Great book for parents and coaches. "Every moment matter" - by John O'Sallivan.
I highly recommend the book to all coaches and parents. Main idea for me from the book is that sport should be fun on the first place and it is more about person, rather than sport itself.
I’m outlining below my highlights and notes from the book - which was great read full of wisdom in coaching, with practical examples from soccer.
If you won’t read the book or at least the highlights below (more than 50), read and think over this one quote:
“If you try to do free play to improve and get better, it will not work,” says Kroeten. “It can only be for one reason, and that is enjoyment. “
Ted from the author with some key ideas - John O’Sallivan - I love watching you play!
1. Key lessons of the euthor outlined in the book:
- Lesson 1: “To Be a Better Coach, Be a Better You” Do the Inner Work First
- Lesson 2: “You coach a child, not a sport.”
- Lesson 3 “The Goal Is to Win; The Purpose Is Something Much Deeper” Pursue a Higher Purpose than Winning
- Lesson 4 “You Can’t Practice in the ‘Kind’ World if You Compete in a ‘Wicked’ One Turn Technique into Skill and Create an Effective Learning Environment
- Lesson 5 “Great on Paper, S#!% on Grass” Build an Engaging and Effective Practice
- Lesson 6 “Win the Day” Don’t Show Up to Win; Show Up to Compete
- Lesson 7 “Make Your Athletes Feel Invaluable, Even if They Are Not the Most Valuable” Create a Positive, Inclusive Environment
- Lesson 8 “Women Tend to Weigh the Odds; Men Tend to Ignore Them” Understand the Difference between Coaching Boys and Coaching Girls
- Lesson 9 “As Many as Possible, as Long as Possible, in the Best Environment Possible” Identify and Develop Talent, Not Simply Maturity
- Lesson 10 “Most Sports Are Played on a Five-Inch Field” Succeed in the Outer Game by Winning the Inner Game
- Lesson 11 “Some Parents Are Crazy, but Most Are Just Stressed” Effectively Engage Your Athletes’ Parents
- Lesson 12 “Don’t Take Your Culture for Granted” Establish Your Team’s DNA
- Lesson 13 “Performance Is a Behavior, Not an Outcome” Establish Standards to Drive Excellence in Your Program
- Lesson 14 “You Are Enough!” Help Your Athletes Overcome Fear, Stress, and Anxiety
- Lesson 15 “Trust Is Like the Air We Breathe” Build High-Trust Teams
- Lesson 16 “The Rule of One” Create Extraordinary Moments for Your Athletes
- Lesson 17 “Just Because You’re a Good Parent Doesn’t Mean You’re Going to Be a Good Coach/Parent” Keeping It Fair When Coaching Your Own Child
2. About the great need of coaching competence for everyone being with children: “At three o’clock, the needs of the child do not change, yet we often turn them over to well-intentioned adults with little-to-no training in child development, education, or psychology—not even a basic understanding of what the child in front of them needs. Often, their only qualification is that they are available. Yet when children are coached by an untrained volunteer, 26 percent of them do not return the following year (as opposed to a 5 percent dropout rate for children who play for trained coaches).”
3. Amanda Visek of George Washington University discovered that the top five qualities children want in their coach are as follows:
4. The four parts are based upon four important questions all coaches must ask themselves. They were first written about in my favorite coaching book, InSideOut Coaching by Joe Ehrmann. The four sections are as follows:
5. We don’t get to choose which things stick and which ones they forget, so in everything we say and do, we must be intentional.
6. The kost important question to ask yourself: “What are the players going to feel when they walk into your building?”
7. As a coach you have to clearly define and stick to your core values - Carroll gave him a homework assignment: “When you get back to your hotel tonight, write down ten things that are important to you. What are the most important things to you, personally, in your life? When you come back tomorrow, we are going to narrow down those ten things to four. Those four principles represent you as a human being.”
8. “It’s what matters to you because, ultimately, your values have to be reflected in the way you coach. That’s what makes it authentic. And if you try to use somebody else’s values, the players will see right through you.”
