How do you know if a kid has more potential? They’re breathing.
“Much of leadership is about extracting the extra 5 per cent of performance that individuals did not know they possessed.” (Sir Alex Ferguson)1
GET MOR3EE’S RELEVANCE AND OPPORTUNITY IN TODAY’S COACHING ENVIRONMENT
I am a coach, and I grew up as the grandson of a hall of fame coach who left an echoing legacy. The most influential people in my life have all been coaches. The foundation of many of the ideas and observations of GET MOR3EE came from observing and studying coaches and teams in competition over a season or seasons—much of it at the youth level.
We now face the challenge of a technological society where technology has both brought us closer together and at the same time drawn us farther apart. We have the ability to communicate more easily than ever before, but we struggle to keep the focus of our youth with so many things competing for their attention. How do we help them stay on task when it’s so easy to move on to the next thing when they face adversity? How do we still challenge them to strive for a goal and achieve more than they maybe thought possible?
In a world where social media influencers are all the rage, have we forgotten about the most powerful influencer in a person’s life? The coach. The coach is still one of the greatest influencers and most impactful people in an adolescent’s life. The coach has the opportunity to have the undivided attention of a youth for an hour or two at a time, several times a week, and without the distractions of tablets and technology. Their parents may not even get that much connected time.
It has become obvious to me that I must share my leadership and coaching philosophy on how to grow and develop the people in your charge and get more out of them. Coaches are attracted to the easy-to-apply formula for motivating their players to achieve more. We need to be able to inspire and equip coaches to coach the person and not just the player. We need to empower athletes to increase the positivity in their environment and eliminate the “trash” talk that has become so prevalent and accepted in our youth athletics today. An appropriate proverb from the wisest man that ever lived is “Good people bless and build up their city, but the wicked can destroy it with their words” (Prov. 11:11 NCV).
MY FOCUS
My focus has never been on winning every game. My heart has always been on winning with every player. That doesn’t mean getting them to like me. My role is not to be their friend, but I can be friendly. My role is to be their coach. A teacher, leader, mentor, and cheerleader all rolled into one. My number one responsibility is to motivate the players to succeed at whatever we define success to be—to be one of their biggest cheerleaders and supporters, while also holding them accountable to themselves and the team. How you do that depends on you as the coach and where you’re going, but I have a formula you can follow that’s helped me in guiding teams in countless winning seasons and countless winning people. I developed the formula by observing my grandfather, a hall of fame coach, and observing and studying other successful and unsuccessful coaches and leaders.
Most recently, I implemented the formula over the past three years with the varsity boys’ soccer team at The Kings Academy. When I took over in 2016, we started our rise by defeating two teams in our district that we never beat in the history of our school. The two coaches both approached me afterwards to congratulate me—not necessarily on the win but on how different the team looked, how confident and motivated the boys seemed compared to previous years. We made it to the district final, and one of those coaches, whose team we beat again in the playoffs, told me he was voting for me for Coach of the Year.
I was not selected as Coach of the Year that year, but I thought it was cool that other coaches validated the work we were doing in a year when we didn’t win the championship. The following season of 2017, we were in the district final again, only losing one district game all season to the team that eventually won the state championship. In the 2018/19 season we started the season 2–7–1, but I just knew we were going to win the district. I kept instilling that belief in the boys, even when at our lowest. We finished the season on a 6–0 run through the playoffs, conceding just one goal. Our team defeated the reigning state champions, finally winning the district championship in 2019 for only the third time in school history. We then advanced through the first round of the regional playoffs for only the second time in school history. I was voted Coach of the Year in 2019 after winning the district championship, which was satisfying, and I was appreciative of all the coaches who voted for me.
I walked into a team of high school boys with very few full-time soccer players, who were struggling to compete in the conference and low on confidence. Transforming them into a group that believed they could compete successfully, reaching the district finals all three seasons, and winning the district championship in 2019 didn’t occur by happenstance. I was purposeful in following the GET MOR3EE formula. My goal was to get to the district championship every season.
I started with a bold vision of getting to the last game, the state championship. Then I focused on developing the players. We can’t be certain of what the ultimate outcome will be at the end of the season. We focus on getting more out of each player. My ultimate goal and measure of success is whether I am able to get the most out of every player. Maybe, maybe not, because I believe there is more yet to come, but maybe we did in that season. The success is that we got more out of some of our players than some of them imagined possible.
THE GREATEST CHALLENGE IN YOUTH SPORTS
It may be that the most significant challenge facing youth sports today is the lack of sufficiently trained athletic coaches. The Aspen Institute has studied this extensively and reports, “Coaches are the delivery mechanism for quality sport programming … They can make an athlete for life—or wreck enthusiasm for sport altogether … Trained coaches do best.”2 However, “Less than four in 10 youth coaches say they are trained in any of the following areas: sport skills and tactics, effective motivational technique, or safety needs (CPR/basic first aid and concussion management).”3
Effective motivational techniques and sports skills/tactics are the skill sets we most often associate with good coaching. According to this study, only 36 percent of coaches have received training in effective motivational techniques and 35 percent in sports skills/tactics. The Aspen Institute report provides this information:
Here is why the skill of effective motivation may be the most important in improving youth sports in America. A youth sports study on why students quit a sports team showed that 39 percent of students responded that they weren’t having fun.4 This is an alarming figure and was by far the biggest reason statistically of why students quit playing. At the core, I believe this is a function of the environment created by the coach. Following the GET MOR3EE formula equips coaches to begin building this environment.
The following is an excerpt from an April 10, 2019, Stack.com post titled “A Shocking Number of Youth Sports Coaches Are Unqualified for the Gig.”
A 2004 report from the University of Maine found that youth athletes who play for an untrained coach drop at a rate of 26% per year, while those who play for a qualified coach drop out at 5%. The NAYS states that kids and pre-teens are more likely to experience a boost in self-esteem when playing for a qualified coach as opposed to an unqualified coach. Qualified coaches know how to make practices fun, safe and age-appropriate …
According to research by the Aspen Institute’s Project Play initiative, kids want coaches who:
• Respect and encourage them
• Exist as positive role models
• Offer clear, consistent communication
• Have a knowledge of the sport
• Have a willingness to listen.5
Knowledge