Wisconsin Volleyball

‘We’re scientists right now’: Wisconsin volleyball’s unconventional path to success

An excellent article from Brian Hamilton in The Athletic about the approach of Wisconsin volleyball Coach Kelly Sheffield, who never played the game.

“If I didn’t ask questions, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.”

WAUNAKEE, Wis. – A few hours after practice begins with players juggling tennis balls and Def Leppard rattling through the gym, a little while after serving groups are divided into Packers fans and non-Packers fans, Kelly Sheffield sits in a wine bar and describes his first office as a college volleyball head coach. This was at Albany. He shared space with rakes, shovels and snowmobiles belonging to the grounds crew. He assumes his computer was the first one ever made. For the first home match, he scrubbed net poles wearing his suit. Thirteen people showed up.

This audience, on this Tuesday night, is into it. It should be. We’re a short drive north of Wisconsin’s campus. Also it’s $100 a head to get in.

“B.S. and Bourbon” is the event, with part of the proceeds redirected to volleyball NIL efforts. Storytelling is required, and Sheffield cycles through his library of hits. How he inherited the school’s “party team,” as he puts it, and somehow it reached the NCAA championship match that winter of 2013. How he schemed to get air conditioning installed in UW Field House. How he ticked off the Big Ten and television networks with a tweet about coverage. How Waunakee police once pulled him over because he was following his young daughter in his car near a park and someone called in a suspicious driver.

People laugh between sips, but there’s a gasp, too, when the guest of honor jokes that he can’t talk about his playing career because there isn’t one. It’s a seminal fact, and yet, wildly, news to some patrons: Sheffield runs a volleyball powerhouse having never competed in the sport. How their coach has performed that bit of alchemy, how he’s become a filter-free advocate for the game while building a team positioned to chase another national title, is essentially a mystery to them.

He doesn’t need all night to explain that part.

“If I didn’t ask questions,” Sheffield tells the crowd at Red & White Winebar, “I wouldn’t be where I am right now.”

As of Thanksgiving week, the total is 559 wins in 22-plus seasons across three jobs, including 18 appearances in the NCAA Tournament. Wisconsin volleyball has reached five Final Fours, and Kelly Sheffield has been on the sideline for four of them. It was four straight Big Ten championships until a loss at then-No. 16 Purdue on Friday put a fifth out of reach. This stopped being quirky a long time ago. Actually, this isn’t even the first time a head coach with zero playing experience has led a volleyball leviathan, nor the first time such a coach has received a paycheck from this particular school. John Cook — the head coach in Madison from 1992-98 — checks both boxes, and he’s bringing unbeaten No. 1 Nebraska to town on Friday for a rematch of a five-set epic played on Oct. 21.

Still, this is the first time a historically competitive program has a coach with a national championship trophy displayed on an end table, and it’s a little preposterous that “18-year-old 8th grade cross-country coach” is one of the first lines on his resume. To boot, the Badgers run a system used by only a small fraction of the country’s 300-plus programs, while occasionally doing circus tricks before practice or watching Monty Python clips or singing along to Earth, Wind & Fire in the film room. (On the 21st of September, naturally, after Sheffield hand-wrote the lyrics on the dry erase board.)

Because he didn’t come up in thrall to the sport’s conventions, Wisconsin’s coach sees things eclectically. He doesn’t believe there’s a limit to discoverable answers in the game. Think like a scientist, Sheffield tells his team, over and over and over again. “Sometimes you’re testing things out and it’s not always going to be perfect,” says junior Anna Smrek, the Badgers’ 6-foot-9 – that’s correct, 6-foot-9 – middle blocker/right side hitter. “It’s kind of like a hypothesis. You’re working things out. It’s not your statement yet, right?”

It’s the fun in the 53-year-old’s fascination with volleyball — “Every match, there is a path to winning, and I’m obsessed with trying to find that,” Sheffield says — and it is perhaps only exceeded by how he fell into it.

He grew up in Muncie, Ind., and the extent of his volleyball experience was putting a cutout of a ball on his head and cheering for a Burris High School team that was in the midst of winning 21 state championships in 35 seasons. He was a student at Ball State when a former high school classmate called to ask if Sheffield had seen her boyfriend at a bar the previous night. As it happened, the former classmate was coaching Burris’ junior varsity team. As it happened, Sheffield was a single college guy. So he offered to help, should help ever be needed from someone who knew next to nothing about the sport.

His first year was 1989. The team went undefeated. He’d plunged into Muncie’s volleyball incubator at peak temperature. “I loved the techniques,” Sheffield says. “I loved the tactics, I loved the systems. I loved the challenge of not knowing, but the chase of trying to know.” As he added duties with Munciana Volleyball Club, he visited any practice he could, from high school teams to Rick Majerus’ basketball workouts at Ball State to the college’s marching band rehearsals. He filled legal pads with exacting details: names of drills. Where the coach stood. The words coming out of his or her mouth. He would spend three hours at the Ball State student union writing a two-hour practice plan. He hit against a wall, again and again, to teach himself good hand contact so he could input balls properly in practice and actually get things done.

He bartended at night and obsessed on coaching during the day, working any camp or clinic that would have him. “This wasn’t about a career at all,” Sheffield says. “I was having a blast.”

After Sheffield worked a Bowling Green camp during his mid-20s, then-Falcons coach Denise Van De Walle recommended him to longtime Houston coach Bill Walton for a limited-earnings position. Sheffield worked Walton’s camp and then interviewed for the gig. His first impression was … not great. Walton asked Van De Walle why she sent him this loser who ordered a Diet Coke instead of a beer. “He called me up and said, ‘I don’t want to hire you, but Denise is making me,’” Sheffield recalls. He packed his car in two hours, drove 20 more, and made the second workout of two-a-days in the summer of 1997, the start of a new path worth a tidy $12,000 a year.

