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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The number one piece of developing team chemistry is time. Everything else is a bumper sticker. The only way any of it works is time invested in people.
“Standard-Bearers”: Leadership Across the Whole Team “We talk about not just standards, but standard-bearers as well—guys who push the envelope.”
Bottom line: Do your best at everything, but be great at something that matters to
this team. Model it for your teammates. Raise the bar for everyone. Take on a role. Be a standard-bearer.
Everything we learn here emphasizes “team over individual” and putting others before ourselves.
“an eagerness to sacrifice personal interests or glory for the welfare of all.”
“I realized that our team’s culture, our group dynamics, and our mission and purpose would all be much more important … than how well we passed the ball.”19
“There is nothing more important—nothing—than organizational culture. It is everything and it can be amazing anywhere. And it is 100 percent under your control.”
They train in a way that genuinely makes a difference in games.
“Team agreements are things that the players must do or things that the players must do in a certain way … It’s not a choice. We agree it’s what’s going to happen.”
“team agreements,” claims Brandt, carry the connotation of collective purpose. They’re “oriented toward a vision of who we are,” leveraging social influence rather than authoritarian influence. They’re at the same time less heavy-handed than “rules” and more effective.
“Freedom within a framework,”
“Freedom becomes chaos without structure,”
“If you’re doing something in practice that doesn’t show up in the game, you’re wasting everybody’s time. Most coaches haven’t developed a system where positional play is so dictated, so they can’t train as well for what’s going to happen in the match.”
One thing we’ll notice is that Messiah practices are surprising short, considering the complexity of their system and caliber of their competition—about 90 to 105 minutes a day during the regular season. But every one of those minutes counts, explains Frey: “We’re right to the point, very intentional going from one drill to the next. Get it right and move on.”
“Many coaches do too many things in one practice. Or they try to focus on a few things but they don’t stay with that—like when they say they want the team to work on possession but then at the end of the drill they’re mad about the team’s finishing. I don’t have every practice down to the minute like (UCLA Coach John) Wooden did, but we’ll have only three or four different things we’re going to do in a given practice. Actually, four would be a lot.”
Drills and games that are inextricably linked to their Dutch style of play.
Overall, Messiah does not use a wide variety of drills. Instead, they tend to rely on a scalable set of exercises, starting with fundamentals, progressively adding new elements, and working them to perfection. Even today, Brandt says: “My collection of drills or exercises wouldn’t be that thick of a book. We have things that are purposeful and relate and that work. People are shocked that there’s not that much to it.” Repetition. It’s long been a keystone for Messiah soccer because, as Brandt says, it works. All-American Nick Thompson lived it for years. “I felt a big jump in my personal game
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“We don’t do anything without a purpose in practice. Everything we do in practice translates to the game. Everything is functional, so if you’re a right back, you’re spending time on what you need to do. Now, there are times when it’s general … but overall, we work really hard to make sure that how we train shows up during a game.”
Great leaders must be great teachers. Otherwise, few are influenced. Few follow. Skeptical? See how many you can name who are one but not the other.
Intensely Competitive Practices “Practice the way you play.”
On the men’s side, Josh Wood agrees: “As hard as I’ve been hit in a game, I’ve been hit harder in practice. And I’ve been more ticked off in practice than I ever have been in the game.
“If you leave practice feeling like it’s been a practice and not a game, then there’s a problem.”
Practice the way you play? Messiah ups the ante: Practice harder than you play.
Frey tells his girls it’s a choice. “Do I give in? Do I fight through it? That’s a mental toughness issue. We talk about fighting through it—choosing to fight through it—all the time because you’ve got to do what’s best for the team.”
“Mental toughness for me is your ability to focus on what you can control. If you start focusing on things you can’t control, you’re just soft because you can’t handle your world around you,
The psychological part of the game is an issue of inner excellence, of resiliency, of bringing your “A game” regardless of circumstances. It’s an issue of rejecting the pernicious self-talk that says you can’t succeed; an issue of setting aside your feelings to do what’s necessary and right.
Another advantage is that mentally-tough teams “finish strong.”
How to Become Mentally Tough The question, then, becomes is this trainable?
“You don’t have to lose to become mentally tough. … We can dictate and train this.”
“We separate act from feel.” Distinguish these two things. Set them apart, one from another. Do what you’re supposed to do regardless of what you want to do.
“We choose to be positive … Success is giving your best at all times, no matter the circumstances … We do the right things for the right reasons, all the time” (which is, in fact, a throwback line to the days of Layton Shoemaker). The point is that these teams have created a common and energizing language to keep the issue top of mind and universally understood. It’s memorable and it resonates. Then, they make a priority of communicating the principle often.
separate act from feel”—has
“Some players have difficulty separating their actions from their feelings, but if relationships are strong, you can talk about that. Corrective conversations are more available.”
Modeling by the leadership and by the upperclassmen also makes a difference. Brandt goes so far as to claim that it “might be the most important trait for a leader … Leaders can’t afford to act out their feelings, at least in most cases.”
Their role was to model the principle of separating act from feel, and they considered it an honor. Plus they did it really well—they were right back on the line with an eager face to do their best.
They saw that people do not have to be a slave to their feelings or their fatigue, but instead, that a person could choose to persevere.
It all became even more real when each athlete began to experience for themselves the next level of mental toughness.
“I’m in their ear almost every day with an email about mental toughness. But we’re also doing some training stuff
“We don’t take the easy way out and stop the treadmill when we’re tired,”
“There were guys who didn’t think they had a chance to make it but who did make it because of the encouragement. If they had done it by themselves, they would have hopped off: ‘I’m tired, I’m done.’ But the last thing you want to do is let your teammates down.” ______________________
covered in Discipline 4. Center forward Josh Wood claims that “nobody—nobody—misses a run. You are threatening your relationship with the team if you do. If someone has a questionable ailment, a teammate will ask:‘Are you really hurt?
People confront under-performance.”
It’s not about fitness for the fall season. It’s entirely about young men and women learning that many of their perceived limits are in fact self-imposed.
“finish strong.” How does that become a habit? By players experiencing it each day in practice. In drills and in small-sided games, for example, there’s not only an emphasis on scoring goals but also on scoring the last goal of the game.
“To us it’s important to get the last goal in every game of the season. A lot of times it doesn’t mean much on the scoreboard, but everyone wants to get that and we’ll talk about it afterward. There’s a mentality, a habit that gets created.”
“Doing it when it doesn’t matter carries over to the times when it does.”
“specific training” (training that increases a person’s productivity primarily in the organization that trained him) over and above the usefulness of “general training” (training that will increase a person’s productivity in any organization.)
They have a clear vision of what things should look like on the field and they use specific training to get there, focusing incessantly on what will work in their particular system.
That may seem like common sense, but it’s an uncommon practice.
