- Home
- Coaching and Officiating
- Coaching Better Every Season
Coaching Better Every Season
A year-round system for athlete development and program success
by Wade Gilbert
424 Pages
Maximize the development of your athletes and team throughout the year, and just maybe win a postseason title in the process. Coaching Better Every Season: A Year-Round System for Athlete Development and Program Success presents a blueprint for such success, detailing proven coaching methods and practices in preseason, in-season, postseason, and off-season.
The Coach Doc, Dr. Wade Gilbert, shares his research-supported doses of advice that have helped coaches around the globe troubleshoot their ailing programs into title contenders. His field-tested yet innovative prescriptions and protocols for a more professional approach to coaching are sure to produce positive results both in competitive outcomes and in the enjoyment of the experience for athletes and coaches.
Coaching Better Every Season applies to all sports and guides coaches through the critical components of continual improvement while progressing from one season to the next in the annual coaching cycle. It also presents many practical exercises and evaluation tools that coaches can apply to athletes and teams at all levels of competition. This text is sure to make every year of coaching a more rewarding, if not a trophy-winning, experience.
Part I Preseason: Envision
Chapter 1 Define Purpose and Core Values
Chapter 2 Connect Values to a Philosophy
Chapter 3 Set Target Outcomes
Chapter 4 Build Trust and Cohesion
Part II In-Season: Enact
Chapter 5 Develop Athletic Talent and Skill
Chapter 6 Optimize Athletes’ Learning
Chapter 7 Design Quality Practices
Chapter 8 Ensure Precompetition Readiness
Chapter 9 Coach Effectively on Game Day
Part III End of Season: Evaluate
Chapter 10 Design and Implement a Program Evaluation System
Chapter 11 Recognize and Build on Strengths
Part IV Off-Season: Enhance
Chapter 12 Close Performance Gaps
Chapter 13 Collaborate and Learn
Chapter 14 Recharge and Ignite
Closing Repeating Success
Wade Gilbert, PhD, is an award-winning professor in the department of kinesiology at California State University at Fresno.
Dr. Gilbert holds degrees in physical education, human kinetics, and education and has taught and studied coaching at the University of Ottawa (Canada), UCLA, and Fresno State. He has more than 20 years of experience in conducting applied research with coaches around the world spanning all competitive levels, from youth leagues to the FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games. He is widely published and is frequently invited to speak at national and international events. Gilbert is a coach education advisor to USA Football and a regular contributor to coaching seminars for Olympic and national team coaches in the United States and Canada.
In addition, Gilbert is editor in chief of the International Sport Coaching Journal, published by Human Kinetics in conjunction with SHAPE America and the International Council for Coaching Excellence (ICCE). As Human Kinetics’ coach education advisor, “The Coach Doc” writes articles and conducts webinars on a variety of coaching issues.
Gilbert lives in Clovis, California.
“I met Wade at a USOC coach education seminar, and was immediately impressed by his knowledge of what it takes to coach at a championship level. His cycle for continuous excellence and many of his other insights and recommendations ring true to my experience and teachings throughout my career. Coaching Better Every Season has just become more possible for any coach who reads and applies the wisdom and best practices found in this book.”
Anson Dorrance—Head Coach of University of North Carolina Women’s Soccer Team, 22-Time NCAA National Champions
“The best sport programs have a solid plan for success and follow that winning formula consistently each year. Coaching Better Every Season is a blueprint for building just such a structure for success that coaches can apply and adapt to their specific sport and personnel. Wade Gilbert’s season-by-season guide is a great tool for any coach who is willing to ask “What can I improve?” and who is then willing to take the steps to do so. At YSU our motto is Macte virtute, a Latin phrase that commands us to increase excellence. With Wade’s book, you can do just that.”
Jim Tressel—President of Youngstown State University and Five-Time National Champion Football Coach
“I first heard Wade speak about quality coaching at the Hockey Hall of Fame. The message he shared that day, summarized in this impressive book, is a proven approach to building better athletes and programs. I highly recommend coaches at all levels of sport read this book and apply Wade’s strategies in their coaching.”
