How To Take a Team from First-to-Worst

After two different head coaching stints, I was presented an opportunity to coach at a dream job. It was the same type of school I was currently at but had more resources, more stability, a much nicer campus, and nearly every key player was returning from the prior year’s Top-25 team. The coach had left to take a big-time Division I head coaching job and they wanted me to replace him.

When you listen to coaches speak at clinics and conferences, they are quick to outline what they’ve done to rebuild a bad program. Most stories present an example to follow or a cautionary tale. In that dream job, I took the program from first to worst. That’s right, I ruined that team in just one year.

Not only did we have one of the worst seasons in school history and a 16-win DECREASE but we also lost twice to the team that I had just left.

#Oops.

I wish I had repeated the above quote to myself every single day.?Despite having a tremendous amount of knowledge and knowing what “should” work, I wasn’t wise.

As a result, here is my cautionary tale that you can hopefully learn from. Each of these #Oops moments might not seem like much on the surface but each of them was a major stumbling block that kept me from connecting with the team.

1.) Kicking Team Out –?With a similar team the year before, I kicked them out of practice and wouldn’t let them back in the gym. My pre-planned strategy worked to perfection and that inspired team went on to play amazing in their next practice and game. I believed I had a very similar situation on my hands that first year and set my plan in motion. Not only did the team not beg to come back. Not only did they not work harder the next practice. Some of them went to the AD to complain. We can’t use a cookie-cutter approach with our coaching. Each team, each player, each situation is different. #Oops

2.) Travel Suits –?Most of the team had bought into servant leadership but our senior captain who also happened to be our leading returning scorer was slow to adjust. Our apparel company messed up and we didn’t have enough travel suits for everyone the first couple of weeks of school, so I made sure the freshman had the right sizes since they didn’t have any swag. We weren’t going to have any official travel or anything coming up that they all had to wear the same stuff. I just wanted to make sure the newcomers had some stuff to walk around campus. I didn’t talk with our captains ahead of time, but they went without. I just sprung it on them at a team meeting assuming they’d be okay with it because we had been talking so much about servant leadership lately. Nope. Our leading scorer made the comment (among many) that she had paid her dues and deserved to wear the new stuff first. She quit the next day. Her talent was hard to replace, and her friends left behind were not happy with me. #Oops.

3.) Junior Varsity –?One of the few negatives to the new job was that we had to have a JV program. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, so I let my assistant run that program. I definitely let my attitude show as I didn’t pay much attention to them and was somewhat dismissive of the team and its’ players. Even though I would talk about how everyone matters and that we are all a team, my actions were betraying my words. Many of the JV players were unhappy and since the team was very close, this ended up affecting the attitude of a number of varsity players, as well. This reminds me, as coaches, we need to pay attention to everyone on our bench. Those kids at the end next to the water cooler and athletic trainer have friends that are starters. They also might be needed one day. They are part of our team, and we need to treat them as such. Add value and find significance to all your athletes. In other words, treat everyone right. #Oops

4.) Playbook –?4 starters and 3 key reserves returned from a team that won the conference the year before but that didn’t matter to me. I just figured all that talent would be awesome running my plays. My plays were already set up great for their skill sets. The year before Dan Hughes arrived with the Seattle Storm, they had missed the playoffs. In his first year, they won the WNBA championship. He told me that he did all he could to bring the best out of them. One of those ways was to use the plays and system that they had done well with our felt comfortable the year before. It was easier for him to adjust than a whole team to adjust. I wish I had talked with him before I took over this championship team. Even though my playbook was theoretically perfect for the returning talent, the perfect playbook was the one that they liked. They fought me on all of our new plays and never bought in. #Oops

5.) Put People in Right Positions –?I had a hotshot freshman that was recruited after scoring a bajillion points in high school. She was a natural-born scorer. However, every time she got the ball in the games (or practice), she would mess up my plays. Her position on paper in my plays required her to pass the ball nearly every single time. My plays were very specific on the roles people had and her role in my plays were to pass the ball. Notice I keep saying my plays, my plays, my plays. That is wrong. They are our plays, and our plays are designed for our success. I would constantly get frustrated with her and we’d butt heads. She was frustrated and quickly losing confidence. She wasn’t recruited to pass the ball every time. She was a scorer. A good coach would have found ways to utilize her to her fullest. A good coach maximizes strengths, minimizes weaknesses, and inspires people to be their best. I didn’t do that. I was too worried about numbers on a piece of paper. #Oops

6.) Toughness –?The team had been amazingly successful the last few years, but the VP had told me during the interview that he believed they never achieved their full potential because they weren’t tough enough. I had a reputation for really tough teams that were strong rebounders. I took his words to heart, as well as probably way too literal. I saw this as a blank check to make them “tougher”. However, my style and my demands were too much too soon. It was a culture shock. It was too quick of a change. I didn’t prepare them. Yes, we want to change the culture. Yes, we want to make our teams better as quickly as possible but if you lose them at the start, it’ll be difficult to ever get them back. One particular day early in the preseason training sessions, I had a player fall down and another player on the “opposing team” helped her up which actually hurt her team and the fast break opportunity they now had. I made a point to the whole team that they were wearing different jerseys and even though they were teammates in the broader sense, they were opponents in this drill. Yes, we wanted sportsmanship but not during the course of action when they were still competing. This was a bit extreme and obviously didn’t go over very well, especially since that was the first time, I had addressed that kind of a situation. #Oops

7.) Strict Rules –?One of my rules was that a player had to get their parent's permission 24 hours ahead of time if they were going to go home with someone other than their parents after a game. This was to teach a little responsibility and preparedness. I didn’t want the players to knee-jerk react or wait until the last minute for things. It definitely cut down on players wanting to go home with a friend and trying to get in touch with their parents immediately after games. It seemed to work great until we had our starting point guard want to go home with her boyfriend after a game. She hadn’t gotten the 24-hour notice, but her parents were actually at the game. They told me that she could go home with her boyfriend, and they even handed me a signed note to confirm it. I told them that we couldn’t do that because a rule is a rule. While that might be true, sticking to my guns in that situation was not a wise move. I was following the letter of the law, but the intent of the rule wasn’t really being violated much. It was not an inconvenience, my rear-end was covered, and any reasonable person would probably do it. I needed to be wise instead of being right. This was difficult to overcome especially since I only had a technicality to stand on. #Oops.

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I have told on myself and been transparent in a certain situation but there are valuable lessons to be learned whether we take over a good team or a bad team. In fact, the lessons can be applied whether we are in our first year, the tenth year, or are getting ready to retire. As coaches, we need to constantly adapt, adjust, and evaluate ourselves.

Why do these things matter? Because our athletes have to buy into what we’re selling. In order to do that, they have to know, like, and trust us. They have to feel like we can help them get from where they are to where they need to be. They have to feel inspired by us. My athletes spent an inordinate amount of time getting frustrated with me, fighting me, and being confused by me. They were not inspired. They didn’t feel good about playing for me, especially when compared to the previous coach and his success.

Nearly everything I did with that team “should” have worked from a theoretical perspective. This was my third head coaching job. I had been coach of the year. I had coached high-level athletes. I had won championships. I even was in the coaching profession for all the right reasons. Except I was too intelligent for my own good. I might have been right but I wish I had been wise. Sometimes we are right ... but too right - dead right!