March 2017 – Winning Youth Coaching

March 28, 2017

The 4 Cornerstones Of Championship Culture – Part 7 Of 8- Leadership Development

‘We all need an unreasonable person in our life that holds us to a standard higher than we believe we can attain.’

The 4 Cornerstones of Championship Culture – WYC is excited to partner with Upward Sports to kick off 2017 with an exciting new way for your to raise your coaching game for you and your coaches!

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4th Cornerstone – Developing Leaders

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This week we have the privilege of learning from Jim Harshaw Jr.

Jim is a TedX speaker, a consultant, and a former Division I All American wrestler. He also hosts a podcast called Success through Failure.

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Success through Failure

Jim is passionate about developing leaders who embrace failure as a necessary part of success. The failure along the way is only because we set our goals high. The more successful the person, the more failures they have in their past. You don’t see the grind and struggles and times they wanted to quit after they succeed, but it’s there. ‘Failure is an option. In fact, it’s quite likely.’ We should set audaciously high goals. Then reverse engineer the process it will take to get there. And then forget about the goal. All you can control is your actions. Set action goals.

Be an action taker and don’t let your fear of not reaching a lofty goal prevent you from shooting for it: ‘There are 2 pains in life: the pain of discipline, and the pain of regret’

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Our special thanks to our corporate partner for this series – Upward Sports- check them out at upward.org!

March 20, 2017

WYC 111 – Championship Culture Part 7 – Jim Harshaw Jr talks Wrestling & Developing Leaders Who Aren’t Afraid to Fail

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Jim Harshaw Jr is a speaker, consultant and former Division I All American wrestler. Here is a quick story by him:

I grew up in a blue-collar home so learned the value of hard work early on.

I have spent my life surrounded by Olympians, CEO’s and millionaires. They’ve all struggled and failed on their way to success. Just like you.

On March 20, 1998, my sixteenth year of wrestling ended in a locker room with blood on my face and tears in my eyes. I’d just lost the match to become an NCAA Division I All American.

But I had one more season at the University of Virginia. One more chance. And exactly one year later, in front of over 14,000 fans at the NCAA Championships, I did it. I earned a place on the podium as one of just eight wrestlers in the country with the status of Division I All American.

I followed a blueprint for success to get there. The same blueprint got me invited to the Olympic Training Center and took me overseas to compete on a US National Team.

Website, TEDx talk, & Podcast: jimharshawjr.com

Twitter: @jimharshaw

Facebook: /jimharshawjr

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Listen Now:

Listen on iTunes: iTunes link

Listen on Stitcher: Stitcher link

Listen on Google Play Music: Google Play link

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Quote

‘There are 2 pains in life: the pain of discipline, and the pain of regret’

‘We all need an unreasonable person in our life that holds us to a standard higher than we believe we can attain.’

Outwork everyone

Jim’s goal from day one was to outwork all of his competition

Coaching your own kids

Each kid is unique and has different needs and ways to communicate

Success through Failure podcast

Most of what we do starts with a failure.
The failure along the way is only because we set our goals high. The more successful the person, the more failures they have in their past. You don’t see the grind and struggles and times they wanted to quit after they succeed, but it’s there. ‘Failure is an option. In fact, it’s quite likely.’

Goal setting

Set audaciously high goals. Then reverse engineer the process it will take to get there. And then forget about the goal. All you can control is your actions. Set action goals.
‘We all need an unreasonable person in our life that holds us to a standard higher than we believe we can attain.’

Caz McCaslin’s 2 minute Coaching tips

Kids today are digitally connected, but struggle to connect socially face-to-face – Sports is a great place to make this happen.
Best-practice – At end of practice once per week – have one player on team share a story about themself for 3 minutes while all the other players squat against the wall – then ask the players questions about the story afterwards – if they can’t answer they have to keep squatting – great combination of teaching listening skills while under physical exertion

Championship Culture

‘The coach cares more about me as a person than he cares about me as an athlete’

Connecting with kids

A young man Jim coached who was hearing impaired wanted to quit, but Jim had a great conversation with the young man and he has stuck with it and his confidence has gone up and he’s doing great with it. Someone believed in him.