9. Your team and your program should be a reflection of you. Do the inner work first and get to know your why.
10. To be a better coach, you have got to be a better you. —Joe Ehrmann
11. The most powerful leadership tool we all have is our own example. —John Wooden
12. Four things to get to know and develop you as a coach:
- The definition of quality coaching and why self-awareness is a key component
- The difference between reacting and responding to situations
- The tool I use to help coaches and teams understand how they react so that they can train themselves to respond
- A simple exercise to develop your coaching purpose statement
13. Quality coaching is the consistent application of integrated professional, interpersonal, and intrapersonal knowledge to improve improve athletes’ competence, confidence, connection, and character in specific coaching contexts.
14. The Quality Coaching Framework takes that much further and charges coaches with taking a 4Cs approach to athlete outcomes:
- Competence: refining the technical, tactical, and sport-specific performance elements
- Confidence: developing an athlete’s self-belief and self-worth, as well as their resilience and mental toughness
- Connection: building social bonds between teammates, coaches, and support staff
- Character: developing the moral character of athletes—items such as empathy, respect, and integrity—so that athletes are also good role models
15. Don’t react! Respond. Event plus respond equals Outcome. (E+R=O)
16. Equilibria has four basic E-Colors that describe different personality tendencies (www.EquilibriaInSports.com):
17. Sample coaching statements:
18. The athlete-centered coach allows her athletes to discover solutions, to take notice of their environments, and perhaps even come up with solutions that the coach herself did not see.
19. Good student survey question: “One thing I wish my coaches knew about me that would help them coach me better is…” or “How can I be better for you?”
20. “The Goal Is to Win; The Purpose Is Something Much Deeper” Pursue a Higher Purpose than Winning
21. The goal is to win. We play, plan, and prepare to win every game that we put kids in, but that’s not the purpose. The purpose is something much deeper; it’s the reason why the game exists, which is the human growth and development of students and connecting them to caring adults in their learning community. Without the awareness and without an understanding of the deeper purpose, the default is automatically going to be, “Did you win or did you lose?” —Jody Redman
22. “Great leaders and teams are outcome aware but purpose and process driven.” Erin Quinn
23. If at the end of your career all you can say is, “I was a National Champion, and we won a lot of games,” then I’d say it wasn’t worth the time or energy. But if you can look back and say, “I learned a lot about myself. I did things I never thought possible, both physically and psychologically. I made the most important and lasting friendships of my life. I’ve learned that helping others and seeing them succeed at something is better than it happening to me,” then it is, without question, worth all that you do.
24. Performance vs. Moral Charachter - Sport naturally develops what we might call performance character traits. These are traits such as grit, resilience, and self-discipline. These are what researchers call “willing values,” the mental, emotional, and behavioral attributes that drive performance in an achievement activity.
25. There is another type of character, though, which we refer to as moral character. These are the traits needed for ethical behavior and functioning within a society, such as integrity, respect, and caring.
26. Coaches need to stop seeing themselves as transmitters of information and start seeing themselves as architects of an optimal learning environment. —Dr. Joe Baker
27. “You Can’t Practice in the ‘Kind’ World if You Compete in a ‘Wicked’ One Turn Technique into Skill and Create an Effective Learning Environment. I realize some people might argue semantics here, so here is how I define these terms: a technique is the ability to perform a physical task while a skill is the ability to deploy it in the competition environment.
28. Context isn’t noise; it’s a signal. —Andrew Wilson
29. Ask that coach, “Did you have a good practice today?” and he will likely say, “Yes, those kids got five hundred touches, and we practiced dribbling, passing, and shooting.” Ask the parents eagerly observing, and they might feel the same: “It was great! These kids really need those touches because in the game, they cannot dribble, pass, or shoot.” I used to think that as well. Today I would ask those parents and coaches a better question: “How many decisions did they make today?”
30. Transfer is the ability of a learner to successfully apply the behaviors, knowledge, and skills acquired in a practice environment to the competition. If the training environment does not mimic those game conditions or if it poses decisions and scenarios that are not encountered in a game, then transfer does not occur.
31. The more practice represents the competition environment, the more likely it is that skills will transfer.
32. Keith Davids, Will Roberts, and Daniel Newcombe have recently released a new book titled The Constraints-Led Approach: Principles for Sports Coaching and Practice Design, which is an overview of this approach. In the future, they plan to release sport-specific books that will help coaches design and implement better practices.
