A good friend of mine is an men’s basketball assistant at a college here in Kansas City. Martin sent me a link to an online interview he gave recently. I love listening to great Coaches talk about what they do, so the whole video was interesting to me. And the part I liked best was when he talked about his team’s visit to Italy last month. The way he described his enjoyment at watching the players drink in the whole experience was a great example of why he’s a guy who “gets it”. As much as he cares about winning, he still coaches the athlete first and the game second. The video can be found here.
If you played sports, think about what you remember from those years. How much do you remember from what your Coaches said? (I don’t remember much, other than the one time I decided to count how many times one of my Coaches finished his sentences by saying “all right?”. It was something like 47 times in about a 2 minute speech.) How much do you remember from practice? Probably relatively little. Even with the games, I can remember a play or two, here and there, but mostly it’s all a blur. I’ll tell you what I remember well. The trip our football team took to Miami to watch the Canes play in the fall of 1992. They were awesome that year, eventually finishing as national runner-up. They played West Viriginia on a Saturday night in October. We watched Gino Torretta continue his march toward the Heisman. On the ride home, some of my older teammates gave one of our younger teammates some of their Skoal, and he threw up out the bus window. Not saying that’s a good thing, just saying I remember. I do know this much — on that trip we experienced things that brought us together, mostly in intangible ways, but our team was much stronger for it. A group with average talent went on to win an unlikely district championship.
Even in my years as a Coach, with a few notable exceptions, I don’t remember much of what my colleagues and I said. I don’t remember a whole lot of things that happened at practices, and again, even most of the games kind of blend together. Did we play East Lake in the playoffs in 2002, or was that 2003? I don’t know. I used to know, but it just doesn’t stick. You know what I remember? Cutting practice 90 minutes short and taking the team on a two mile run to the beach where we ate watermelon on ice out of the back of a pickup truck. I remember most of the things I saw at our annual “skit night”. And I remember pretty much everything I saw, heard and did at the funeral of one of our players.
Most of the athletes you serve won’t remember a whole lot of details about what went on in your program. But providing a handful of memorable experiences each season will accomplish a few things, and Rod Olson writes about this in the Legacy Builders series for Coaches. First, you have the opportunity to clearly communicate that you care about your players for reasons beyond what they can produce on the field, track or court. Secondly, these athletes will most often grow up and become Coaches who coach the way they were coached. If a handful of these memories helps them understand that there’s more at stake than winning games and rings, that message will come home to roost for generations to come. (That’s why Legacy Builders is such a great title).
Why not make the effort to include some memorable experiences in your program? Anyone can do it, and it works whether you’re touring Italy together or just enjoying watermelon on the beach.
80’s Lyric