But then, all along, Sheffield has felt like he’s getting paid to do something he’d pay someone to let him do. It satisfies the competitive urges of a guy who wants to bet on which elevator will open first, or which grocery store line will move quickest. It feeds a compulsion to figure things out. The closest Sheffield gets to explaining it: He was once the youngest Eagle Scout in Indiana history. And then someone put him in charge of a college volleyball team.

“If you’re going to start something,” Sheffield says, “let’s fricking go.”

Which means questions. All the questions. Like the time at Dayton he wondered why the band didn’t show up for volleyball matches, and the response “Well, it never has” wasn’t good enough. “Kelly does not have the bias of experience to keep him from reaching high,” says Wisconsin associate head coach Brittany Dildine, who has been on Sheffield’s staff since 2009.

How else to explain those first frenzied months in Madison in 2013? Sheffield interviewed in a suit he borrowed from his brother-in-law, ran out of gas during the move from Dayton and inherited a roster with four future first- or second-team All-Americans … but not a lot of direction or discretion. The Badgers had missed four straight NCAA Tournaments. One of the first team meetings lasted three hours. “We had to learn to be tough,” says Wisconsin assistant coach Annemarie Hickey, who was then a senior. “It was very, ‘What we’re going to try to do is hard,’ and he laid it all out in front of us.”

That group reached the national championship game as a No. 12 seed, losing to Penn State. The bar hasn’t lowered since.

Instant success, for the head coach whose career started in the equivalent of an equipment shed. It’s ironic only if you weren’t in that Chevy Tahoe on the road from Dayton to Madison long ago. Somewhere along the way, Dildine thought of a very important question.

“Well,” she said, “what are we going to do at Wisconsin?”

Her boss looked at her, incredulous.

“What are you talking about?” Sheffield replied. “We do what we do. We just do it there.”

Three days after coming up irritatingly short in the most-watched regular-season volleyball match ever — that five-set inferno at Nebraska that  delivered 612,000 viewers — Wisconsin fills its film room and a very matter-of-fact discussion meanders to the concept of trust. If you’re in a place where you’re trying to do too much, the head coach says, you’re losing trust. Doesn’t matter if the gym is a kiln and it’s so loud the vitriol merges into one endless, thrashing soundwave.

We do our thing, he says. We do our thing and we’re good enough.

Wisconsin volleyball’s thing, basically, is a miasmic flow of ideas adapted to, and executed by, extremely versatile and talented players. There is structure. But there is no permanence. Only the time being, until the next thought. It’s what you get a decade into the Kelly Sheffield experience, with a roster built to fulfill his wildest dreams. “I would never want to be inside Kelly’s brain,” Hickey says. “I think it would be exhausting. But that’s what makes him so good at what he does.”

Wisconsin works because it can change. In every way.

Smrek was a competitive dancer until she was 14 years old. Setter Izzy Ashburn played three sports in high school. (She also dropped band after one year.) Middle blocker/right side hitter Devyn Robinson played basketball before dropping it for volleyball and also ran track. The positional pigeonholing prevalent in youth volleyball? It all but vanishes here. Smrek never trained on the right side until the day Wisconsin coaches floated the notion. Robinson, similarly, was recruited as a middle and added the hitter training on arrival. Ashburn came in as a setter and has been deployed as a defensive specialist, a hitter, a middle and a passer before returning to setting the last two seasons.

Julia Orzol was, well, bad at diving when she got to Wisconsin. Split her chin on the floor three times one preseason. Dildine, at one point, took Orzol to a pole vault pit and threw balls for 45 minutes as Orzol laid out for them. And in that Oct. 21 match against Nebraska, Orzol shifted from outside hitter to libero. “If you go back and watch some of her digs, she was Superwoman,” Dildine says. “And none of those were digs she was making even two weeks (before).”

No idea is beyond a try. “Putting us in spots where we may be uncomfortable,” Robinson says, “is where we grow.”

The result is freedom to do what many others won’t. Midway through 2022, Sheffield had a quasi-radical thought. He had excellent setters in Ashburn and M.J. Hammill. He had outrageous size with Smrek and 6-foot-7 middle Carter Booth. He had elite hitters in the 6-2 Robinson and 6-4 Sarah Franklin. He surmised he could get more size at the net and more firepower on the floor if Wisconsin switched from the ubiquitous “5-1” rotation to a “6-2” system, which required a timeshare at setter.

It wasn’t a light bulb flickering on. It was a dozen alarm clocks going off at once. “People right away were like, you’re crazy,” Ashburn says. “Why are you even trying that?” Sheffield estimates maybe 5 percent of 300-plus Division I teams employ the “6-2.” He believes Southern California was the last team to win a national title running the system, in the early aughts. Wisconsin? Lost in five sets to Pittsburgh in the Elite Eight a year ago and has won 24 of 27 matches this season. The offense ranked No. 2 nationally both in hitting percentage (.310) and blocks per set (3.01) entering the penultimate weekend of the regular season.

During a European exhibition tour last summer, Sheffield suggested Ashburn and Hammill take turns running matches in a 5-1, just because. They declined. It wasn’t who Wisconsin was. “No questions, no selfishness — just find the flow of the game individually and together and communicate,” Ashburn says. “It really is an advantage to have another setter’s eyes from the bench, letting you know what they’re seeing, or what success they’re having.”

Sheffield concedes none of this happens without what he describes as a “paradigm shift” at Wisconsin; a robust, uncompromising commitment to resourcing volleyball. It began with the air conditioning and getting the wasps out of the Field House roof. Then came a new locker room and a new floor and a new scoreboard. Now Wisconsin charters to road games. Mindfulness coaches are a text away. Last offseason, the Badgers received Oura rings and weighted blankets and pads that change the temperature of their beds as part of a program-wide sleep study. “How it is here,” says Franklin, who played two years at Michigan State before transferring in, “is not even close to how it is at other schools.”

