Win This Point
I have been relistening to Nick Saban's conversation with Theo Von and rewatching the documentary on his career, and the thing that keeps landing with me is how much of it is about people.
The relationships. The character. How a coach shows up for a player, how a player carries himself on the field and off it, and how everyone in the building helps somebody reach a goal they could not reach alone. The standard of excellence is not a banner hanging in that story. It is in the fabric of everything they do.
That is what I am trying to build too. I coach beach volleyball, and I ask the ladies on my team for three things every day, and not one of them is a win.
The first is an attitude that brings out the best in the person next to you. The second is to be where your feet are, which means giving the time you have together your full focus and leaving everything else at the door, because whatever else is going on will still be there when it is over, and sometimes a little clarity shows up on the other side. The third is to enjoy it. That is the whole list, and I have come to believe it is a better plan for improvement than any scoreboard I have ever stared at.
Three Things Anybody Can Control
What I like about the list is that every item on it is available to anyone before the first play, no matter who our opponent is. A player cannot decide to win. Neither can a coach, a teacher, a boss or a parent. What any of us can decide is how we show up for the person next to us after a mistake, and whether we move on to the next play, and those two decisions are there for the taking every single time.
Attitude is not a mood, it is something you give. And it is harder than it sounds, because before you can bring out the best in somebody you have to know them well enough to know which one they need. Some people need encouragement, and some need someone to be honest with them, and you only find out which by actually seeing them. So the first commitment quietly requires a relationship, which is a big part of why I spend so much time building them.
The third one is the one people treat as a bonus, and I think it is a result of the other two. If you bring a good attitude and your full attention, you are going to get better, and getting better is fun. Almost nobody enjoys feeling stuck.
A Standard That Doesn't Depend on the Opponent
A standard of excellence is easy to put on a wall and hard to put in the fabric. For me it comes down to a few honest questions. How do I treat the person next to me when it is going badly? How do I carry myself when nobody is keeping score? What do I do with the next play after a mistake? If the answers change depending on who we are playing, it was never a standard, it was a mood.
That is why I build a hard schedule. The old habit is to pad the early part with easy wins, which feels good and builds confidence, but it can build bad habits at the same time, because a sloppy pass still scores when the other side cannot make you pay for it. Better opponents punish everything, and that is where a person has to stop thinking about the match and think about this point. Win this point, then the next one. A match is only a pile of points, so the way to win it is to spend your attention on the one in front of you.
The other half of that is practice. If we compete hard enough there, the match should feel easier than the work did, and I think that is a big part of what separates a good team from a bad one.
How We Are Going to Do It
Saban has been quoted as saying that becoming a champion is not an easy process, and that it is done by focusing on what it takes to get there and not on getting there. He has also said they are not going to talk about what they are going to accomplish, they are going to talk about how they are going to do it. I love that, because it moves the conversation off the thing nobody controls and onto the thing everybody does.
Trevor Moawad, the mental conditioning coach who worked with him at Alabama, described the same idea from the inside. The coaches did not talk about winning a national championship, they talked about the next assignment, and they said it through a lot of different voices for a lot of years. Alabama went 7-6 in Saban's first season, which tells you the process did not pay off overnight. It paid off through repetition.
And notice what the process is made of. Saban has described leadership as having two parts. You have to be somebody people want to emulate and who cares about other people, and then the team has to accept that leadership and respond to it. That is not a scheme, that is a relationship, and it is why I believe the process starts with people.
Bill Walsh reached the same place from the other direction. He took over a San Francisco 49ers team that had won two games the year before, wrote a standard of performance for everyone in the building, from the head coach to the receptionist, and was 13-3 within two seasons. In The Score Takes Care of Itself he wrote that if he took care of his job, the score would take care of itself.
I do not think we need to be results-driven leaders. I think we need to be process-driven leaders, who build the people and the standard and trust that the results we want will follow. Scores come from what happens on ordinary Tuesdays.
Know the Score, Don't Chase It
I am not asking anyone to pretend the scoreboard does not exist. Look at it, know the score, and then lock in on the next point. If we are 3-0 heading into a big match, the three things are the same as they would be if we were 11-7 heading into the postseason.
A record is a report on where a team has been. The three things are a plan for where it is going, and if a team is getting better every day, the record can be misleading. That is the kind of team nobody wants to see in the playoffs.
It is a quick season, and honestly it is a quick life, so I would rather spend it on the things I can control, with people I care about, and enjoy as much of it as I can.
What are the two or three things you would commit to every day, if you had to do them whatever the scoreboard said?
— Kevin