Best Stolen Idea

Variety

Quote

‘There are 2 pains in life: the pain of discipline, and the pain of regret’

Leadership and life coaching

Website, TEDx talk, & Podcast: jimharshawjr.com
Coaches people and former athletes on goal setting, success, and leadership

Parting Advice

Focus on the life lessons. Translate the actions they are doing into life lessons.

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Today’s Sponsors

Established in 1995, Upward Sports is the world’s largest Christian youth sports provider. Approximately 100,000 leaders and coaches deliver Upward Sports programming to half a million young athletes around the country.

Upward Sports promotes the discovery of Jesus through sports, by providing a fun, encouraging environment in which young athletes can learn technical skills and a love of the game. We use sports like basketball, volleyball, soccer and flag football to help young athletes develop mentally, athletically, spiritually, and socially. We are about the whole athlete—that’s our 360 Progression.

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Reviews are the lifeblood of the podcast!- If you like the podcast- please take 2 minutes to write a review! Click here

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Ready to be an Awesome Youth Coach? Sign up for our free weekly newsletter:

March 17, 2017

The Culture Journey Week #24 – Rough week

Week 24

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Regular Season week #3

Positive Energy

Crazy weather this week so we only had 1 practice, and it was shortened because of a field conflict, so no goofy games or book reading this week.

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Culture Update – Rough week

Felt like we took a few steps backwards this week. We only had 1 game, and to be honest I was embarrassed to be on our sideline. Our head coach berated several players very publicly, as well as berating me during a play he didn’t like how I coached the play. Felt like last year and some of the ground we had made took some serious steps backwards. He seemed a little more agitated than he had been recently, maybe something outside of lacrosse was bugging him. Either way it needs to be addressed, we are off the next week and a half for spring break, so I plan to talk with him about it when we get back in town. Hopefully we can nip it in the bud. It’s a little scary because when we get back we have back-to-back games against teams we lost to a combined 40-1 last year.

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I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.

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If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. It is exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.

March 13, 2017

The 4 Cornerstones Of Championship Culture – Part 6 Of 8- Leadership Development

‘If your dreams don’t scare you- you’re not dreaming big enough’ – Chasing the Lion

The 4 Cornerstones of Championship Culture – WYC is excited to partner with Upward Sports to kick off 2017 with an exciting new way for your to raise your coaching game for you and your coaches!

–

4th Cornerstone – Developing Leaders

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This week we have the privilege of being joined by TJ Rosene, head basketball coach and 3x national coach of the year at Emmanuel College, director of coach development at PGC Basketball, and co-host of the Hardwood Hustle podcast.

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Captains

TJ had a very unique answer when I asked him how his teams choose captains. He said they don’t. I was very interested in this idea, in fact I wrote a previous blog post about this: click here.

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When leaders arise who he wouldn’t have chosen – he is honest with them and works to develop them and train them how to be a better leader. He is also honest about what the 2 or 3 behaviors are that will affect their teammates adversely if they don’t work on improving them or eliminating them.

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Leadership development

The first step is asking the players who wants to lead. They create levels of leadership around 4 traits: Character, Courage, Consistency, Communication. They define levels 0 to 3 with tangible steps on to how to reach level 3 for each characteristic, which is hard to attain.

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Our special thanks to our corporate partner for this series – Upward Sports- check them out at upward.org!

March 13, 2017

The Culture Journey Week #23 – The Bus Trip

Week 23

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Regular Season week #2

Positive Energy

I continued what I have affectionately self-named ‘Coach Craig’s Goofy Games‘ to start each practice.

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This week’s best game:Great Teammate Tips Challenge

After one of our seniors shared the 2 new tips for the week from The Hard Hat, we broke into 4 teams: freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. I gave them each a page from the sketch pad which we use to write the tips on (by the way – love this sketch pad I bought for $14 on Amazon: link) and gave them each a Sharpie and asked them to write down as many of the 8 teammate tips they could remember. The correct number ranged from 3 to 7 (the seniors obviously had an advantage since they are reading the book.) It was good to get the groups brainstorming together, plus put the emphasis on how much are they really listening to these tips being presented by the seniors.