All volleyball programs would like more stuff. Fewer enjoy the institutional imperative to procure it. “Each year (Sheffield) looks for things we can dive into deeper,” associate head coach Gary White says. “If something new comes out, we’re like, could we build that into our program? How do we benefit from this information? We’re always looking for that.”

Which brings us to 4:26 p.m. on a Tuesday in October, and the pop-up lab inside UW Field House.

“We’re scientists right now,” the head coach tells his team.

The Badgers are well into the season, but what feels like solid ground always floats on something more fluid. Today’s test subject is tempo. Wisconsin hits with sufficient speed at the net and the back row. Sheffield thinks his team goes slow in the middle of the floor when it doesn’t have to. He wants his hitters to be athletic and accelerate, which requires a different kind of feed from the setter. And this requires everyone to rehearse the scenario repeatedly while communicating about where the ball is or should be.

Nine minutes in, Sheffield hits pause. It’s not quite getting there. He lines the hitters up single-file. One by one, they approach and swing. No traffic. Just timing and mechanics and discussion. The experiment, reduced to its core elements. “Some places are like, no matter what our hitter’s percentage is, we’re running this tempo, and that’s it,” Hammill says. “In those moments, it’s very collaborative to what’s going to get us the best results.”

It’s the serious work amid the dodgeball contests and “Anchorman” clips and team field trips to see Bruce Springsteen in Zurich at the end of that Europe tour. The science juxtaposed with calculated madness.

That alchemy, though, is in the moments when it’s hard to tell the difference.

Like tennis balls juggled to hone hand-eye coordination. Or the one preseason Sheffield wanted to see less spin on sets, and he had Hammill and Ashburn set balloons. They thought it was ridiculous. It worked. Of course.

“He’s just a big kid,” Franklin says, “who knows volleyball really well.”

These days, yes, sometimes the big kid acts up. He has his reasons.

On March 19, 2022, Kelly Sheffield sent a couple tweets.

A year and a half later in a wine bar, Sheffield recalls the visit from a Wisconsin administrator provoked by these thoughts. ESPN sent a message. The Big Ten reached out. The Big Ten Network did, too. Not happy, he was told.

So be it, Sheffield replied.

“You’re willing to be patient for an amount of time,” he says, “and then let’s cut the crap.”

These aren’t his questions about how to elevate college volleyball. These are his demands. His career, after all, is a mockery of barriers to entry. People pay money just to hear him talk. Shoppers recognize Franklin, the ebullient team-leader in kills, at Plato’s Closet and ask for pictures. To Sheffield, it’s not random. It’s proof of concept.

Just like 92,003 fans watching a volleyball match played in a football stadium at Nebraska in August, the largest crowd ever to watch a women’s sporting event. A couple of weeks later, Wisconsin played Marquette at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, and the 17,037 attendees set an NCAA record for largest attendance at an indoor regular-season match. And, what do you know, in late October, Wisconsin and Minnesota played the first volleyball match broadcast on FOX. Big gets bigger. Presumptions shrivel.

In fact, Sheffield adds, within 48 hours of Wisconsin’s gripping first tilt with Nebraska, officials from Lambeau Field reached out about hosting a volleyball match.

The coach wants assurances of a sellout. A plan to make it an epic experience for fans and the teams. That’s what Sheffield sees, even if others can’t yet.

If everyone can make that happen? Let’s fricking go, he says.

Do What You Are Good At

Understanding your role. I’ve talked a lot about how that terminology can limit your players, and limit your ability to know what they are good at. I recognize I’m in the minority here when it comes to coaches. It seems like most of us want our players to “know their role,” and on good teams you even hear a lot of players talk about knowing their roles and how important it is to success.

Your role is to help our team win. That is everyone’s role. Do things that are going to help us have success. If you are a good 3-point shooter, you should be looking to shoot threes. If you are great at getting downhill, you should be driving to the basket. If you can help the team by sharing the ball or get to the glass, then get to it.

I think for a player learning his role is just about self-evaluation. Understand what you are good at. If you are honest about what you are good at, you can figure out how to help the team. Figure out what you are good at, and do those things a lot. That will help us. And that will give you an important “role” on our team.

As a coach, I’m not going to define a specific role for you. But I am going to help you understand what you are good at. I never want to limit a player or put him in a box and say “you are a defender and a rebounder,” because a lot of the time players will surprise you with what they can do.

Figure out what you are good at, and do that a lot. That is your role.

Curiosity

The best leaders are curious about others around them. The leaders on great teams are genuinely curious about their teammates, and their teammates success. They also have the ability to do their own job while also having the mental capital to think about others. Not everyone does, which is why not everyone is a great leader in the traditional sense. Certain players can only focus on their own job to be able to get it done, and that’s okay. They don’t have the mental space to think about what’s going on with their teammates while also handling their job.

When you are looking for your best leaders, look to those who are curious about what is going on around them. Find the guys that can handle their own business and still understand what’s going on around them. Great leaders are curious about their teammates. That is the first step in making their teammates better.

