I don’t know anybody who has ever achieved anything that didn’t question what they were doing. It’s what makes responsible people responsible. Self-assessment provides a compass that can keep you outta the swamp. In 1966, I found myself in the middle of the Okefenokee. Surprising in that my football teams a couple years earlier had run a string to 20-0.
The ’66 season that was to be . . . never was. The ticker tape parade took place on foreign soil. I was up to my neck in crocodiles and all of them knew my name.
It was during this period I started to have marital problems. I knew I was working too late. My nerves were frayed. I talked with an edge. Stress had stolen my smile. One day the papers arrived. Betty wanted a divorce. I was despondent. I thought we could work it out but I didn’t know the depth of the problem. A while later we showed up in front of the judge. His frown could sour sugar. He read the decree. As he looked at my wife you could see the sympathy in his eyes. He looked at me with a scowl.
“I’m in agreement with Betty, Bill. Any coach who can’t win “The Big One” doesn’t deserve a wife.” I looked at Betty and asked her to give me one more chance. Her smile told me she would.
I wanted to blame someone else. I thought fate had done me wrong. And then one day I looked in the mirror. It didn’t help. A mirror only reflects what’s on the outside. I knew to fix the situation I had to get at the core of who I was. Failure may not be fatal but it sure hurts. I wanted the pain to go away. I figured there were two things I could do—placate my ego with excuses or fix the problem. I took the less painful route.
I have to confess. I was surprised by my approach. I decided to open my mind. Math teachers are known for precision. Science centers on being exact. There is no maybe in two plus two. Coaching is a different issue. Alternatives abound. Could it be what made me a digital wizard hindered me as a coach?
I pulled out a pad and began my search for the Holy Grail. I began to write down everything that came to mind. Nothing was off limits. At the top I had headings. Coach, Leader, Teacher, Parent, Priest. On the side I had Actions. In the middle, Reactions. I had arrows and numbers. Within minutes the page was filled. On to page two. More scribbling. More notes. Successes. Failures. Examples. Role Models. Input. Output. My mind raced. On to page three. Two days later I’d filled the pad. I went to the fridge and grabbed a Coke. I lit a fire and sat down. I wasn’t getting up until I figured out what went wrong.
As I looked at the chicken scratch and tried to find meaning amidst the mess, I went into a state of shock. I couldn’t believe it. The words jumped off the page. No, it can’t be true. Yes it is, I concluded. I’m not as dumb as I thought. And then I remembered. I didn’t get the job because I’d been a loser. I scrutinized my past. It looked pretty good. Two years earlier the Mayor asked to bronze my whistle. Miss Alexandria wanted to drink Gatorade from my cleats. I was feeling better.
I gazed at the words and found meaning everywhere. Sure, fate had not been kind, but I’d also made mistakes. The good news was they could be fixed. With some modifications and a little luck, Yoast would be back. Glory Hallelujah.
If you didn’t know it, your responsibility as a coach, or parent, or priest, or teacher is no different than any leader. Intuitively, I’ve always known that leadership played a role in achievement. The luckiest kids are those that get to grow up under leadership. From the very beginning they are directed, counseled, nurtured, and guided by someone who cares. They’re encouraged to extend themselves. They are put in situations where there is an upside and downside and asked to perform. They’re challenged to excel. More often than not they do. As a result, confidence grows. And the confidence that comes from testing yourself and winning manifests itself in a variety of ways—none more important than the creation of energy. People that are well led are filled with energy. They are excited, enthusiastic, and optimistic. Children that are blessed by leadership know that anything is attainable.
As young men and women came into my life I could tell almost instantly which ones had a leader in their life and which ones didn’t. Kids that had been well led were up for anything. All I had to do was make a suggestion and they were after it.
On the other side of the coin, kids who had grown up without leadership were less open, less adaptive, and more hesitant. Coaching them is where I earned my pay. Making them better was when I felt the best.
Leadership at times can be overwhelming. There are many who think about leadership and see icons. They visualize countries on the march and armadas preparing to do battle. Some believe there isn’t anything small about leadership. I think they’re wrong.