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Culture Update – The Bus Trip

This weekend we had 1 of our 2 bus trips, a 3 hour ride over to Knoxville to play 2 varsity games and 1 JV game. I had been thinking about this for some time, because last year our bus trips were a bit shocking to me how immature and disrespectful much of the conversation was. We discussed this as a coaching staff, and decided rather than trying to ‘police’ the conversation, to instead fill the time with productive activity. We brought a DVD with the 2015 Div II lacrosse national championship game which was 1 hour 45 minutes long and played that as soon as we left. Then we spent the last hour bringing up the different position groups to the front of the bus with the coaches to discuss the gameplan for the day. This seemed to work really well and our mindset getting off the bus seemed to be much more focused and excited to play great lacrosse vs. last year where they were just goofing off and not focused. The results on the field paid off as well as we played a great first half and won the first game.

The return bus trip was less organized but we stopped for pizza then most of the boys fell asleep as it was a long day and we were all pretty exhausted. Overall it was a night and day better experience vs. last year.

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We also continue to have the seniors presenting 2 of the teammate tips from Jon Gordon’s The Hard Hat, this weeks we covered points 7 and 8:

7 – Do it for your team, not for applause

8 – Show you are committed

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Have a great week and keep fighting for your culture everyday!

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I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.

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If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. It is exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.

March 13, 2017

WYC 110 – Championship Culture Part 6 – TJ Rosene talks Chasing the Lion & Leadership Development

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TJ Rosene is a 3x National Coach of the year. He has already compiled over 300 wins as a college coach and has most recently put together 8 straight 20-win seasons. TJ also serves as the Director of Coach Development for PGC Basketball, and co-hosts the Hardwood Hustle podcast.

Twitter: @CoachTJRosene

Websites: pgcbasketball.com; hardwoodhustle.com

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Listen Now:

Listen on iTunes: iTunes link

Listen on Stitcher: Stitcher link

Listen on Google Play Music: Google Play link

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Quote

‘If your dreams don’t scare you- you’re not dreaming big enough’ – Chasing the Lion

1st steps in building culture

The first step is believing
Then define key cornerstones

Buy-in & Building great teammates

Have your players brainstorm about what the characteristics are of the best teammates. Then ask the players whether you have their permission to hold them accountable to those standards.

Empowering players

The best time to have players figuring things out on their own is when there is less on the line. That’s true of lower levels of youth sports. That’s true of early in the season even at higher levels of athletics.

Communication needs 3 things:

Truth
Love
Transparency

Start each practice talking for 5 to 8 minutes

This helps everyone to get to know each other and
My commitment Monday
Tough Tuesday
Thankful Thursday

Communication – Life skills

They have their athletes do the following when ordering at a fast-food restaurant:
- Eye contact
- Call the person by name
- Ask them how their day is going
- Express gratitude

Caz McCaslin’s 2 minute Coaching tips

Tough love – Set standards that build not just great athletes but great leaders
Remember the off the court impact you have is more important than what happens on the court

Captains

TJ’s teams have never elected captains. He just lets the natural leaders emerge.
When leaders arise who he wouldn’t have chosen – he is honest with them and works to develop them and train them how to be a better leader. He is also honest about what the 2 or 3 behaviors are that will affect their teammates adversely if they don’t work on improving them or eliminating them.

Leadership development

The first step is asking the players who wants to lead
They create levels of leadership around 4 traits: Character, Courage, Consistency, Communication
They define levels 0 to 3 with tangible steps

Connecting with kids

Sometimes you have to draw lines. It’s scary because we don’t want to alienate a player, but it is important.

The One that got away

Losing a national championship game – TJ had not prepared himself for what could go wrong.
You have to learn from the adversity and not live in the adversity

Best Stolen Idea

Don Meyer – Sent TJ a note and book within 48 hours of his passing. TJ learned that you’re never too big for any situation or person.
Be a lifelong learner!

PGC Basketball Clinics

10,000 kids go through their camps every summer – check them out at: pgcbasketball.com

Parting Advice

Keep perspective. Define your legacy.

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Today’s Sponsors

Established in 1995, Upward Sports is the world’s largest Christian youth sports provider. Approximately 100,000 leaders and coaches deliver Upward Sports programming to half a million young athletes around the country.