33. How to Build a Sticky Learning Environment
- Interleaving. Interleaved training mixes and matches various techniques and skills, usually in a game-conditioned setting. Many practitioners call it “repetition without repetition.” Interleave instead of mass our practices. Do not replicate the same technical activity fifty times in a row. Instead, mix and match, add defenders, direction, and different constraints that compel athletes to focus—not go to autopilot mode.
- Spacing. The basic concept is this: after learning a new skill or idea, learners should give themselves time to forget so that the brain, when presented with this material in the future, must struggle to recall the skills it learned previously. In general, though, the best time to reintroduce a topic is right at the point where they are about to forget it.
- Desirable Difficulties. Interleaving your practices and spacing them out are successful learning strategies because they produce what researcher Robert Bjork calls “desirable difficulties.” The term refers to learning a task with a considerable but not overwhelming amount of struggle. In other words, we want to make learning more challenging, more frustrating, and slower in the short term in exchange for long-term gains. When they achieve one level of mastery, we must immediately up the ante and ask them to do a bit more. This type of teaching can be frustrating for athletes as they never seem to actually “get it” in practice. It can be frustrating for parents watching their kids struggle. Yet, the research demonstrates it is far more effective than allowing them to repeatedly accomplish a technique or concept they have already mastered.
- Quizzing. The most obvious way they are quizzed is within competition. This is the opportunity for an athlete to demonstrate what he has learned well and what still needs work. That is why within competition it is important for coaches not to joystick their players around the field or court. It is OK to ask them questions. “What do you see? Where else could you be?” But if all you are doing is telling, you are giving them the answers to the quiz. You are not forcing them to recall the material you covered in practice.
34. Great coaches don’t steal the reps from their athletes, just like great spotters do not steal the reps from someone doing squats in the weight room. Take a step back, allow your athletes to succeed or fail, and let each of their reps become teachable moments. Again, this is not to say there is never a time to coach from the sidelines, but choose your timing and your words wisely.
35. Refrain from stealing the reps from our athletes. Be patient; let them try and fail; teach them to embrace the struggle; and remind them any skill can be improved given enough time.
36. Ask Them Three Great Learning Questions Post-practice or competition, there are three questions that are always appropriate and helpful in framing a balanced assessment of the performance and where to go next:
37. Show them where to look, not what to see. —John Kessel
38. “If you try to do free play to improve and get better, it will not work,” says Kroeten. “It can only be for one reason, and that is enjoyment. You have to let go of performance in order to really grow from play, and once you do that, when you go into a performance, you do very well. In that performance you are now playing the game instead of fighting or working the game.” Our society has devalued play to such an extent that many children no longer value it anymore. This is incredibly sad. I meet many children who struggle to organize a pick-up game or select teams, set up a game, and play. I have tried to run “Free-Play Fridays” at different organizations, and attendance is generally poor. If I run “Skill-Development Fridays,” they are packed. We have lost sight of the tremendous value of free play, and we need more situations where coaches provide a safe environment but then step back and let the kids enjoy themselves. We need more organizations to educate their parents on the value of these environments. We need fluency before accuracy, and that comes through free play.
39. Golden Thread advises coaches that each session contain the following five elements:
40. In order to prepare for both the present and the future of the game, the England Rugby Union staff identified five characteristics that every player should possess and every coach should work to develop:
41. Regardless of how the sport evolves, Fletcher and Earnshaw are convinced that players who possess the qualities outlined in CARDS will be prepared for the game. They will be problem solvers, capable of doing the unexpected, fearless, and resilient in the face of adversity. They will be adaptable when tactics and strategy change and capable of adjusting to an opponent during a match. “The CARDS approach,” says Fletcher, “gives every conversation about player development an anchor.”
42. Start a Coaching Journal with All of Your SessionsUse your journal to map development and refer back to it to make sure you have covered relevant topics and to remember how your athletes responded to those sessions. My training journals are some of the most effective tools I have in player development.
- How do we want to play?
- What are my learning objectives for this session to build toward how we want to play?
- What activities do I need to use to accomplish this?
- How can I organize it and teach it so my players will love it?
- How can I integrate our team values into this session so I can tie it to our higher purpose?