The Best Teams…

I’ve been a part of:

• Embrace the value of practice

• Play for each other

• Have great perspective

• Compete at an elite level regardless of circumstance

• Are genuinely curious about each other

• Handle losing

• Listen without responding

• Take ownership

• Show vulnerability

• Don’t take themselves too seriously

• Confront bad behavior

• Don’t always get along

• Understand sacrifice

• Love playing together in the off-season

• Are in great shape

• Have different personalities

• Challenge each other as players

• Challenge me as a coach

• Understand the value of being a great teammate

• Don’t sweat the small stuff

• Trust each other sincerely

• Speak up

• Handle the spotlight

• Play with joy

• Are not afraid of conflict

• Love being a part of a team

• Set their own standards

• Hold each other accountable

• Understand our culture is their behavior

• Ask questions

• Confront me when I need it

• Refuse to let one another down

• Would give anything for one more day of practice together

“We’re Here Because of the One’s That Love Us”

Terrific stuff from Matt Rhule of Nebraska Pre-Game.

“Leadership is Solving Problems”

“Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.” - Colin Powell

I would say leadership as a coach is not just solving problems, but teaching people how to solve problems. In a big picture sense, you always need to solve the problems that are impacting your organization. But once we get to playing games, we can’t solve the problems anymore. They have to solve the problems.

Are we teaching them to solve the problems themselves? Finding a balance in practice between how much you stop, talk and teach versus letting them play through mistakes is challenging. Colin Powell didn’t have that luxury. But the more hands on we are as coaches, the more we are inhibiting their ability to solve the problems themselves. And with 5:00 to play in a tie game, they need to solve the problems themselves.

Ask them questions in practice instead making loud, declarative statements all the time. When someone commits a turnover ask them “What did you see there?” and let them explain it to you. There’s a big difference between that and “Stop turning the ball over!” You are giving them a chance to process what happened, think about what they saw and figure out a better way to make the right play, instead of simply being judged on the result. When you yell at them to stop turning it over you are making it very clear what the problem is, but you aren’t giving them a road map on how to solve the problem.

I think effective coaches at times have to get comfortable with practice being sloppy and chaotic. Not to say you should stop coaching, but understand even if it doesn’t look great and things are erratic your players are getting used to an uncomfortable environment and how to figure things out. If you stop practice every time something bad happens, they aren’t learning to navigate it. They are learning to stop doing bad things.

Don’t just solve the problems for your players. Teach them to be problem solvers. The more ownership of the process they have, the better your team will be.

Notre Dame Headsets

A very cool 5-minute trip on the headsets as Notre Dame comes back to beat Duke.

https://x.com/NDFootball/status/1709013512528199958?s=20

How Candid Are You?

From Admired Leaders:

We know all too well the reasons people decide not to be candid. 

Being forthright with your views and frank in the way you express them can hurt others’ feelings and make you unlikeable. Politeness is generally indirect. Likeable people don’t impose their views on others. So, most people swallow what they really think in an effort to get along. 

Being direct and candid also exposes the limitations of what the speaker really knows or doesn’t. This can elicit a putdown when someone in the room decides to show everyone else how misinformed or uniformed your views are, or both. Being candid requires taking a chance and, in too many cases, people think it isn’t worth the risk. 

As a result, we generally know less than we should about what people really think and believe. Getting to the right or best answer requires candor from those in the room. The same is true for reaching quality decisions. 

Candor is the secret ingredient when it comes to addressing important issues. Being candid gets ideas and thoughts out in the open so they can be dealt with. 

Yet, despite the numerous benefits of candor, people typically prefer to be liked, so they avoid too much of it. This is a problem in most relationships and teams. Too little candor equals a superficial debate or discussion of ideas or issues. 

Of course, too much candor can also be a problem. Despite the popularity of such catchphrases as radical candor and radical transparency, uncensored honesty between people is usually offensive and unnecessarily unkind. No one wants to be around someone who has no filter or can’t stop themselves from saying whatever they are thinking at the moment. The unfortunate reality is we really don’t like people who are too transparent or uncensored. 

But the problem is not that most teams and relationships have too much candor. This is probably why such catchy descriptions become popular in the first place. We need more candor, especially when performance matters. Which is just about always. 

Leaders who are themselves direct and candid and reward it in others get more of it. When they are selflessly candid (they want to get to the right answer, not show everyone what they know) and helpfully direct (the only way others know what to do differently to improve is to tell them), good things happen. 

Not surprisingly, encouraging others to speak candidly requires that leaders listen and don’t overreact to what they hear. But there are more specific ways to promote more candor. 

Thanking people for their candidness before responding is a habit of great leaders. People who are thanked for being candid often respond to the encouragement by doing more of it. 

Some leaders even thank people for their frankness in advance, before they begin discussing an issue. This sets an expectation that candor matters more than other social qualities right now. 

Even more important for some leaders is to give people permission to be frank and honest. People need to know that the leader prizes candor and wants it. It is always easier to call up the courage to potentially be disliked when others tell us we won’t be. In fact, leaders who tell others they most respect candidness in people can open up the floodgates.

The Body Language Battle

Body language seems like. a really hot topic for coaches on social media. It feels like a day doesn’t go by where I don’t see “Body language screams” from some online coach. The amount of coaches preaching to young players about how their body language is going to get them cut, end their career or makes them uncoachable is a little tough for me to swallow.

I’ve said this a lot. I’m not a fan of negative body language. I just don’t really care. I don’t think it’s a very big deal. I have a lot of things going through my head when I’m coaching, trying to build my team, and trying to get the most out of my players. There is a lot of stuff I have to worry about, and body language isn’t one of them. I’ve won a lot of games with plenty of players who exhibit what would be considered “bad” body language by the twitter coaching community. Give me a talented, tough kid who really competes and sometimes expresses his frustration the wrong way any day. I just don’t think body language is having a big impact on our team, unless I decide to make a big deal out of it.

I have a lot of different thoughts on the body language battle.

• Compare your body language as a coach with your player’s body language when they are playing. If I filmed you on the sidelines during a game, would I see what you would consider bad body language? If body language is that important to you, you better model the behavior or your team will see right through you. Let’s not be hypocritical.