Leadership has nothing to do with size or scope. Believe it or not most results start at the bottom and work their way up. The performance of a thousand little groups determines the performance of the parent. World War II was won with a lot of little teams shooting rifles. Great companies are made on the assembly line and in customer service. Forget to put the screw in the widget and it will be felt across the country. Five people answering the phone correctly are how reputations are built.
Most of the championships I’ve won did not come from anything notable. An undetected effort in the middle of the line sprung a running back free. One effort by one player made the difference and the rest was history.
So if you are thinking you have to come up with something profound think again. Think small and if things aren’t working out, think even smaller.
Little stuff counts.
There is a common thread that runs through every leadership action. All leaders have a goal and that is to produce results. Leadership involves doing something. Leadership involves accomplishing something.
Leaders are called many things and you can add catalyst to the list. Leaders are a catalyst for generating emotion because emotion is at the heart of elevating performance. Your MO as a leader may require that you be smart, aggressive, creative, humble, clever, disciplined, courageous, empathetic, or invisible. In a leader’s bag of tricks there are numerous tools to get people excited. Excitement creates energy and energy creates results.
One year while coaching track I had to place two runners in the top four to win the state meet. One of them, David Sullivan, had never run the 440. I knew he was a competitor. I went and told him I thought he could beat my ace 440 man, Jasper Kirk. He liked the sound of that. I went to my 440 guy and told him I couldn’t believe what I just heard. “What’s that’s coach?” he asked. “David just told me he could beat you in the 440 and he doesn’t even run the 440.” I could see the fire in his eyes. “Bring him on coach,” he replied. They finished one and two and we took the title. Who won? The team.
When people are well led they do amazing things. They do incredible things. They do unexplainable things. They will give their life for their leader and have no regrets. Examples abound.
If you are going to get your team to a higher level of accomplishment don’t hesitate to ask for more. Don’t be afraid to demand more. That’s your job. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t want to do better. I’ve never met anyone who didn’t appreciate the person who made them a success. Since the beginning people have responded to leadership but there are some things about leadership that the non-leader doesn’t understand.
♦ People liked to be led.
♦ They will decide who they will follow.
♦ Their effort sprouts from emotion.
In its simplest form, leadership is about looking out for someone else. The people that are following you aren’t dumb. They know, through your actions, whether their welfare is at the forefront of your thoughts. You can’t fake it. And when your followers determine you are doing right by them, they will do right by you. With leadership, dreams are fulfilled.
In 1966, none were. There were lots of reasons. The non-leader in me would like to point a finger but the leader in me accepts responsibility. It was my job to get it done and I didn’t. My guys wanted a championship. I gave them a black eye. As their leader I failed. End of story.
I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about leadership. I believe it is at the heart of performance. I didn’t always know that. When I first began coaching I read all the books, I memorized techniques, I focused on strategy. Tactics were my thing. My X-ing and O-ing was as good as it gets.
What I didn’t understand initially was that all of that meant nothing if I couldn’t get my players to elevate their effort.
I used to think leading was easy. I’ve changed my mind. If leading was easy we wouldn’t have political unrest, business debacles, and armed insurrection. If leading was easy, insolence would be passé, bad guys would be good and good guys would be better. If leading were easy I’d still have a wife.
Leading is not easy. Taking a group to a higher level has never been easy. Understanding how it happens is very easy. We all know that leadership has changed the world. I’ve never seen any situation in any environment that wasn’t made better with leadership and worse without it. Over the years I’ve wondered why people don’t lead. Given the link between leadership and success and non-leadership and failure, why wouldn’t anyone in a leadership position lead? I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a variety of factors—fear of failure, ignorance, apathy, and the burden that accompanies fulfilling expectation. Being asked to make a team victorious can be daunting.
People that follow you want to win. Victory has a nice ring. Thinking you may not be able to give it to them could make you hesitate. I read a quote once that I’ve never forgotten.
On the plains of hesitation lie the bones of countless millions, who at the dawn of victory chose to wait and in their waiting, died.