45. Grab Some Coaching Challenge Cards from the Magic Academy (www.themagicacademy.co.uk/)
46. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions: they have a winning standard of performance before they are winners. —Bill Walsh
47. To “win the day”, we will cover three basic principles:
48. Those who show up to win are:
49. Showing up to win is not a performance enhancer. It harms your performance because you lose sight of the process. On the other hand, showing up to compete means a player is
50. Showing up to compete is the performance enhancer. It increases confidence because you have turned all your attention onto the things you control and off those things you cannot control. And the more often you show up to compete, the more marginal gains you make.
51. Win the Day. The “never, nevers” are as follows:
- Never give up, no matter what the score or situation.
- Never lose confidence by focusing on outcomes.
- Focus on controllables instead.
- Never let an opponent defeat your spirit, identity, or culture.
- Never be afraid of mistakes or losing as they are the greatest teachers.
- Never try to go too big; instead, do all the little things well over and over.
- Never fail to respond to a mistake with IPR (immediate, positive response).
- Never whine or create drama unnecessarily.
52. Three ways coaches can make athletes feel valued (”catch them being good” Tony DiCicco):
53. As sport scientist Joe Baker from York University says, the three critical ingredients of long-term sport participation are autonomy, enjoyment, and intrinsic motivation.
54. Men/Women coaching considerations:
55. Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course–the distance between your ears. —Bobby Jones
56. Best techniques to win the inner game
57. You can help simply by learning to praise your athletes for their effort, not their ability. It’s not about winning and losing; it is about winning and learning.
58. Life is not a fairytale, and sometimes you don’t win when you do everything right. Most important, though, we did not lose before the whistle even blew. We wrote our own story and constructed our own narrative.
59. “Positive self-talk,” writes psychologist Gregory Jantz, “is not self-deception. Positive self-talk is about recognizing the truth in situations and in yourself. One of the fundamental truths is that you will make mistakes. To expect perfection in yourself or anyone else is unrealistic. To expect no difficulties in life, whether through your own actions or sheer circumstances, is also unrealistic. When negative events or mistakes happen, positive self-talk seeks to bring the positive out of the negative to help you do better, go further, or just keep moving forward.” Jantz recommends the following exercise to his patients, and I think it works great with athletes as well: Write down some of the negative messages you tell yourself that affect your performance. Be specific and include names of people who contribute to that message. Take a moment and intentionally find a positive truth that counteracts each of those negative messages. These may not come quickly, but take the time needed to counteract each one. Teach yourself to make that your mantra when the negative thought pops into your head. As Jantz writes, “You may have a negative message that replays in your head every time you make a mistake. As a child you have been told, ‘You’ll never amount to anything’ or ‘You can’t do anything right.’ When you make a mistake—and you will because we all do—you can choose to overwrite that message with a positive one, such as ‘I choose to accept and grow from my mistake’ or ‘As I learn from my mistakes, I am becoming a better person.’ During this exercise, mistakes become opportunities to replace negative views of who you are with positive options for personal enhancement.”4 In other words, help ensure that the message your athletes hear the most is one that is affirming, positive, and hopeful.
60. Some parents are crazy, but most are just stressed, and we have to stop using the bad parents as an excuse not to engage with all the good ones. —Skye Eddy Bruce
61. “Children become the messages they hear the most.” - that is why the parents are important
62. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. —Maya Angelou
64. When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before. —Jacob Riis
65. Your values and shared purpose are important when you are winning, but they are even more important when you are losing. They tell you that you are on the right track. They keep you focused on the process and the controllables. And they give you a better way to determine if you are progressing than simply looking at the scoreboard.
66. “There is a big saying in the team, ‘You don’t own the jersey; you’re just the body in the jersey at the time.’ It’s your job to continue the legacy and add to it when you get your opportunity.”
67. There is a huge performance difference between playing to win and playing not to lose, and one of the most important things we can do as a coach is to help our athletes reappraise their stress and anxiety as a challenge rather than as a threat.
66. Remember Dan Coyle’s advice regarding the four most important words a leader can say? “I screwed that up.”
67. Every athlete is one relationship away from a successful life. —Joe Ehrmann
68. “John, get out of my classroom,” he said, staring at me with piercing eyes. “You can come back when you decide to put forth the effort to develop the gift you have been given to write. Because you are a great writer! Now, get out!”
69. “Do you really want to be living your life so that others will approve of you?”
Many thanks to author John O’Sallivan - the ideas from the book are invaluable.
You can see more reviews on the book on Goodreads.