• Can body language be a good thing? Doesn’t it give you a read on the emotions of your players and where they are mentally?I’m made substitutions and won games because I read players body language and realized he needed a break, or I needed to talk to him, or he needed his teammates to help him. Body language is knowledge about your team if you look at it that way.

• How was Tom Brady’s body language as a player? Known as a great leader and one of the greatest winners of all time… if Tom Brady wasn’t on a winning team would his approach be seen as leadership or as bad body language? We used the body language to fit the narrative we want to see. It’s part of confirmation bias. Did Michael Jordan show great body language as a player? How about LeBron? Are these guys you wouldn’t want on your team?

• On a losing team it’s bad body language. On a winning team it’s being a great competitor.

• Coach the behavior. Not the personality. Your biggest concern is the behavior. If bad body language leads to the wrong behavior, then make sure you address that behavior. And maybe you can see the body language as a clue in the future that behavior is going to change. I think often times we coach players based on what we think about them, and we use body language to help confirm what we already think.

• We usually want to see some emotion from our players. We want to know they care. We want to see a competitive edge. Doesn’t our body language help shed some light on this for us? Sometimes people react a little emotionally when something really matters to them.

• It’s very easy to read body language the wrong way. It’s not that easy to interpret. I get body language wrong a lot, so maybe that’s why I don’t make a big deal about it. It’s very easy to react emotionally to bad body language when you get hot, but you might be reading it wrong, and now you’ve got a bigger problem.

• Try and ignore body language one day. Just let it go, don’t react to it. It might be hard if it’s something that usually gets to you. But try and ignore it. My guess is you’ll get past it and be better able to focus on things that are more important.

From Admired Leaders on body language:

Scratch your neck, touch your nose, push out the tip of your tongue, cross your arms, point your finger, shrug your shoulders, or squint your eyes. According to the cottage industry of body language experts, gestures can reliably reveal important truths about people, especially in high-stakes situations. 

Unfortunately, it's total horse hockey.

We use body language to confirm what we are already learning from others. As interpreters, we cobble all the movements and gestures together and add them to our ongoing interpretation of what is being said. This is known as confirmation bias in other circles. 

We simply can’t decode the mental states of others exclusively from their body language. No gesture means anything specific, no matter how many times you’ve heard that folding your arms or closing your arms is a sign of closemindedness. 

Coaches Screaming

Dan Le Betard and Dominique Foxworthy discussing the way coaches scream at athletes.

Link

Courage of Conviction

How courageous are you as a coach? Your team will sense any trepidation you have in your decisions, and you have to make tough choices as a head coach. It’s part of the job.

To make tough decisions I’ve always felt you have to be confident in who you are and what you believe in. You have to have a clear set of values that matter to you, that you won’t bend on when things get tough. For me our compete level every day, the way we treated others, and trust were not negotiable. If somebody didn’t go to class they weren’t going to play - I can’t trust you. If someone went through the motions in practice they were going to lose playing time - practice was sacred, and our compete level was our identity. We controlled that.

When you have a clear vision of your values and you stick to them, the tough decisions aren’t actually that tough. It allows you to lean on and strengthen your culture, rather than show cracks in it in search of winning.

In one of my early years as a head coach I had a key player screwing around in study hall two days before a big road game against our rival. It wasn’t clear what exactly happened - he had an excuse - but he didn’t get his hours in for the week. Our academic coordinator and our AD said we should just get through the weekend and we’d figure it out on Monday. But that didn’t sit well with me. He hadn’t gotten his hours, and if you didn’t get your hours in, you didn’t play. I sat him for the big game on the road that weekend, but made him come on the bus and sit on the bench in street clothes. We had a huge win that helped us win the league, and he had to sit there and watch his teammates play without him.

Was that a tough decision? I guess you could say that, but ultimately if our culture was important to me, and our values mattered, it wasn’t that hard. If you screwed around in study hall you weren’t going to play. Our guys knew that. He didn’t play. I’m glad we won the game - and part of me believes that the strength of our culture helped us win that game. Our culture got a lot stronger that day.

Your core values aren’t actually values until they are tested. If, once they are tested, you don’t follow through on them, they aren’t values. They are preferences. And there is a big difference.

I really enjoyed this post from Admired Leaders on courageous leadership:

Courageous leaders have the same fears and trepidations as everyone else but make the choice to act anyway. We know a leader is courageous by what they do. 

We’d all agree that it takes courage for leaders to admit their mistakes, buck a trend, challenge consensus, ask for criticism, and send tough messages. 

It’s not clear to many experts as to why some leaders can act courageously and others seem to fold in the face of challenge and discomfort. The idea that leaders can develop their courage seems a foreign idea to those who believe courage and bravery are innate qualities leaders are born with. 

Yet, studies of leaders who consistently exhibit courage have revealed that values play a much more important role than any link to family history. A deep commitment to a potential outcome or a strong belief about an issue or person allows leaders to behave more courageously. 

This is commonly known as the courage of conviction. Leaders rally their ability to stare down their fear when they have a powerful conviction about the people or issues involved. 

Look a little closer at leaders who behave courageously and you will learn that it is the steadfast commitment to personal values that matters most. Leaders who know their values and stick to them regardless of the circumstances or social pressure are more likely to act courageously. In the face of extreme challenge, where fear can easily take over, they brace themselves with their values and do what needs to be done. 

Leaders can learn to become more courageous by reviewing their core values and establishing a deep and abiding commitment to them. Reminding themselves of what they stand for and saying so frequently with their team helps to bolster courage when it is needed. Any leader can become more courageous by becoming a more values-based person. 

Having courage doesn’t mean leaders run toward danger or relish trepidation. It means leaders don’t let fear stop them from acting. Knowing and acting on their most deeply cherished values is how the best leaders push through and act courageously.