Upward Sports promotes the discovery of Jesus through sports, by providing a fun, encouraging environment in which young athletes can learn technical skills and a love of the game. We use sports like basketball, volleyball, soccer and flag football to help young athletes develop mentally, athletically, spiritually, and socially. We are about the whole athlete—that’s our 360 Progression.

—

Reviews are the lifeblood of the podcast!- If you like the podcast- please take 2 minutes to write a review! Click here

–

Ready to be an Awesome Youth Coach? Sign up for our free weekly newsletter:

March 6, 2017

The 4 Cornerstones Of Championship Culture – Part 5 Of 8- Mental Toughness And Relational Resilience

‘In society we think of competition as going head to head with someone else and trying to beat them. But if you look at the Latin root of the word – it means To Strive Together. You put your best foot forward and I’ll put my best foot forward. Even if I lose, I will thank you as my competitor for bringing your best that day.’ – Joe Ehrmann, paraphrased

The 4 Cornerstones of Championship Culture – WYC is excited to partner with Upward Sports to kick off 2017 with an exciting new way for your to raise your coaching game for you and your coaches!

–

3rd Cornerstone – Creating Mentally Tough Athletes

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This week we learn from Sara Erdner, PhD student in Sport Psychology & Motor Behavior at the University of Tennessee.

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Sara has done research in the area of resilience, and here are 5 keysher research has uncovered as the keys to being resilient:

1 – Positive outlook
2 – Intrinsically motivated
3 – Focused
4 – Confident
5 – Perceived social support is high

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Sara also has done a deeper dive into the fifth point which is about relationships. Emotional support is the key and the concept of empathy is critical. Empathy is striving to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.Empathy is important to overcoming and working through the shame that has been put on you by your parents or coaches or others in your life.

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Some of these are harder to control than others – but certainly choosing to be positive, to be focused, and to show empathy to others are things we can control with our choices every day.

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Our special thanks to our corporate partner for this series – Upward Sports- check them out at upward.org!

March 6, 2017

The Culture Journey Week #22 – Defining Who We Are

Week 22

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Regular Season week #1

Positive Energy

I continued what I have affectionately self-named ‘Coach Craig’s Goofy Games‘ to start each practice.

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This week’s best game:Towel Tug-of-War King-of-the-Mountain Style

We repeated the towel tug of war game I have previously described (to see the details click here), but this time we did it king of the mountain style. I sorted our roster by approximate size and weight and put them in ascending order so we started with the smallest 3 athletes first. Then whoever won got to stay and we brought in the next 2 kids. So if you kept winning you remained king of the mountain. It’s always fun to see surprising kids step up, we had one of our first year players win 5 matches in a row at one point.

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Culture Update – Defining Who We Are

This week was quite a roller-coaster ride on our culture journey. It started with a game last Saturday that was quite embarrassing to be part of. We played selfishly, we played recklessly, and we got in a fight which included one player from each team getting ejected. But instead of letting this define us, we used it to fuel a heart-to-heart with our team at practice on Monday. We discussed whether we wanted to be known for being a chippy scrappy team that easily lost their focus, or whether we wanted to be known for being a smart, aggressive, great lacrosse team that respects the game and their opponents. We tied in our ROOTS core values and discussed respect for the officials and opponents particularly. It was a great discussion, but of course you always wonder who much of it will actually play out when push comes to shove in a game.

We had our next game on Wednesday. We won a hard-fought game against a solid opponent 6-5. We only had 1 or 2 penalties, we played unselfishly, and we respected the officials and opponents. What a turnaround in one game. Maybe we needed everything to go wrong in that first game to see the picture of what we don’t want to represent.It did, and we will continue to use that as a reminder that we have to be continually focusing on our respect for our ROOTS values.

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We also continue to have the seniors presenting 2 of the teammate tips from Jon Gordon’s The Hard Hat, this weeks we covered points 5 and 6:

5 – Share Positive Contagious Energy

6 – Don’t complain

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Have a great week and keep fighting for your culture everyday!

–

I am excited to walk this journey with you. I welcome any feedback, ideas, and suggestions you might have as you read through this. You are also welcome to share this with any other coaches you think could benefit from it, and please have them email me at [email protected] if they would like to be added to this email list.

