Profile and Purdue Recruiting
Profile is a company that does personality assessments for coaching staffs, players and recruits to give you better insight into who is a good fit for your team and how to better connect with your players. Their website is worth checking out.
This is a good story on Matt Painter and Purdue from a few years back about how it impacted his recruiting and coaching from The Athletic.
The secret behind Purdue's turnaround is a simple test Matt Painter gives recruits
Sep 5, 2018
Kicking back with his buddies over a few beers and a friendly game of cards, Matt Painter is complaining. Complaining a lot actually, and though he kinda can’t stand himself for bringing down the conversation, he also can’t help himself. He needs to vent. This is 2014, not long after the season has ended, and the source of Painter’s frustration is his Purdue basketball team — or more accurately his handling of the Purdue basketball team. The Boilermakers finished 15-17 and, combined with the 16-18 finish a year before, Painter is crushed that his alma mater has slipped so far under his stewardship. Even more galling, he can’t figure out how to fix it.
As Painter is bitching, Chad Brown is listening. Brown, a fellow Purdue grad and former football coach, doesn’t know Painter that well — he earned the card game invite via his college roommate, former basketball player, Brian Cardinal — but eventually, he has to speak up. “Man, I don’t mean to push this on you,’’ Brown tells Painter. “But I think I can help you.’’
Since that conversation Purdue is 104-27, and Painter has reconfigured his entire recruiting strategy, searching for guys who are productive as well as talented, who are more dominant and stable in their personality rather than extroverted influencers who merely want to be the life of the party. How did he figure it out? How did he identify the players who fit? Simple. He took Brown’s advice and had them take a test.
Eleven years ago, Brown was Painter — a fed up coach. He spent 10 years on the sidelines, crisscrossing the country as an assistant and recruiting coordinator. He loved the game but couldn’t stand the uncertainty, always hoping a recruit would fit his team’s style and staff’s personality.
His frustration led to, as he calls it, an “identity crisis,’’ and in 2007 he left Northern Colorado for a job in the corporate world, signing on with a sports tech company. As part of the hiring process, Brown took something called the DiSC Assessment test. Developed by William Moulton Marston, who also helped with the first polygraph test, DiSC has been around forever, used frequently by companies in the hiring process and for team building. It essentially separates people into four behavioral schemes: dominance, inducement, submission and compliance. When Brown saw his own results — they fit him to a tee — his head started spinning with ideas. This was the answer he’d been searching for in coaching, a way to help eliminate so much of the guesswork involved in constructing a team. “How can I make this work for coaches?” he thought to himself.
By the time he sat down across the card table from Painter, Brown was heading up Profile, a company he created that married his belief in personality assessments with his passion for sports. With the aid of a software developer, Brown took the principles of DiSC and expanded the test. Along with detailing behavior traits, he developed questions that would help determine an individual’s most important values, creating a composite that included who a person is, and what his or her motivators are, and how that translates into a positive work environment, or in the case of athletes, into a positive team experience. Armed with his new tools, he barnstormed around the country, trying to entice coaches to give it a try. “This isn’t for everybody,’’ Brown says, by way of explaining much of the skepticism he’s been met with since launching.
In Painter, though, Brown found a receptive audience. Painter is analytical and a thinker — when he eventually took the test, he scored as a CS, someone who is compliant and stable, and requires accuracy and reliable facts — and the idea of something concrete appealed to him. And let’s face it, he also was a little desperate. Painter listened to Brown’s pitch, did his own research and decided to take a trial run to see if the results were, indeed, reliable. He asked some of his former players to serve as guinea pigs, and when their scores rang true to their personalities, he was sold.
The test is pretty straightforward and takes about 15 minutes to complete. Test takers are first asked to choose from successive lists the adjectives that best describe them and are the least like them. Next, they must identify 36 sentences out of a list of 86 that describe things that are important to them at work — everything from salary and benefits to social interaction with coworkers and personal responsibility. The first set of questions generates where they fall on the DiSC evaluation, and the second determines which values — things such as competitiveness, recognition, wisdom, loyalty, spirituality and family happiness — are most important. (Full disclosure: I took the test. I’m an IS, a people person who trends more toward emotions than hard facts, but is nonetheless able to adapt and act as a good listener. I value integrity, creativity, responsibility, wisdom and financial security. That’s all very accurate, though my family is still searching for the part that points out my chronic impatience.)
Most people who take it are impressed with how true the results are. “Honestly I don’t think most of us thought much of it until the results came back,’’ says Purdue senior Ryan Cline. “And then it was like, ‘Whoa! That’s exactly right.’ It’s kinda crazy how spot on it is with all of us.’’ Brown now counts some 15 Division I programs among his clients and works the NFL Combine for the Dallas Cowboys, with the league office maintaining an interest in his findings. But while he feels confident in his test what he stresses with his coaches is that it can’t account for everything, especially external factors. “You are who you are, and your personality doesn’t change, but it can be affected by things outside,’’ he explains simply. Cline, for example, is a high “I” or influencer. He likes to make sure his teammates are loose and enjoying the game. Channeled properly, that’s not a bad thing but two years ago, when Cline’s personality was infused with outside influences, it led to trouble. As a sophomore, he was arrested for marijuana possession after he was found unresponsive in his car.
Cline’s personality hasn’t changed, but his actions have. “It’s really, are these people helping me more than those people?” he says. “It was about maturing, understanding who I am and figuring out how to guide myself and be more serious.’’
Painter bides his time while recruiting, waiting for what he believes is the proper moment to broach the subject. It’s hardly a deal breaker. He will neither stop nor start recruiting a kid because of the results of the test. Nor is it mandatory. (Though most recruits agree to take it willingly — and their parents are especially intrigued — a handful over the years have never gotten around to it.) He admits it can and has raised red flags when coupled with his own concerns about a player, and has made him question whether a recruit is worth pursuing. But it can swing the other way, too. Caleb Swanigan grew up in an unstable and frequently fractured family environment. Yet he scored as a very rare “high D,’’ a person who is a natural born leader. That reaffirmed what Painter already believed about Swanigan — that his external forces, which could have adversely affected him, only made him stronger.
Mostly it’s allowed Painter to understand how to best coach the players he has (who is task oriented and can handle more responsibility versus those who need more nurturing), identify the players that suit him, and give his team a better understanding of what makes him tick. “A lot of times, kids don’t know who they’re playing for,’’ Painter says. “You give speeches, you talk to them, but this lets me say — ‘Here. This is who I am. This is what’s important to me.’’ Consequently as part of his annual presentation to the Boilers, Brown shares the coach’s results. Painter isn’t in the room, so the information comes off as conversational instead of a ‘my way or the highway edict.’ Privately Painter even will allow his players to read his profile if they ask. “I love that he’s putting himself out there, saying ‘This is who I am,’’ Cline says. “He wants us to feel comfortable around everybody and really understand who we are.’’
So is the test really the secret to all of the Boilermakers’ turnaround? Of course not. Painter also has learned better how to build a team, to surround uber-talented guys with role players who make their free throws, don’t turn the ball over and take smart shots. He’s borrowed from other coaches, specifically Bo Ryan and Brad Stevens, in trying to mimic how they defined roles for each player on their roster. And he’s taken inventory of himself, growing more confident in the kind of coach he wants to be and the kind of program he wants to run.
“It’s not that it’s the answer,’’ he says. “People want to pay a fee, get an answer and boom! Their team is better. That’s not how it works. You have to grow into it. You have to process the information. Instead of the answers, it gives you the questions.’’
And a much more enjoyable card game.