High Performing Teams - Unbreakable Trust

The Characteristics of High Performing Teams - Part 6

If I can’t trust you, I don’t want to be around you. I certainly don’t want to try and win with you. High performing teams build a trust that’s unbreakable. That doesn’t mean they don’t make mistakes, or fail to live up to the teams standards. Every team has those issues. But they develop a trust that that is strong enough to overcome those issues for the best interests of the team.

Trust is developed through transparency. If you want your team to trust one another, they have to be able to trust you. Everything you do has to follow what you say. You have to model the behavior. Admit your mistakes. Be open about the why behind your decisions, and let them know when you screwed up. Once they realize they can trust you - and how important trust is to you - they’ll start to trust one another.

Creating a safe environment is a key to building trust. Your players have to know it’s okay to make mistakes. You want them to be comfortable taking risks, and not looking over their shoulder. A confident team is one that is not afraid to make plays. And that environment is up to you. If you are transparent about the decisions you make, and you take ownership of your mistakes, your players will do the same.

The challenge with developing a safe environment is it involves giving up control, and that is hard for a lot of leaders to do. You have to allow your players the chance to fail, and make them comfortable with taking risks. If they hear about it every time they make a mistake, the won’t be willing to take risks. If you blame them every time something goes wrong, they’ll start blaming others as well. Give them the chance to learn, to grow and to speak up, by giving them a chance to own their approach and make some mistakes.

Elite teams trust each other without fail. You can actually see it on the court - they way the sprint to help side, they way they block out, their willingness to share the ball. An unbreakable trust turns into the behaviors that win tough games, and it starts with the environment you establish.

Talent Sets The Floor

Buzz Williams: “Talent sets the floor, character is the ceiling. Trust increases speed.”

How Do You Play A Lot Of People?

I had a good conversation with a head coach recently about how you go about playing a lot of players. He has a really deep roster this year and a lot of new players who he thinks can help. He is comfortable playing a rotation of 7-8 generally, maybe one more, but he feels like he’ll need to play 10 or more guys this year to get the most out of his team, as well as keep people happy.

It’s interesting that almost every coach goes to the “keep people happy” reasoning for playing a lot of guys. They don’t want too many guys on the end of the bench upset, and possibly bringing a bad attitude to the rest of the team. The truth is I don’t think playing time is what you should think about when you want to “keep people happy.” I think players are in a good spot mentally when you are honest with them and they know what to expect. Not simply when they play. They want to know what’s expected of them, what they have to do to play, and they want a fair shake. If you can provide that environment, they may not always be happy with their playing time but more importantly they will be good teammates about it.

A lot of coaches don’t play a lot of guys quite honestly because they are a little insecure. There is so much pressure to win, and to win you want to have your best players on the floor. As soon as you give one of your studs a break, and the other team goes on a 4-0 run, you are sending that kid back into the game. It’s mental protection for the head coach - well, if we lose with our best players out there and they don’t perform, it’s on them, it’s not on me. A coach can take a lot of heat for losing with his starters on the bench. But you can’t tell me that the 34th-plus minutes of your starters are better than minutes 1-5 of a good player with fresh legs.

I always liked to play a lot of guys as a head coach, but it started with having a lot of good players. What I learned though was that it had a huge impact on practice. I started as a head coach with the belief that practice was going to be the most important 2-3 hours of our day every day. Not the games, not recruiting, but practice. That was the mindset, and I still believe it today.

To have a competitive practice every day, you need everyone engaged. And to keep everyone engaged, they have to show up playing for something. I’ve been a part of too many teams where the back-ups or the scout team, who knew they weren’t going to play, started going through the motions once the games started because they knew they weren't going to play. Now you can Coachspeak them to death all you want - you never know when your number is getting called, everyone has to be ready every day - but it just doesn't work that way. Every kid on your team wants to play more. If they don’t feel like practice is a way to earn playing time, their competitive edge is going to drop and your practices will get worse.

I learned how powerful it was when you rewarded kids who competed and produced at a high level in practice with playing time. When that kid who hardly played was the first guy in off the bench after having a good few days of practice, everyone took notice. It sent a strong message - if you bring it every day, you’ll get a chance. Playing time was earned every day. That is what gave our practices a great competitive edge.

How do you actually go about playing a lot of guys? The first thing you have to do is figure out exactly what is important to you as a coach. What are the behaviors that you value that lead to winning? I would write them down. Think hard about what really matters to you when it comes to winning. Once you are clear in your own head what really matters to you as far as winning, you can be very clear with your players.

First you need to be honest and direct with your players. Do you want to be a part of an elite team? Here is the situation we are in. We have a lot of guys who can help, and our depth will be a huge strength for us. No one is going to play as much as they like. But you are going to have a chance to earn it every day in practice. The standards we expect of everyone to earn playing time will be clearly laid out for you.

Once you’ve made it clear to your players what to expect, then you have to show them the behaviors - and reward them. If you value toughness, show your players he behaviors that define toughness for you - a great blockout, sprinting back on defense, diving for a loose balls, etc. Then you have to reward those behaviors with playing time. If you believe those behaviors lead to winning, then the guys that do them most consistently need to play. It doesn’t mean they need to start, but you have to consistently reward the right behaviors with playing time.

I used to do this pre-season exercise with my team. I’d give each player an index card and ask them to write down one number on the card - the number of minutes they expected to play. Obviously they all want to play a lot of minutes. But ask them how much they expect to play, based on what they’ve earned - how hard they compete, the way they produce, how they impact winning. They need to write down the number of minutes they expect to play on their card, and they don’t have to put their name on it.