I’d like to give credit to whoever said that but I don’t know the name. I’d like to thank him because the words are accurate.
In leading others, action is what matters. Action is the catalyst. Thinking about something is fine. Talking about it is nice. But only through action will one of two things happen. You will fail or you will succeed. Either way, you win. Failure will make you smarter. Success will make you stronger. So when you act, there is always a benefit. It may not be immediate but then life is not three innings.
Over the years, I’ve encountered people who are slaves to the “what if” game. I believe those are the two laziest words around. If you are asking yourself, “what if” then it means you haven’t done anything.
If you have done something you will have your answer. You will know that what you did was right or wrong. I had great expectations for the 1966 Hammond season. Sure the talent on our squad had been cut in half but we still had the core of a team that went undefeated. In all the key positions I had guys who had performed. There was one guy I was a little worried about. He was my quarterback and a linebacker. I guess that said something about his personality. It wasn’t that he couldn’t play he just had an opinion about everything. He was the personification of the mouth that roared. Good for calling plays but no coach wants to be scolded by an eighteen year old.
It seemed every five minutes he was critiquing my bread and butter. “Come on coach,” he’d yell, “enough of this running stuff. Let’s put the ball in the air.” Periodically I’d let him elevate. The results were always the same. At sixty yards he would put a bullet on a receiver’s numbers. At forty yards he could knock ’em down. I was in agreement with my coaching staff that he had an arm but disagreed with them that we should employ it.
For a number of years my offense had served me well. It would again. I’d never been a passing coach. That was a different game. Throwing on first and ten was uncharted water and I didn’t want to go on the rocks. So I was afraid, afraid to change.
Because I believe that a willingness to change is so crucial to success, it demands comment.
Change: Doing what needs to be done under different circumstances.
In the course of getting down the road I never gave change much consideration. It was probably because I was too busy changing. I thought a lot about kids. I thought a lot about coaching. I never thought much about change. And I don’t know why, because my life has been a never-ending series of changes. At the age of thirty-six I had changed so much I sometimes wondered who I was. In the decade following my graduating from college I was on the move. I’m still on the move. I’m ready to reinvent myself again. At this stage I don’t know what that will be but I’m excited by the thought that in the not too distant future I know my life will become different. How? It doesn’t matter.
And so the first thing I would point out is that:
♦ Change is inevitable.
It is so understood that statement is a cliché. Whether it is by choice or by edict you will have to change in your life. Maybe you’ve never given change much thought. You might not realize how much change you’ve experienced. I suspect you’ve changed more than you realize. And more change is coming. Accept it because it is change that will deliver the unforeseen thrill.
You should also know that:
♦ Change comes unexpectedly.
There are those who believe change is essential and they are prepared to give it a kiss. What I’ve found though is that many of these people believe change arrives on the horizon riding a white horse and wearing a ten-gallon hat. You can’t miss it. Emblazoned across its chest are the letters C-H-A-N-G-E. It’s on its way. You have time to prepare. In reality, you open a door or turn a corner and there it is. “Hi,” it says. “Here we go.” And if you aren’t ready you may say no.
♦ Change is disruptive.
It’s supposed to be. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be change. Change is about mixing things up. Whether it is trouble-some is up to you. Recognize that in the disruption lies alternatives and solutions that will take you places you didn’t know existed.
Change is so necessary, so important, so life sustaining I’ve often wondered why so many people resist it. I’ve come to the conclusion that there are three reasons. Do they look familiar?
Apathy. Some people have been disengaged for so long their mind, their body, their spirit has atrophied. When the need for change comes they just aren’t interested.
Ignorance. People who don’t understand what to do usually do nothing.
Fear. Change is notorious for taking us out of our comfort zone. It interrupts our life. It forces us to be different. It mandates we operate with a new set of rules. That can be frightening. I don’t know too many people who don’t hesitate when they encounter something that scares them. But the difference between people who accomplish more and those that accomplish less lies in the recognition that fear is never rewarded. Overcoming it is.