Greg Schell—Coordinator of Hockey Development for Toronto Maple Leafs Hockey Club
“Now 47 years into my coaching journey, I am still looking for ways to improve my coaching. I just wish Coaching Better Every Season had been available earlier in my career. It is an invaluable resource filled with key concepts, proven strategies, innovative ideas, and insightful examples for addressing the philosophical underpinnings, the seasonal process, and effective day-to-day applications in coaching. Throughout the book are recommended strategies for improving coaching effectiveness via a careful blend of art and science. Read and use this book, and you’ll be a better coach.”
Vern Gambetta—Founder of GAIN (Gambetta Athletic Improvement Network) and Coach/Consultant to NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, Collegiate, National, and Olympic teams
“Dr. Gilbert is widely recognized as a leader in coach education. His guidance for coaches—not just coaching theory but also applied practical advice—allows us to be more effective in what we do.”
Ken Martel—Technical Director of USA Hockey
“If you are satisfied with your quality of coaching, Wade Gilbert’s book, Coaching Better Every Season, is not for you. However, if you are like my former coach John Wooden, who improved his coaching every year until his retirement, this book will be most valuable, as it will provide a roadmap for your passionate pursuit of perfection.”
Swen Nater—Author and Former UCLA, NBA, and ABA Basketball Player
“Coaching Better Every Season iss a book is for all coaches truly committed to being better at their craft. Wade’s insights have provided me the guidance I need to stay focused on the things that really matter for coaching and performance improvement at the highest level. His approach and strategies have real-world, practical application for coaches around the world at all levels, from youth sport to those at the Olympic and national team level.”
Cameron Kiosoglous, PhD—US Rowing National Team Coach
“Coaching Better Every Season is a must read for any coach at any level seeking to build a championship program, positive team culture, and lasting tradition. It is a book you will want to continually refer to as a coach’s guide throughout each season.”
Jeffrey Huber, PhD—Indiana University, Big Ten, NCAA, USA, USOC Coach of the Year; 13-Time USA Diving National Coach of the Year
“For more than 20 years, Wade has been sharing his exceptional coaching knowledge and wisdom gleaned from his varied experiences as a teacher, researcher, and coach. He is a world-renowned expert in the coaching field, a scholar of extraordinary breadth, and a brilliant communicator. Wade brings to this book a marvelous blend of research, insights, and strategies about coaching that provide a master blueprint for building successful sport programs.”
Jean Côté, PhD—Professor and Director of School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University
“Dr. Gilbert’s research on coaching is the best coaching science we’ve got. He has studied, learned from, and collaborated with successful coaches around the world, including national, Olympic, and world championship coaches—and John Wooden himself. I highly recommend the book, which most certainly will have you Coaching Better Every Season."
Ronald Gallimore, PhD—Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UCLA
"Coaching Better Every Season is the most comprehensive coaching book I have read. Dr. Gilbert has a knack for speaking and writing about the heart of coaching and leadership. It is a must read for any coach who wants to be successful and continually stay ahead of the game.”
Guy Krueger—Education and Training Manager at USA Archery
“In Coaching Better Every Season, Wade Gilbert masterfully incorporates the art and science of coaching into a system that promotes greatness. His book provides a clear and compelling road map for developing the people who are producing the results. If you are driven by your desire to help your athletes be their best, this book is for you.”
Ralph Pim, EdD—Sport Adviser and Team Consultant, Director of Competitive Sports (retired), United States Military Academy
"Working with Wade and applying the strategies he shares in Coaching Better Every Season has helped me set the vision and standards for our wrestling program."
Troy Steiner—Head Coach of Fresno State University Wrestling
"Coaching Better Every Season should be a mandatory read for all coaches. It presents the art and science of coaching, no matter the sport."
Chuck Kylee—Head Coach at Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio; Two-Time USA Today High School Coach of the Year; Youth Football Advisor for the Cleveland Browns
“Internationally known coaching expert Wade Gilbert has the rare ability to link science and practice in creative ways for coaches, as shown in this book. The organization of pointers from preseason to off-season makes for an informative read for coaches.”
