Coaching Athletes To Be Their Best

Seems like that would be a good thing.

Here at SmarterVolley, the theme of spring has been Teaching. In February we looked at Nick Winkleman’s The Language Of Coaching

And Now For Something Completely Different

and in March we looked at Rob Gray’s How We Learn To Move.

Learning To Move

And now, in April, we’re going to look at the third of the books which are influencing my coaching the most: Coaching Athletes To Be Their Best. There are several authors cited, but I’ll mostly just use Jonathan Fader as a proxy for the authors, because it was his podcast appearance on CYBO that introduced me to their framework, which is called Motivational Interviewing.

Motivational Interviewing might sound like a mashup of Tony Robbins and Barbara Walters, but it’s actually a subtle approach that involves listening and connecting with your athletes. As with the other 2 books, my intent here isn’t to summarize the books. CATBTB is both a terrible acronym and an easy-to-read book. If you haven’t read the book, just get it and read it, then come back to this article. Or at least ask ChatGPT.

What I’m going to do is share my main takeaways and how I’m applying them to my coaching practice right now.

The Strengths Lens

In CATBTB, the authors use the concept of looking at your athletes through a strength lens while you’re coaching. It’s easy to have your error radar out seeing all the mistakes and flaws. That’s especially easy if you’re coaching anywhere besides the sub-elite level: there’s A LOT of flaws out there, folks.

This type of thinking is pervasive in coaching. After the completion of one season at a program that I won’t name, I was given a performance review. The athletes were asked to evaluate their coaches on a variety of characteristics. Great. Some of the characteristics were things like “Honesty and Ethics” or “Organization.” Also great. What’s interesting was that the first item (and it wasn’t in alphabetical order) in this evaluation was, “Error Detection.” What’s also interesting is that there was no category that asked athletes to evaluate how much this coach helped them to improve. It was implied, since there was an “Effectiveness,” category, I just thought it was interesting that, “Error Detection,” was significant enough to warrant its own category.

Fortunately, I scored pretty high there. Yes! Hire me, I will tell you what you suck at!

And of course, identifying mistakes is an early step on the path to improvement. My takeaway from CATBTB is not that you don’t ever fix mistakes. Of course you need to fix mistakes. The helpful analogy to me is the idea of the Strengths Lens.

Identify Strengths

These players made your team for a reason. Hopefully that reason was, “their parents sent them to a school that has a no-cut policy.” (“Strength: is a live human”)

All people, and thus all players, have strengths and weaknesses. Your players have things they bring to the table. They have redeeming character traits. All this in existence to their inability to pass a freeball or their terrible transition footwork or whatever flaws they have.

The good thing about the Strength Lens is that it’s not always a maximization effort. Two players can have an opposite reaction to a situation and BOTH of those players can show a strength.

Whenever Bobby comes out of the game, he’s asking when he can go back in. “Coach, if you don’t need me at middle, I can play outside… I can set if you need me to… do you want me to fill out the lineup card for the next game??”

Whenever Johnny comes out of the game, he never asks to come back in. He supports and cheers for his teammates and waits to be told to sub in.

Guess what? Both of these athletes are showing strengths. They are showing different strengths, but they are both showing strengths. Bobby badly wants to get in the game. That’s awesome. He’s a competitor. He needs some direction on when the appropriate time is to talk to the coach and some reminders to support his teammates, but you’d never question his readiness to get in the game. On the flip side, Johnny is showing his strength as a supportive teammate. You might wonder if he needs to develop his competitive streak a bit more, but there’s no questioning that he contributes to a positive team vibe.

Using The Strengths Lens

This is how you use the Strength Lens. It’s not to ignore mistakes. Serving in the net is still serving in the net. Bothering the coach is still bothering the coach. Missing your turn to sub in is still missing your turn to sub in. But putting a mistake in the context of an athlete’s strengths helps you better understand how to guide them toward fewer mistakes and more contributions.

For example: if I view Bobby’s actions with a Flaws Lens, I see his actions as selfish and impatient. “Can’t he understand it’s not his turn?” If I view Johnny’s actions with a Flaws Lens, I see his actions as meek. “Doesn’t he want to get back in the game?”

From this viewpoint, I need the Bobby and Johnny to be less of themselves, not more. “Be less selfish… be less cooperative… etc.” It’s a difficult position to counsel a player from.

However, when you view an athlete with a Strength Lens, your guidance connects to their more fundamental traits. Bobby wants to be out there, impacting the game when it matters most. But if he wants to be able to come through in a big moment, he needs teammates out there with him. Taking his voice off the court at certain times will allow others to grow. Then, when he’s back in the game, the energy will be even higher. Johnny values supporting his teammates. But he can learn to understand that part of supporting his teammates is stepping forward and stepping up on the court, not just from the sidelines.

Communicate Strengths

When players are on your team, or even better, before they come on your team (if you have the ability to recruit), a good question to ask is: “what are your strengths?” Put it another way:

When it’s 23-23 in our biggest match of the year, how are you helping us win? What might you do in that moment on the court? What might you do off the court? What did were you doing in practice that impacted that moment?

Most players will respond with… blank stares. Most people don’t have a clear idea of their strengths and they haven’t spent much time developing them. They’re hoping to just not screw up enough to survive. But your players need to spend time on this! Spend time reflecting on this. Players might need to write down 1 or 2 traits, or a couple sentences describing themselves or answering the above prompt. They need to be able to stand up tall and tell it to you. And ultimately, they need to be able to stand in front of their teammates and say it.

There’s all sorts of ways to help a team win.

When it’s 23-23, I’m never going to let a ball hit the floor. I’ll run through a wall before I let anything drop on our side. You can all count on me for that.

My strength is composure. I don’t always get too hyped up on the court, but I also don’t let myself get down. I’ll keep that steady presence out there, no matter what the situation.

I’m going to really embody hard work for our team. We know that we can’t win big games without preparing for it, and I’m going to lead that effort. If I practice every day like it’s a championship match, that’s going to help us all come through when it matters most.

Your players will almost never get there on their own, but imagine the power of a team of 12 players that can stand up in front of each other and communicate their individual strengths in that way.

In the next article, we’ll talk about how to help athletes find their strengths using a powerful MI tool: affirmations.