifically the Internet… and even more specifically… mobile smartphones and social media.

What does that have to do with athletics?

Everything.

Sports have always been and will always be an interpersonal activity that requires human connection and communication.

Coaching is all about building quality relationships. As they say, ‘it ain’t about the X’s and O’s… it’s about the Jimmys and Joes. (or the Jamies and Josettes)

But because of things like social media and the ‘everyone gets a trophy’ mentality, the Jamies and Josettes of 2015 are not the same as they were in 1995.

And even though we can’t stop the waves… we can all learn to surf.

Here are 22 tips for coaching today’s players…

  1. Find out how to truly connect with your players. Find out what makes them tick, what motivates them and what is the best way to coach them (in front of their peers and behind closed doors).
  1. Embrace social media and technology… it’s not going anywhere. It’s important to your players, so it needs to be important to you.
  1. Learn to speak their language (I am not referring to profanity). The top 2 ways players communicate today is through text message and social media (particularly Instagram and Twitter). Learn to use those platforms.
  1. Understand this: consistency breeds excellence – excellence breeds trust – trust breeds loyalty – loyalty builds a strong program. Be consistent with everything you do. Players won’t respect you if you don’t.
  1. Encourage this 3-step mistake policy with your players – Admit it. Fix it. Don’t repeat it! The first time it is a mistake. The second time it is a decision.
  1. Coach attitude and effort before X’s and O’s. Without proper attitude and effort the X’s and O’s don’t matter.
  1. Clearly articulate your core values, principles and each player’s role. These are non-negotiable. They make up your program’s culture.
  1. Players want to know the why behind everything. So tell them! Explain why you do what you do, why you believe what you believe, and why you expect ABC from them. The higher the perceived relevance, the higher the buy-in. And at the end of the day, a coach’s #1 job is to get buy-in from every member of the program.
  1. Social media has created an abundance of superficial ‘friends’ – make sure your players know you truly care about them (on and off the court). That you have their back.
  1. Don’t try to be ‘friends’ with your players. If you are too close to them personally you can’t hold them accountable. You should be a role model, a teacher and a mentor… but not a buddy.
  1. Players all learn differently. Make sure you can effectively teach each type of learner (audio, visual, intrapersonal).
  1. Players want to show their individuality (shoes, haircuts and especially with pre-game starting line-up announcement antics and routines). Don’t fight it. Have some leniency within your program rules. Respectfully, today’s idols and role models are a lot different.
  1. Create a climate and culture that values people over productivity. Your players must know you care about them as a human being first and a player second.
  1. If you want to know if you are a good coach…ask your worst player.
  1. You’re either coaching it or you are allowing it to happen. You either accept it or correct it.
  1. Replace ‘but’ with ‘now’ when instructing a player. For example, “I like your release, now try to get your elbow over your knee.” This minor change will make a huge impact.
  1. Focus on what your players can be… not what they are.
  1. Science shows that most people have a pretty firm definition of what is right and wrong by age 13. Hold them accountable. Ignorance is not an excuse. However, learn to choose your battles. Kids will be kids. If a players posts something stupid on social media… don’t condemn them for life. Use it to teach a life lesson. Hold them accountable, but use it to teach.
  1. Players actually want to be held accountable.  It shows them that you care and are invested in their success.
  1. Most of the players today have grown up in the ‘trophy generation’ – which has created an immense sense of entitlement. Players need to learn another ‘E’ word… earn. Create a system where players have to earn
  1. Players today want to play immediately. They don’t understand the concept of ‘right of passage.’ Freshman want to play varsity. Young players want to play serious minutes. Learn to channel this desire but keep them focused on the process and the long term.
  1. One of the biggest changes between the players of 1995 and 2015 is with the parents. Parents are much more involved and much more vocal (especially on social media). Parents can be a tremendous support system… or they can be a total thorn.
    I’m honored to be in the coaching fraternity.Alan SteinHardwood Hustle Blog
    http://www.About.me/AlanStein

Self Reflection: A Technique for Daily Improvement

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This article was provided by Busy.Coach, a great source of ideas for the coach that wants to improve their productivity

By Mandy Green

For me, I try to live as if every single day is a fresh start.  Every day is a new chance for me to be better than I was yesterday.

The practice of self-reflection has played a critical part in my effort to get better every day as a coach.  The 5 minutes that I am spending at the end of the night to reflect, has helped me make so many better choices going forward and has moved me towards what I want a whole lot faster.

Reflecting helps you to develop your skills and review their effectiveness, rather than just carry on doing things as you have always done them. It is about questioning, in a positive way, what you do and why you do it.  And then deciding whether there is a better, or more efficient, way of doing it in the future.

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection, from the quiet reflection will come even more effective action” –Peter F. Drucker

We learn by experiences and mistakes. But, unless we question ourselves about what our experiences mean and think actively about them, research has shown that we won’t make any changes. Self-reflection enables you to move from just experiencing, into understanding.

So coach, do you ever take the time to figure out how well you are actually doing day to day?  Not just evaluating whether or not you’re on schedule to reach your goals, but how well are you doing on that schedule?

Do you understand what you have done well so you can repeat those actions? Do you know where have things failed?

How would we know the answer to these questions unless we are measuring ourselves and our performance all along the way?

To do this, at the end of the day, find a quiet place to sit and think for 5-10 minutes. Start by asking yourself these simple few questions:

  • What happened today? Did today well or did it not?

With that simple few minutes of reflection, you’re able to say “here’s what I do well, here’s how I operate, and here’s where I get off track.  And then based on that information, here are the changes I’m going to make to guarantee that I’m more successful tomorrow than I was today.”

Here are a few more questions that you could ask in a daily review:

  • Did I focus on what matters today?
  • Did I show up and perform by best today?
  • Did I progress forward today?
  • What level of energy did I bring?
  • Is there anything I can do better tomorrow?

I have also found that using video can be a great way to aid reflection. Since you can only self-reflect effectively once you have left the practice or game environment, it could be easy to forget exactly everything that was going on at the time. Video can help provide you with an objective perspective; helping you to notice things you may not have otherwise remembered. Videos can also become resources that you can re-visit and watch again to gain deeper insight into what happened.

Self-reflection is not something you should do once and a while.  I encourage you to reflect on a daily, weekly, and a monthly basis. Asking these types of questions consistently helps us stay on track.  You might be working hard and getting things done, but if you are not continually checking in with the process, you won’t know if you are being successful.  Check in with yourself all along the way.

For more great ideas about how to improve your productivity visit Busy.Coach