Robin S. Vealey, PhD—Professor and Graduate Director of the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Miami University
“Coaching Better Every Season articulates the role of coaches in building teams as centers of learning. Dr. Gilbert’s book is the perfect resource for those who desire sustainable programmatic success; it is a must read for coaches at every level.”
Jon LeCrone—Commissioner of the Horizon League
“I have had the pleasure of speaking to Wade Gilbert’s classes over the past eight years. I have watched him mentor and bring out the best in every student in his classes. Coaching Better Every Season is going to give every coach who uses this book the opportunity to coach better every day. Wade Gilbert knows how to use science and practical experience and bring them together. This book will help us all be better coaches to our athletes.”
Jeanne Fleck—Head Coach of Fresno State University Women’s Swimming and Diving
“I am fortunate enough to have worked with and learned from Dr. Wade Gilbert, and I consider my experience with him to be the most significant factor in my desire to return to coaching and pursue my first head coaching position. In Coaching Better Every Season, Wade delves deep into his subject matter while keeping it relatable and applicable to coaches of all levels. The concepts and strategies he shares have bolstered my ability to build and sustain a successful program, with success defined by so much more than wins and losses. Reflecting upon the totality of experiences I’ve had in my sport and profession, I truly believe that the knowledge and tools provided in Coaching Better Every Season have been paramount to my development as a coach.”
Breanne Nasti—Head Coach of Women’s Softball and Assistant Athletic Director at Adelphi University
“I have been extremely fortunate to reconnect with and work alongside Dr. Wade Gilbert. He has provided me with a wealth of invaluable knowledge that I share regularly in my interactions with coaches and athletic directors. His acute insights on what it takes to become a better coach, and a better person, and to build a legacy through a better program are exactly why every coach should read this book.”
Pat Riddlesprigger—Athletic Manager at Fresno Unified School District
“Dr. Wade Gilbert provides a perfect blend of research-based information, front-line coaching applications, and compelling examples throughout his book. Coaching Better Every Season is a major contribution to the education and practice of coaches.”
John Bales—President of the International Council for Coaching Excellence
“I have had the privilege of collaborating with Dr. Gilbert for over 15 yearrs as both a high school coach and athletic director. Dr. Gilbert has the unique ability to present current research in the field of coach and athlete development and demonstrate how that research can be applied in the real world of everyday coaching. Over the last five years, Wade has been an integral part of rebuilding the athletics program at Fresno High School. The results have been both dramatic and measurable; we now have a system in place that allows us to use data, athlete feedback, and competitive indicators to measure the status of each sport program. Simply put, Wade provided us with the tools that changed the culture of our entire athletics program. With Coaching Better Every Season, you can too.”
David Barton—Athletic Director at Fresno High School
“Unquestionably one of the best coaching books out there from one of the finest minds. I wish a book like this had been available when I started coaching 20-plus years ago!”
Sergio Lara-Bercial, PhD—Senior Research Fellow at Leeds Beckett University; International Council for Coaching Excellence
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Preparing Mentally and Emotionally
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition.
Precompetition physical preparation will be wasted unless the coach also helps the athlete design effective precompetition mental and emotional preparation strategies. Athletes are known for finding creative ways to lower their stress before a competition. Some examples include Olympic medalist and U.S. national champion figure skater Gracie Gold who juggles before stepping out onto the ice; Hall of Fame baseball player Wade Boggs who had to eat chicken before every game; three-time Ironman champion Chrissie Wellington who liked to watch uplifting movies the night before a race; World Cup soccer player Laurent Blanc who had to kiss the shaven head of his goalkeeper before every match during France's run to the world title in 1998; and 11-time NBA champion Bill Russell who said, "The last thing I did before I went out was throw up [before every game]. I can't remember it not happening. Just like taping your ankles."
