Summer School Part 4

Results > Process

If you have to beg players to trust your process, maybe your process sucks.

People love The Process.

Focus on process, not results.

Trust the process.

It’s all about the process.

Maybe.

You’ll hear it in every sport, at every level. High school basketball teams with a losing record say they’re “trusting the process.” College coaches reference “long-term development” after another disappointing finish. Even professional teams…

…. yeah.

And to be fair—it’s not wrong. Process matters. We don’t want to chase short-term results at the cost of long-term growth. But I think that’s a false dichotomy. I’d argue this:

Your process only matters if it actually leads to better results.

If your process doesn’t produce better athletes—more skilled, more adaptable, more game-effective—then what exactly are you asking your athletes to trust?

Process Worship

I see this sometimes in coach-to-coach conversations. A team struggles. A player regresses. A certain technique or tactic just isn’t clicking. The coach's fallback?

“We just need to trust the process.”

But here’s the thing: players trust results. They trust what they feel. What they see. What helps them win rallies and beat blockers and dig balls that used to drop.

So when coaches keep pushing a method that isn’t working—and ask players to ignore their own feedback loop—what we’re really asking for is faith, not feedback. We’re teaching them to override their own perception. To defer judgment. To disconnect from their own performance. But the results should guide the process. The results are the north-star and coaches forget that at their peril.

In Summer School Part 1, I talked about self-organization (and some limitations) and how players learn by solving problems, not memorizing solutions. In Part 2, I introduced the spectrum from Direct Instruction to Guided Discovery to Mutual Exploration. In Part 3, I pointed out that players aren’t blank slates—they bring learning baggage with them, and we need to coach the actual athlete, not the hypothetical one.

Some of you might be thinking I’m leading you toward a model that emphasizes coach control. I’m not. I mean, if it works, I’m fine with the coach dictating the play, but it’s got to work. For instance, with younger setters, I specifically define a preferred release in Rotation 1. But I do so because:

1. It’s a simple move that can be specifically defined in a short explanation.

2. It’s a move that is relatively low in intrinsic feedback — players often can’t feel the difference between a mediocre release and a good one.

3. Almost every setter who doesn’t effectively release in Rotation 1 (And it’s many of them!) will see an immediate improvement after being directly coached on their release.

But not everything is like that. In fact, most things in coaching aren’t. So now we need a Performance-Process Loop.

Observe → Adjust → Refine

I’ve written about the DDCDD loop. That’s what happens between you and the athlete. But now let’s consider the other loop that’s going on in your own head. You coach an athlete. You observe what happens. If it’s working, you keep going. If it’s not, you tweak it. That’s not abandoning your process. That’s what your process should be.

(And note that “coaching an athlete” could be feedback, but it also could be how you design a drill, how you structure practice, where you ask them to stand in serve receive, etc… cueing and feedback provide easy examples to discuss, but I’m really asking for self-reflection about the totality of how an athlete is coached.)

Let’s say you’re cueing an athlete’s armswing. You “know” that athletes need to get their elbow up. (Wait… do you?) So you cue them on that a bunch. Over the next month their hitting velocity doesn’t budge.

You can’t write that off.

You can’t just say “trust the process” and assume it’ll bounce back. Maybe it will. Maybe there’s a short-term dip before long-term gain. But maybe—just maybe—your cue doesn’t work for that athlete. (If you’re coaching hitters to get their elbow up, this will be the case a lot…)

You don’t get bonus points for sticking with a bad process. If you’re serious about coaching, you adapt.

This is exactly what I talked about in Goal–Intention–Cue. Coaching is a three-step interaction:

• What are we trying to do?

• What do you want to feel as you’re performing the skill?

• What language helps that happen?

If that last piece isn’t creating better outcomes, it’s not the athlete’s fault for not trusting you. It’s your job to pick a better cue. (Or design a better drill, etc, etc)

Elite Athletes Are Sensory Masters

This is one of the core messages from Rob Gray in How We Learn to Move.

Elite performers aren’t just skilled. They’re tuned in. They know what the movement feels like, they read the play before it happens, and they calibrate faster than anyone else. We love all that. And that’s developed by some combination of developed skill and innate talent at observing their effects on their environment.

And that doesn’t happen through coach-led instruction alone. It happens through feedback-rich environments. Through movement exploration. Through self-assessment. Through cues that direct attention externally and invite adjustment, not impose correction.

When we talk a lot about process over outcome, we sometimes accidentally shut down the very thing that makes athletes elite: their ability to notice, react, and self-modify. This is partly why I “invented”¹ Goldilocks Method. These contrast drills help players explore the edges of technique—not just grind reps at the “correct” version.

So maybe I was being a bit polemical when I say Results > Process. If you’re doing the Process right, it’s a Performance - Process Loop where they inform each other.

“Trust the Process” Undermines Autonomy

Here’s another angle: asking players to “trust the process” can lower their sense of agency.

I wrote in Affirmations that