Inevitably when you add up the numbers on the cards you are going to get between 400-500 minutes. Everyone, even the young guys who just arrived, expect to play good minutes. It’s a pretty simple message. You guys wrote down that you all expected to play a total of 400 minutes. Do you know how many minutes are available in every game? 200. But your expectations are to play twice that many - and that’s not possible. Everyone is going to have to sacrifice, because no one is going to play the minutes that they want.

Finally I think it’s important that they understand that simply doing their job isn’t good enough to earn minutes. That is what is expected of everyone - the bare minimum. When a player comes to me and says “Coach, I’ve been working really hard, I compete hard in practice every day, I really feel like I’ve earned the chance to play…” Well, that isn’t quite enough. Not only do you have to meet our standards every day, you have to do it better than the guy next to you. Competing hard every day in practice, and being a great teammate, that’s not enough. Everyone is going to do that. You have to do that and outperform the guy next to you who plays your position. This isn’t a grammar school YMCA team. We are trying to win here. Just showing up every day and competing doesn’t get you on the floor.

Playing a lot of guys isn’t comfortable for a lot of coaches, and it isn’t always easy. But it is a great way to build a cohesive team and get the most out of everyone. Be intentional about your approach - be honest with yourself and your team about what’s important to you, explain it to them in behavioral terms, and reward the right behaviors with playing time. You’ll be surprised how much your team will buy in when you are honest with them.

Klay Thompson

Klay Thompson was suspended for 1 game when he was in college a Washington State. He felt so bad, he took the microphone before the game to apologize to the fans and the University because he wasn’t playing. From The Athletic:

He apologized to the arena before the game. He had a microphone and the arena was packed and he apologized to the entire arena. Can you imagine being 21 years old and letting down an entire university and then getting on a microphone and having to apologize to them? We had announced the starting lineups and before the game the P.A. guy said, “Hey, we have an announcement to make,” and he gave the microphone to Klay and Klay apologized.

Loewen: Well, I actually started that game. Our starting point guard messed up his ankle ,and Klay was out. We lost to UCLA in overtime. That was a really emotional time for Klay. It was an emotional time for him, and he felt so bad. But that’s not the point of my story. The point of my story is, we played the game. I think I logged 22 or 23 uneventful minutes, and we lost in overtime. That was my first start and my first real minutes. After the game, we were walking out and he came up to me, put his arm around me and was like, “Man, I was so proud of you out there. I was just so proud of you.”

High Performing Teams - Perspective

The Characteristics of High Performing Teams - Part 5

We had just lost to Amherst at home. My Rhode Island College team as very good, and Amherst was one of the elite teams in the country, having beaten us in the Elite 8 a few years earlier on the way to their first national title. Losing to Amherst wasn’t the end of the world, but we had a couple of other tough losses in January and we put an NCAA Tournament bid in danger. Beating Amherst would have been a huge win, one that likely would have put us in the Tournament. We didn’t pay well, and they handled us pretty good.

I rarely reacted emotionally after games, especially losses, preferring to watch the film and understand a lot more about how we played before drawing any conclusions. After this game, I was pretty down. We expected a lot better and this was a huge game for us, and we didn’t perform.

I walked into the locker room after the game and the players could tell I was pretty disappointed. We had put ourselves in a tough spot as far as just making the tournament, with our consecutive streak of 5 straight tournaments on the line. I let the players know we had dug ourselves a pretty big hole, and we had a lot of work to do to get out of it. But their response was interesting. They were obviously disappointed that we lost. But they didn’t seem like it was that big of a deal to them. They weren’t distraught. They were saying stuff like “we’ll see them again, well get them in the tournament.” I was thinking, what tournament??? We had a lot of work to do just to have a chance.

I remember we came back the next and we were really sharp at practice. Our guys were a little pissed off that we lost, but it didn’t impact our approach to work the next day. I felt a lot worse than they did. If it was up to me, that loss probably would have stung a little bit and changed our approach to practice a bit. But our players were confident in each other and what we did, and it was just time to get back to work. They had great perspective. And I learned a lot about that from them.

Their unique perspective was the attitude that they took towards losing. I learned, over time, that my best teams had a great relationship with losing. That doesn’t mean they accepted it or didn’t think winning was important. They just didn’t let losing have a negative impact on what they did next. They hated to lose, but it didn’t phase them to the point where they were making bad decisions moving forward.

Elite players and high performing teams have great perspective. They have a particular attitude toward what happens around them, and they are very balanced mentally.

Chris Paul

Chris Paul on why he chose to play for Skip Prosser at Wake Forest:

How did Wake Forest’s head coach Skip Prosser lure you to his program over others?

He was successful in recruiting me because he was real with me. When he came to see me play in high school, he would be like, “Man, you don’t play defense.” And I knew that if I wanted to become the player I hoped and strove to be, I would need people who were honest with me. I also learned early on that what the head coach thinks matters. At the end of the day, he determines your playing time.

High Performing Teams - Win Anyway

The Characteristics of High Performing Teams - Part 4

High performing teams refuse to make excuses. They cultivate an environment where excuses simply aren’t accepted. This can start with the coach, but eventually the caretakers of this mentality are the players. Everyone is uncomfortable when excuses or rationalizations come into play, to the point where it just stops happening. The players make each other uncomfortable when they start hearing excuses.

The phrase we used with our teams was Win Anyway. A lot of stuff happens during a season, big and small. Everyone deals with some form of adversity. You know what your job is? Win Anyway. You are missing a couple of starters due to injury? Win Anyway. The bus showed up late? Win Anyway. The officials are calling it too tight? Win Anyway.

Nobody wants to hear about the labor pains. They just want to see the baby. Everything that is happening to your team is happening to every team you play. Injuries, bad calls, unfortunate luck, a bus driver who gets lost. At the end of the game, there is a winner and a loser. And you know who cares about what happened to you or your team along the way? Nobody. Not one person. There are no accommodations made in the league standings for misfortune.

