Building a championship team

The first thing you need is talent. You can’t take a ham sandwich to a steak roast. I have played and coached over 30 championship teams and mentored another dozen or so coaches and teams to championships in all team sports. The one common denominator with all those teams has been talent. Coaches don’t know how to win, nobody does.

Winning is a result or a destination. I am sure if Scotty Bowman, Joe Torre, Greg Popovich, or Vince Lombardi coached a team with no talent they would not win. Scotty Bowman won championships in Montreal, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. Did he forget how to win in Buffalo?

Some of the youth and high school coaches are getting paid and, therefore, put a status on what they do, and in turn, winning games. They wear their team colors wherever they go and want to get recognized and praised for their win loss record and the level they coach. Well that’s fine, but remember, they open themselves up to criticism that way. They come off as a professional coach so they should expect the same kind of heat and analyzing.

When one of these coaches scouts another team, understand that most games are lost not won. Why then, after they scout, doesn’t their team win every time they play the team they scouted? They need to concentrate on their own team and not go out to make a show at another team’s game they are not involved in.

Coaches need to lose the swag. My teams all had humility and character. If the coach showboats, they will too. Say please and thank you. Have great manners, they are important.

Next a coach needs to take their ego out of it. It’s all about the journey and the kids. I repeatedly see coaches taking all the credit for wins, while continually making excuses for the losses.  A coach has about a 10% say on his or her team’s performance once a game starts. When my teams won championships, it was because of them. When we lost, it was my fault.

 A coach trying to manage games over player development has continually cost his/her team more losses than games won. Short term versus long term, except in that final championship game, will always have an expensive cost, even if the coach can’t see it. I see coaches scheduling easier opponents or dropping down a division to just to boost their win loss record. Then whamo, they lose in the playoffs.

 Coaches have to have patience. The last kid on a coach’s bench could become the coach’s best player, but not if he/she sits. No one gets better sitting on the bench. And remember, 70% of your best player is not better that 100% of a lesser talented player. Effort counts a lot! You never know when “suck” is going to happen.  A coach needs to be ready for it. How? Play a lot of kids. They learn from internal realization not external force. Let them make mistakes, and learn how to correct them. The more kids a coach plays the more they will compete. If they struggle? Well, that’s where real true coaching comes in. Learn how to motivate them. That means truly caring about them over a victory. That means little or no yelling at them. No one likes it when parents yell at them so coaches shouldn’t yell at the kids.

 And coaches should lay off the refs.  They are human too. Coaches need them.

I have seen some great coaches in my time. One thing they all had in common was humility. They really coached relationships. They took great joy in the success of their least talented player as much if not more than their best player or biggest win. They continually take time to build trust, which is a critical component of success and a must life skill to teach.

Now understand I am not talking about real professional coaches at the DI or major league pro level. There is no correlation to what they do and what youth and high school coaches are doing. “Professional coaches do it.” Well, these kids aren’t pros and 99.9% of them won’t play pro so they shouldn’t be coached like they are.

Interteam competition. Man, I cannot stress this enough. Play by performance for the older kids, post puberty, is the key ingredient to getting a team better. Once again, over and over, I see a coach playing his/her “horses” even when they are playing badly and losing. I watched an NFL coach not give his second string guys any playing time, and then was surprised when they didn’t play well when they went in for injuries. Coaches refuse to put in other kids fearing that they will lose a game, and not seeing the disgust the kids on the bench display. FEAR of seeing their team in the newspaper with a lopsided score, and then wondering what happened when their team loses in a close game because there was little competition coached in practice.

Parents stay out of it. Let the coach coach. You don’t have someone yelling at you at work or questioning your calls. On the way to the game or practice, just tell your child to try and have fun. On the way home, tell them you love them. Don’t yell instructions to the kids while they are playing. Do not go around the stands and tell the other parents what you think about the coach or the game. Lay off the officials. You can’t do any better than them so be quiet. If you think this is harsh, you are right. We have polled over 1000 kids and almost all of them don’t want their parents voices heard during a game or practice.

Laugh and have fun. You may not think fun is a critical component of a team’s journey to a championship, but it is. The more fun you are having the more you will want to keep playing. The more you play in that environment, the more effort your kids will put out. And don’t forget, these kids are friends, and friends want their friends to do well. When that happens, they naturally ramp up the competition between themselves. Create the right environment, and competition will ensue.

You want to talk about the will to win; nobody will try harder than me. Let’s talk about competing.  Coaches should make the teams even and fair, or at the very least, let the other team have more talent than mine, because I want to get better. Then let’s play. But that involves inclusion not exclusion. So if someone is talking about winning a meaningless game in the beginning of the season to pad my win loss total, by shortening the bench, I’m out. That’s entitlement, not competition. You want to be the best, play the best.

Heck, in a championship game I’ll bench my mother to win if she’s not playing well, and it won’t faze me.

And there you have it. Be patient, it’s all about the journey. Play a lot of kids, have fun, and build relationships. If you do that, you put yourself in a position more times than not to play for a championship. And that’s what I wanted to do as a coach. I wanted to put my team in a position to play the last game of the year. Even if you don’t win, you will have lasting memories that will far outweigh a single game victory. And really, isn’t that the final championship test of a true coach?

If you are interested in learning how to coach a championship journey, please give us a call or email me at vj@frozenshorts.com. We teach it every day at Frozen Shorts.