–

If you are interested in diving deeper on building culture we have started a mastermind group that meets the first and third Wednesday of each month at 12:30 pm EST, see the details at: winningyouthcoaching.com/the-culture-bus-mastermind/. It is exciting to be with likeminded world-changers.

March 6, 2017

WYC 109 – Championship Culture Part 5 – Sara Erdner talks Mental Toughness and Relational Resilience

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Sara Erdner is a PhD student in Sport Psychology & Motor Behavior at the Univ. of TN. She is a lifelong athlete including multiple triathlons and most recently Strongman competitions. Today she will share with us some of the research she has done on relational resilience.

Twitter: @serdner

Facebook: /sara.erdner

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Listen Now:

Listen on iTunes: iTunes link

Listen on Stitcher: Stitcher link

Listen on Google Play Music: Google Play link

–

Quote

‘In society we think of competition as going head to head with someone else and trying to beat them. But if you look at the Latin root of the word – it means To Strive Together. You put your best foot forward and I’ll put my best foot forward. Even if I lose, I will thank you as my competitor for bringing your best that day.’ – Joe Ehrmann, paraphrased

Competition

Joe Erhmann talks about the word competition – ‘In society we think of competition as going head to head with someone else and trying to beat them. But if you look at the Latin root of the word – it means To Strive Together. You bring your best foot forward and I’ll put my best foot forward. Even if I lose, I will thank you as my competitor for bringing your best that day.’

Relational Resilience

Adversity – Perception is reality, so if you perceive a situation as adverse, then it is.
5 characteristics of being resilient:

1 – Positive outlook

2 – Intrinsically motivated

3 – Focused

4 – Confident

5 – Perceived social support is high

Coaches’ & Parents’ role in resilience in athletes

It all starts with you. If you are not resilient yourself, it’s nearly impossible to develop resilient athletes. Are you positive & focused?
Self reflection is one of the most powerful thing you can do as an individual.
Acknowledging when you’ve done something wrong is important.
Emotional support is the key. The concept of empathy is critical. Being able to strive to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Empathy is important to overcoming and working through the shame that has been put on you by your parents or coaches or others in your life.

Mental toughness

Traditional coaching behaviors such as yelling, throwing things – these old standards create negative emotions that drive fear and anxiety
Care, love, positive emotions – are the true ways to bring out the best performances

Caz McCaslin’s Coaching Tips

Developing a player athletically:
- Teach them to have a great work ethic
- Teach them to be constantly learning

Empowering kids

Ask open-ended questions
- What do you think you would have done in that situation?
- Are there other things you might add to that?
- It takes more time, but it has infinitely more valuable

Positive Energy

Sara gets her positivity from her mom – Shout out to Sheryl Erdner!

The One that got away

Sara was in a triathlon and was so in the flow state that she forgot to do the 2nd lap of the biking portion.
She had a friend tell her – ‘These are the moments that will have the biggest impact on making you a better athlete, because it forces you to think about what happened and what you could do have done better’

Best Stolen Idea

Dr. Rebecca Zakrajsek, PHD from Univ of Tennessee – Had a book called The Book of Awesome by Neil Pasricha – she shared a story from to start each class. Started the class with positive energy. Eventually she started to ask the class what awesome thing happened to them lately.

Favorite coaching book/quote

Quote: ‘Stop trying to prove yourself because you’ve already done it.’ There’s a difference in trying to prove yourself and trying to improve yourself.
Book: Grit by Angela Duckworth

Parting Advice

Start practices with something fun and something motivational/positive.

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Today’s Sponsors

Established in 1995, Upward Sports is the world’s largest Christian youth sports provider. Approximately 100,000 leaders and coaches deliver Upward Sports programming to half a million young athletes around the country.

Upward Sports promotes the discovery of Jesus through sports, by providing a fun, encouraging environment in which young athletes can learn technical skills and a love of the game. We use sports like basketball, volleyball, soccer and flag football to help young athletes develop mentally, athletically, spiritually, and socially. We are about the whole athlete—that’s our 360 Progression.

—

Reviews are the lifeblood of the podcast!- If you like the podcast- please take 2 minutes to write a review! Click here

–

Ready to be an Awesome Youth Coach? Sign up for our free weekly newsletter: