Coaching Nuggets From 9 of The Best!
Getting To Us: How Great Coaches Make Great Teams - Seth Davis
I know, I know it’s been a minute since I’ve sent written a newsletter! I really enjoy writing them and brainstorming the ideas/topics so once the college hoops season ends the Backyard Buckets emails will return on a more consistent basis. Until then I figured it’s easy enough to at least share with you guys some of the books, articles, podcasts, clinics and other resources I’ve enjoyed over the past few months.
I was going to throw a bunch of different links into this newsletter but once I started writing I realized that this book needed its own dedicated piece so I can really show my appreciate for it. I share my favorite paragraph from each chapter below that resonated with me in some shape or form.
"Getting to Us" Seth Davis - How Great Coaches Make Great Teams
Description: (Coaching/Leadership/Personal Life)
Coaches featured: Urban Meyer, Tom Izzo, Jim Harbaugh, Jim Boeheim, Coach K, Doc Rivers, Brad Stevens, Geno Auriemma, Dabo Swinney
Quick Summary: I just recently finished reading this book front to back and loved it. I would basically sum it up as a mini biography of 8 of the most well known coaches across various sports. Each chapter is dedicated to one coach by taking a deep dive into their upbringing, daily habits and coaching philosophy that has influenced the legacy they have left in their respected sport. By highlighting moments of adversity and challenges both within their programs and in their personal lives, Davis sums up each chapter by describing how each coach was able to ultimately bring their team together and create buy in… or in Seth Davis’ words this was the process of “Getting To Us”
Standout Quotes From Each Chapter
Urban Meyer: “Everybody from the strength staff to the video staff to the equipment staff to academics and nutrition - everybody who touches the players there at Ohio State gets the same message and the same expectations and the same goals. Meyer’s favorite word in those early days was juice. He said he wanted energy givers, not energy takers, and nobody gave more energy than him.
Brad Stevens: “Stevens dives into his game-day routine like he does all his endeavors, with quiet, burning, even-keeled intensity. He wakes up early, sees his kids off to school, grabs a cup of coffee, and secludes himself in his home office. He spends a lot of time during the season speaking one-on-one with his players, but he is not a big “meeting guy” when it comes to his staff. He will organize a conference call to start the season and assign everyone their responsibilities, but aside for a few confabs along the way, his assistants work in their own silos jut like he does. For each opponent, one assistant scouts the offense and, one the defense, and a third evaluates personnel. The coaches email their written reports to Stevens and send him their video edits via Dropbox. These are due to him by noon the day before. He likes to stay a game ahead, if possible. That’s why he almost never sleeps on airplanes. If he can get some work done late at night, he won’t have to cram the next day”.
Tom Izzo: “Guilt is his constant companion. When he’s working, he feels like he should be at home with the kids. When he’s home, he wonders if he should be back in the office, grinding. When someone he has known for a long time asks for an appearance, he knows he should decline, but that would really make him feel guilty. So he says yes, “I spoke at a Rotary Club last week. I’m still speaking at Rotary Clubs,” Tom Izzo says with a laugh. “You know why? Cause the friend that was helping me out thirty years ago when I had no money, no food, and no job asked me to do it. All those people that helped me, I’m obligated to ‘em.”
Jim Harbaugh “Harbaugh prefers to have very few things on display. Soon after he took the job here (Michigan) , he stripped a bunch of sayings and quotes off the team’s meeting and weight rooms. I would ask guys who were in the weight room every single day, What’s the best saying you’ve seen here? And they couldn’t come up with one, he said. It just struck me that that’s a lot of white noise, so you can’t remember any of it. If you can’t remember, then it’s going to be hard to execute.”
Jim Boeheim: “You don’t have to go through life not feeling things. But coaches above all else have to be resilient. I mean, I’ve had bad things happen to me during the season. You’ve got to keep going. You have to be able to get through things. You’re always trying to convince your players that they have to go forward, no matter what happens. It’s like I tell them every year. When we’re winning and things are good, you don’t find out anything about yourself. When you lose, that’s when you find out.”
Coach K: Practice plans were scheduled down to the minute, but they also included notes explaining how each drills would prepare the team for its next opponent. That allowed his players to visualize the big picture. “It was like getting a West Point battle plan every day,” Mark Alarie (former player) said. “I played a lot of basketball, including five years in the NBA, and I never had a coach that put one-tenth the elbow grease that Coach K put into every one of those practices. Unlike many coaches in high pressure situations, Krzyzewski did not rigidly separate his work and family lives. Mickie (his wife) had roles in the program that played to her creativity. Staff meetings and film sessions were held at his house. His wife and girls hung around the offices and rode the team bus. “We never felt that basketball was taking him away from us, Jamie (daughter) said. This wasn’t his thing. It was our thing”.
Geno Auriemma: “When Auriemma first got to Uconn, he was convinced that whatever challenge his upstarts faced, they would figure it out and beat more talented teams. Once his teams become heavy favorites, however, he found himself consumed by worry, certain that whatever could go wrong, would. This was the price he paid for chasing perfection. It wasn’t enough to win. They had to win by playing the right way. No practice plan could compete with that vision. Auriemma might schedule a two line layup drill for ten minutes, but it would go on for well over an hour if his guys didn’t do it exactly how he wanted. His goal was to make those workouts so taxing that the games seemed easy by comparison.”
Doc Rivers: “Rivers has often sought to the company of coaches in other sports to enhance his knowledge. When he was in Orlando, he spent time with Jon Gruden, who at the time was the coach of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Rivers was fascinated by how a pro football team is organized, with the head coach delegating huge responsibilities to his offensive and defensive coordinators. “My belief is we coach wrong in basketball,” Rivers says. “In football, the head coach doesn’t have to be the voice on everything.” Rivers assembled his staff in Boston accordingly.”
Dabo Swinney: “Swinney likes to call Clemson “A relationship driven program” but it is not easy to foment intimacy with a roster of over a hundred players, not to mention dozens of assistants and staff. He meets every Monday with a leadership group he calls Swinney Council. It includes the senior leaders on the team, but those players will regularly invite younger guys to take part. Every day before practice, Swinney gathers his players in the team meeting room, where he will speak for about ten minutes, give or take, to set the tone for the day. The walls bear signs listing the sixteen team commandments as well as five goals for every season. When the players walk into the room, they are greeted by a slide that shows the view a driver has from behind the wheel of a car. The logo of last week’s opponent is in the rearview mirror; the next week’s opponent is visible through the windshield.
Regardless of whether or not you actually like these coaches on a personal or professional level, each one has achieved levels of greatness and notoriety that cannot be denied. I find it fascinating to read about how a coaches personality, life experiences and habits really do shape the format and structure of how their programs operate day to day.
Hopefully, one of these quotes hits home with you or at least gets you thinking about your program, players, job etc. Not just the parts you agree with, but actually more so what you don’t like. This book paints the perfect picture on how the road to “success” is a long one and that the things each individual is willing to sacrifice to get there looks a lot different depending on which coach you ask.