What should be clear from these contrasting examples is that if left to their own devices, all athletes will find a strategy that seems to work best for them. Therefore, the role of the coach is not to create precompetition mental and emotional coping strategies for their athletes. Rather, the coach should help her or his athletes learn how to monitor their precompetition mental and emotional states and provide guidance for creating personalized and appropriate strategies. Coaches, therefore, need to have a basic understanding of how emotions influence performance and how to harness emotions in the moments leading up to an event.
The Zone
Decades of research on arousal, emotions, and athletic performance shows that every athlete has unique precompetition mental and emotional needs, commonly referred to as individual zones of optimal functioning, or IZOF. Russian sport psychologist Yuri Hanin first coined the term IZOF based on his research with Olympic athletes.
Hanin made three key discoveries about emotions and peak performance. First, optimal precompetition arousal is best thought of as a zone or range of readiness as opposed to a single point in the arousal-performance relationship. Athletes consistently perform better when they report that their emotions are in the zone compared to when their emotions are out of the zone.
Second, there is no one ideal level of precompetition mental and emotional arousal; every athlete has a different ideal state. Notice in figure 8.2 that athlete A is most ready to perform when she is calm and relaxed. In contrast, athlete B is most ready to perform when he is more emotionally activated.
Individualized zones of optimal functioning (IZOF).
Reprinted, by permission, from R.S. Weinberg and D. Gould, 2015, Foundations of sport and exercise psychology, 6th ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 87.
Third, both pleasant (i.e., joy) and unpleasant (i.e., anger) emotions can be either helpful or detrimental to performance depending on the unique perspective of each athlete. This finding is perhaps the most surprising and important for coaches. When studying athlete emotions and peak performance, emotions are divided into four categories.
- [U-] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
- [U+] unpleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P+] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as helpful to peak performance
- [P-] pleasant emotions perceived by the athlete as disruptive to peak performance
Although each athlete believes that specific emotions, such as joy or anger, either help or hinder performance, a consistent emotion-performance profile is associated with peak performance. With this profile, commonly referred to as the iceberg profile, athletes report low levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as ineffective and high levels of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as useful to peak performance. The goal, then, for coaches is to help athletes identify which emotions are most associated with peak performance for them personally.
Coaching scientist and former college coach Robin Vealey has created a simple exercise that coaches can use with their athletes to help them identify their individual zones of optimal functioning. An example of an individual zone of optimal functioning for a golfer, prepared using this type of exercise, is provided in figure 8.3.
Golfer IZOF profile.
Reprinted, by permission, from R. Vealey, 2005, Coaching for the inner edge (Morgantown, WV: Fitness Information Technology), 390. Permission conveyed through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
- Step 1: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant emotions (e.g., confident, energetic, certain) and three or four unpleasant emotions (e.g., tense, nervous, irritated) they believe help them perform at their best.
- Step 2: Ask athletes to write down three or four pleasant and unpleasant emotions they believe hurt their ability to perform at their best.
- Step 3: Ask athletes to rate, on a scale of 0 (not at all) to 10 (most possible), how much they need to feel that emotion during their precompetition routine. For example, athletes may identify confidence as a pleasant emotion that they believe helps them perform best, and they believe that their confidence needs to be at least an 8 in the moments before a competition.
- Step 4: Have athletes plot the scores for each emotion by placing a small circle or dot on a graph with intensity on the y-axis and feeling states on the x-axis. This point represents the athlete's preferred intensity for each type of emotion identified in steps 1 and 2.
- Step 5: Have athletes then draw their zone of optimal functioning by drawing a line 1 point above and 1 point below each circle on the graph. For example, using the example of wanting to feel an 8 on confidence, the athlete would draw the top line of the zone at 9 and the bottom line of the zone at 7 for confidence.
Save
Save
Save
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Reflecting on Why You Coach
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
Most coaching books start with a discussion of the importance of creating a coaching philosophy and follow up with a section on creating goals. But to define a coaching philosophy and set goals, you must first understand and express why you coach and what principles will guide how you coach.