In 2010 when I was coaching at Rhode Island College we were playing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament at Oswego State in New York. We played very well and handled Penn State - Behrend in the first round, and we were set to play a really good Oswego team on their home floor the next day to go to the Sweet 16.

When we were sitting down for breakfast the morning of the game, our starting center limped in with only one shoe on and said “Coach, I don’t know what happened, but my foot is killing me.” He was a first-team all league center, and probably the best player on any of the four teams in the bracket that weekend. Our entire team looked at him in disbelief. He played the entire game the night before without an issue. He didn’t know what happened. But he woke up that next morning and could barely walk.

We got on the bus to go to shoot around and I felt awful as well. Everyone had the same feeling. How are we going to win this game without our best players? He tried to put his shoe on and said he wanted to play, but it was clear he couldn’t. Our guys were kind of sleepwalking through the shoot around, everyone feeling the air had left the balloon. So I called the guys together.

“Do you guys know what is happening next Friday night? Can anyone tell me?” They looked at me puzzled. “The Sweet 16. Next Friday night there are going to be 16 teams left with a chance to win the national championship. We are either going to be one of them, or we’re not. But nobody is going to be talking about who played and who didn’t. They are still going to play the Sweet 16 games, and either us or Oswego is going to be there. So who’s it going to be?”

“Mike isn’t going to play tonight. Carl will start, and Darius will play the 5 spot. What are we going to do? We’re going to Win Anyway, just like we always do. Everyone has to be prepared to play out of position and guard up. Mike is hurt. It happens. There’s nothing we can do about it. But we are going to the Sweet 16.”

You could see our guys perk up and their emotions change. We were all feeling sorry for ourselves, myself included. It was a huge blow. But we took pride in the way we competed and never making excuses. We played probably our best game of the season that night and beat Oswego in front of their home crowd going away. We laced them up the next weekend in the Sweet 16.

No one cares what happened to you or your team. Win Anyway.

High Performing Teams - Embrace Conflict

The Characteristics of High Performing Teams - Part 4

Conflict is an essential and unavoidable part of leadership. High performing teams learn to embrace conflict.

Great teams, great leaders, and great organizations have to learn to embrace conflict because they have to confront bad behavior. On the best teams I have been a part of, the players took on this responsibility.

Failure to confront bad behavior spreads like a cancer and takes down teams all of the time. I’ve always said to my teams that whatever you are willing to walk past, that is your new standard. If guys are screwing around in the weight room and nobody says anything to them, that becomes acceptable. That’s your new standard. If guys are jogging back on defense and the team lets it go, they’ll get used to it. That behavior has to be confronted, or it will become normal.

It’s not going to be comfortable. Most people run from conflict. It’s the easy and safe play. Don’t bother confronting it, just move on and forget about it and hope the behavior goes away. That approach can really poison the environment for your team. Communicate regularly with your team about how you are going to resolve conflict. Come up with a game plan for how you are going to disagree, and don’t ever let communication be an issue with your team.

Conflict needs to be embraced. By that, it should be accepted and expected as part of the operation. It’s not like you are walking around looking for things to fight about. But great organizations give people the freedom to be themselves and express their opinions - and teams should act the same way. When that happens, you have a safe environment where risks will be taken and that will lead to great progress. But there will be disagreements, and that is okay. Learn to embrace conflict and figure out a resolution path for your team, and you’ll open up another door towards elite success.

Bill Parcells

In 1983, Bill Parcells led the New York Giants to a 3-12-1 season. The Giants wanted to fire him. They even offered his job to Howard Schnellenberger, but he declined. So the Giants brought Parcells back. He knew that he had nothing to lose, so he changed everything going into that offseason. Parcells lacked confidence in his first year. He was tentative, he didn't confront players, and he didn't connect. As a result, he didn't have the players' respect. He realized that he had to lead and take charge.

He said, "To lead, you’ve got to be a leader. That may sound obvious, but it took me an entire year to learn - and it wasn’t a pleasant year." That is when the team started to turn it around in 1984.

His 3 Leadership Actions to Change the Culture:

1. Accountability - He told the team that losing was no longer tolerated. He was going to confront players on their performance and hold people accountable. Bill said, "The only way to change people is to tell them in the clearest possible terms what they’re doing wrong. And if they don’t want to listen, they don’t belong on the team."

2. Values and Purpose - The team had to focus on achievement. Bill told the team that achievement comes from relentless effort and commitment. He said, "It wasn’t going to be easy, but at the end of the day, achievement would be the most important thing they would take home with them." He connected the purpose to the players and anchored the team on values and that purpose.

3. Connection - He would spend time connecting with players and coaches 1-on-1. He needed to build credibility and respect. That meant being honest and communicating with everyone. He said, "I’ve found that holding frank, one-on-one conversations with every member of the organization is essential to success."

In 1984, Bill Parcells led the Giants to the playoffs and a 9-7 record. 2 years later, he won his first Super Bowl. He is known as one of the best NFL coaches of all-time and for his ability to turn around teams.

Takeaway 1: Leadership is about your behavior. You can see the difference in how he led the team in Year 1 vs. Year 2. He effectively communicated, connected with his players, held people accountable, and anchored the team on specific values and purpose. When you show the way and lead the way then people trust you and follow.

Takeaway 2: You have to be yourself. People know immediately when you are faking it. You have to do it your way with your personality and style. Parcells learned that in year 1. He knew that if he was going to get fired, he needed to at least try winning in the way that best fit him which meant connecting and being tougher.

"I’m convinced that if you get people onto your team who share the same goals and the same passion, and if you push them to achieve at the highest level, you’re going to come out on top." - Bill Parcells

• From @Coachajkings