More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“There’s not much we don’t orchestrate.” No Unimportant Details
“A mantra around here is ‘if anything matters, everything matters.’”
“Talent doesn’t and won’t ever be the factor that sets you apart. When you are at the Final Four, everyone is talented, everyone can play. There needs to be another factor that sets you apart. For us, it is being detailed in all aspects of our lives. “It means eating healthy food, because that’s what’s better for the cause. It means getting in my run even though it’s hot outside, because my team is worth it. It means getting my homework done because we have a night game or we’ll be traveling for NCAA’s. It means notifying our professors that we won’t be in class because of our away game. It
...more
“There are things we can control and things that we can’t. I can’t control whether we go to another Final Four or whether we win another National Championship. Soccer’s a funny game. You can dominate and lose 1-0.”
“What we can do is cling to the principles that Dave provided us and that got us where we are today.”
There are no unimportant details. We do things a certain way for a reason. Little things make big things happen.
“Today’s principle is…”
“Coach often shares something with us from books he’s reading or emails he’s getting, always reminding us of the themes—especially
Frey has even gone so far as to ask soccer alumnae to write letters to the current team about what they miss most, something
Leadership expert John Kotter, from Harvard Business School, popularized the notion that most leaders under-communicate their vision by a factor of ten.
Growing any type of relationship requires time. There’s no shortcut.
“I just agonize over practice,” he reveals, more expressively than usual. “Rarely does it just come. I’ll spend two hours at night and I’m embarrassed to say sometimes I get stuck at work and I’ll just lose a day in trying to come up with a practice. You can’t function doing this very often, but I wrestle with it. It’s hard.”
Rather, the goal, as we’ll unpack more fully in Discipline 5, is to train in a way that actually affects game day performance.
“The coaching staff is at the field early and has everything laid out. We have a plan on paper regarding who’s going to be in what group for certain drills. We set up our cones straight. We make sure we have enough balls. All coaches know what their responsibilities are for a given practice. Guys jog in for their water and jog back out and we stay on the time schedule. We never come to the end of a week saying ‘weren’t we going to work on this?’ It all gets done because we planned it out ahead of time.” They even think through the ebbs and flows of the practice, compensating for the energy and
...more
“Guys have limited focus after a day of classes, so we stay on top of this or we may start to lose them. We often design the last part of practice to keep their interest and focus.”
Every minute of practice matters. And I’ve been able to convince our teams of that, too.”
“I’m very intentional about this,” says Coach Frey. “I have some key points I want to make and I write them down. I only talk to them for five or ten minutes before a game, but I want to trip their trigger.”
It often requires more preparation to speak persuasively for five minutes than it does for 15 or 20 minutes. In the same way that great teachers distinguish themselves by preparation that exceeds their peers, these coaches also invest the necessary time to choreograph their game day communication.
I’m not asking you to be Pele; I’m not asking you to be perfect. I’m asking you to give your best at all times.
Some leaders don’t, though, succumbing to the temptation to accommodate mediocrity.
Addressing under-performance, especially when it might only be “two percent of going through the motions,” risks relationships. It risks the leader’s popularity. It makes everyone uncomfortable. More than that, it’s arduous, says Brandt: “Confronting the human tendency to be comfortably mediocre is exhausting. It’s a battle in leadership.” A battle that Brandt unfailingly chooses to engage, as we’ll see throughout the book. The Coach pushes people toward their full potential, without regard for his personal reputati...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Why? Because at Messiah, you’ll find coaches who are never soft on players going through the motions.
“For the most part, this is all very intentional, the management of these relationships and the dynamic between me and the team. I’m relational, but clearly in charge”
Brandt, citing one of his role models. “Do I become more compassionate by being less results-driven? No. Balance is not the answer. A leader has to be both.” Intentionally.
Nothing happens by chance in these programs. Coaches never just hope for the best.
It’s practically an obsession; his mind never stops.
“I’m doing my gardening at home thinking ‘what if we did this?’ Almost every moment of my day I’m thinking about this team.”
This is what it takes to be the best, leaders who are tireless and tenacious.
A fiercely competitive spirit AND selfless love
The hardest working team AND the most technical team • Champions heart AND humble spirit • Driven individuals AND selfless teammates • Dare greatly AND the courage to fail • Goal: to be a champion AND being a champion is not our purpose
“We want to be an extremely technical team and an extremely tough team,”
“we tightened up standards in every area: on the field, off the field, maturity, type of kid. On the field I was looking for a kid who fit our playing vision and off the field I valued a kid with a great heart and a high level of maturity. He was going to buy-in, work hard, be selfless, have no element of attitude or ego whatsoever.”
Set the quality standard exceedingly high; prioritize character, insisting on a humble, team-first attitude; communicate these criteria unashamedly; don’t settle for what you don’t want; and achieve critical mass so teammates will
sharpen one another. There is simply no substitute for having the right people, and contrary to what we might think, there may be no tradeoff involved in getting them.
A risk he chose to take, consistent with his entire modus operandi coming in the door—one that, in the end, seemed to pay real dividends as it enabled the coaching staff to maintain a single focus. We’ll see the upshot of that in a minute, but if I may, there’s another important leadership lesson here: simplify. If you’re being spread too thinly, then focus your resources to do fewer things with more excellence. There’s a second lesson as well, in particular for new leaders: stand firm. Be courageous and make the gutsy calls. There will be longstanding elements of your system that need to
...more
The drivers of camp growth have not been fun drills and low prices. They’ve been a high-level of training and a strong brand—and a significant investment of time on the part of the leader.
I wanted everything that had our name on it—this is business and branding, of course—to be phenomenal, to exude excellence. So camps have been a big piece of the PR, the public image of our program. It was very important to me that if it said Messiah soccer, it was special.” ______________________
“Whoever said Christians can’t be competitive?”
Discipline 3). The other secret of success, though, as Overholt indicated, is that everyone expends maximum effort because they want to do their very best for the team. Because of their close relationships. Because of the camaraderie. Because of their team chemistry.
“Team chemistry is: • the ability of the players to get along with one another, to work smoothly and unselfishly under the leadership of the coaching staff. • each player’s recognition of the specific role that he or she has in the team approach. • mutual feelings of loyalty and empathy for one another. • the ability of the players to anticipate one another’s moves and to blend their efforts into the team pattern. • a strong sense of team identity coupled with total commitment to the program and coaching staff.”
“Relationships are the foundation of a team. You can never invest too much care and time in a teammate.”
“When you don’t have strong relationships, you don’t necessarily want to bleed for that guy.”
“We play for each other. If you can’t find the motivation from yourself, look at the girl next to you and know she is busting her butt for everyone … We do not want to let each other down, which goes back to being best friends. Friends don’t want to disappoint each other.”
hassle. “We do some scheduled things together,” says Frey, “like we’ll get together at the house once a month to have some fun, maybe compete or just hang out (most recently, they’ve started calling it “FREYday night”).
“Coach’s email will simply say this is what we’re doing, you’ve got to be there and if you can’t, come talk to me.
FFF may be the most important way that Messiah cultivates chemistry, but it is far from the only way. Another essential habit for both the men’s and women’s program is to be proactive about minimizing conflict.
“mean no offense, take no offense.”
“What happens at practice stays at practice. We’re not each other’s friends at practice, but as soon as we step off the field, that’s the first thing we are.
visit, I rely a lot on what my guys say about a recruit. ‘Did you like this guy? Is he immature? Did he talk about himself the whole time?’”
“It began the second I committed to the team as a senior in high school. My future teammates started sending me emails and Facebook messages telling me how excited they were I was on