A coaching purpose defines why you do what you do; it is your fundamental reason for being (a coach). Your purpose also represents your motivations for coaching. Coaches by nature are competitive and driven to succeed. This attribute combined with outside pressure from others to win can easily cause coaches to lose sight of their true purpose. A traumatic life moment is often the trigger that causes a coach to pause and reflect on the why. For three-time national college football champion coach Urban Meyer, a combination of dealing with serious health issues and listening to his daughter speak at a public ceremony caused him to realize how absent he had become from her life. For renowned high school football coach Joe Erhmann, the moment came while attending his brother's funeral. In his deeply personal account of how he discovered his coaching purpose, Coach Erhmann explains how he came to identify his true purpose as a coach: “‘My Why': I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will lead, be responsible, and change the world for good.”
Whereas clarity of coaching purpose serves as a beacon for navigating the choppy waters of coaching, core values are the expectations and standards that coaches and their athletes use to hold each other accountable and build a culture of excellence. Some coaches such as Hall of Fame professional basketball coach Pat Riley describe a team's core values as a covenant or agreement that holds teams together. Successful coaches ensure that the program core values are clearly aligned with their coaching purpose.
One of the most successful coaches of the 21st century is professional football coach Bill Belichick. His coaching purpose was formed early in life, perhaps even as young as 6 years old when he eagerly helped his father, a college football coach at the time, analyze game film. His coaching purpose is rooted deeply in the pursuit of excellence and a love of football. The single core value that has long served as the guiding principle for all the teams he has coached is summed up in the simple mantra “Do your job!” Unwavering commitment to this core value is demonstrated through relentless preparation, incredible attention to details, a team-first attitude, and an intense work ethic.
You will know you have found your coaching purpose when your purpose is inseparable from who you are as a person. For example, all-time winningest college baseball coach Augie Garrido once said, “I coach baseball to its core because it is in my core.” Your purpose and core values, then, serve as a window into your coaching soul - the essence or embodiment of who you are as a coach and why you coach.
The most effective coaches are acutely sensitive to this basic concept. In fact, 11-time professional basketball championship coach Phil Jackson includes the word soul in the title of his best-selling book about how to coach championship teams. Coach Jackson explains that his purpose and core values are grounded in his deeply held concern for connecting with athletes and creating what might be considered an enlightened basketball environment - one in which he helps athletes find personal meaning in the sport experience.
A coaching purpose and core values do not need to be validated by others. A purpose and values are right if they are personally meaningful and inspirational. Together, your purpose and core values make up what is sometimes referred to as your core ideology - your enduring character and identity as a coach. Your core ideology as a coach matters because it gives meaning to your work and has the power to ignite passion and sustain the long-term commitment required to become an effective coach.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Determining What to Evaluate
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development.
The first consideration in creating an effective evaluation plan is to identify the right things to evaluate. At minimum all program evaluation systems should include tools for measuring athlete development. As highly respected and Super Bowl champion football coach Tony Dungy once remarked, "The true measure of a coach, or anyone in a leadership role for that matter, is how they help those around them grow."
Besides athlete development, other evaluation priorities will be dictated by the setting in which a coach works. For example, when coaching in a school-based setting, athlete academic performance and student-athlete eligibility will be important to include in the program evaluation system. Useful, high-quality evaluation requires time and effort, so setting aside some time in the preseason to decide what will be evaluated at the end of the season is a wise investment that will pay valuable dividends.
National and conference college ice hockey Coach of the Year Guy Gadowsky has prepared a list of evaluation categories he uses to assess the quality of his program at the end of each season (see figure 10.1). Notice that his list includes not only the usual team and individual performance statistics that make up most evaluations but also program philosophy, personnel, practices, team environment, and academic performance.
The second consideration when designing an effective program evaluation system is to ensure that evaluation information is collected from all key program stakeholders. At minimum, coach self-evaluations should always be supplemented with feedback from members of the coaching staff and athletes. This method is the only way to ensure a balanced and comprehensive approach to making evaluation decisions. Program feedback from athletes who make up leadership councils and senior or departing athletes in particular can provide helpful insights on how to improve a program.
Learn more about Coaching Better Every Season.
Related Books