Skiing is a great metaphor for life. Standing at the top of a double black diamond looking down a run filled with ice-encrusted moguls, you wonder what to do. The inclination is to sit back, go slow, and survive the event. The reality is, hesitation is seldom rewarded. In skiing, the answer to fear is force. The same thing applies to change. When change occurs you need to attack. Easier said than done. For people who have had little change, change is a big deal. I won’t tell you that it shouldn’t make you uncomfortable. It will. To this day change always grabs my gut but then when I think about what change has done for me, I’m ready to do it again.
Seventy percent of coaching is getting players properly placed where they can be most effective. I tried to avoid preconceived notions. A difficult thing. On the Titans we had a young man who was in full bloom at seventeen. At 6′5″, 240 lbs he was a moose. We thought we had the next Bubba Smith. We put him at defensive end. In a scrimmage with the Girl Scouts he got buried. What a surprise. We played another game and he got killed. I put him on the bench. A few weeks later I got a brainstorm. I decided to give him a try at tackle. The difference between a two or three point stance made all the difference. Why? It doesn’t matter. What is important is that the operative word that led to victory was change. He went on to become an All-American and one of the most recruited guys in the country.
In the course of getting to this point, my attitudes about things have undergone a number of changes. To this day I find myself evolving in all aspects of my life. Maybe Darwin had it correct. The survival of the species is predicated on its ability to adapt. Surprisingly I’ve become more flexible with age.
In part, my evolution started after reading a story by Arthur Conan Doyle. The title was A Study in Scarlet.
The main character, as you probably know, is Sherlock Holmes.
Let me paraphrase what happened. Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s assistant, was interested in why Sherlock had such a profound knowledge in matters related to crime but when it came to knowing things unrelated to crime, he was in the dark—a first-class dummy. Watson was confused. One day Holmes explained it to him. “I see my brain as an attic. I can store whatever I want. If I store too many things, when I go to look for something that is important, it will be more difficult to find.”
It made sense. At that point in my coaching career maybe I had too much in my attic. I’d read all the books. I had the facts. At least I thought I did. At the time I didn’t know that a lot of experts have a self-serving interest in their sermon. Maybe the real good stuff was not so good after all. For me, victories were becoming as hard to grasp as a feather on a windy day. So I examined the hypothesis. Were there things in my cerebral storage shed that were obstacles to progress? I concluded yes.
The next season, 1967, was greeted with hope and also a little skepticism. I was still recovering from the emotional shock of a losing season but my success in coaching track had helped rebuild my ego.
I didn’t have the hot shots from the previous year. This group was pretty much a team of untested unknowns. There was something about them though that made me feel good. My quarterback had graduated and my earplugs had been retired. The new guy that was going to spearhead the offense was a plump, unassuming sophomore named John O’Connor. He was a perfect example of the book and cover concept. Looking at him you suspected he was the most valuable player at Pizza Hut. John O’Connor wasn’t a cover boy but as an athletic talent he was terrific. And he could think. And he could throw. And he could kick. And he was quiet. Thank God he was quiet.
I started, with the help of my coaches, to evaluate my players. It didn’t take long to recognize that not only did I have a guy who could put the football down field but Bob Stumpf could catch it.
It was time to change. Opportunity was knocking. I opened the door and attacked. The air was filled with pigskin. The turnaround had begun. Our fans returned to the stands. On Friday night no one was watching ice dancing. The gridiron was back in vogue. A year later we won the Championship. Mistakenly, I got Coach of the Year.
The good times were punctuated on August 27, 1968, when my daughter Deidre was born. Not only was she a great kid but she also turned out to be a great athlete.
In those two years I redefined who I was—as coach, as a leader, as a human being. I learned that commitment transcended desire. Commitment had to be directed. Being committed in the wrong areas would do nothing. Commitment was not a salve or a tattoo. Commitment did not vanish with circumstance. Commitment was a force that resided within. Commitment dictated results. Commitment was at the core of excellence.
I also learned that loyalty sprouted from integrity and integrity is at the heart of a coach/player relationship. I learned so many things and I would need them all.