Coaching for success

July 31, 2008

Dear Leslie,

Nearing the start of my new job advising the university newspaper, I am reading books about coaching. My perception is that advising college journalists has much in common with coaching athletes. Coaches set standards and develop a game plan, but they can't go into the game and throw a pass or strike out a slugger. I can talk to a college journalist about the basics and refinements of newspapering, I can establish standards, but I can't write or edit their stories.

In his book "They Call Me Coach," legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden says he realized he couldn't be his players' buddy. But he could be someone they could rely on and talk to. He could do his best to help them succeed.

At the gym a few weeks ago I broached this subject with Carl Gross, who just retired as one of the region's most successful high school football coaches. Carl and I grew up playing sandlot baseball in the same neighborhood.

You can't be your players' buddy, he agreed, but you can show them that you love them. One way of doing that is to teach them the fundamentals that every kind of skill requires.

Wooden instructed his players on the proper way to put on socks to prevent blisters.

A coach also sets standards of performance and behavior. Carl told his players that if they messed up he'd better be the first person they told about it. If he wasn't they emptied out their locker.

Early in his career John Wooden developed his Pyramid of Success, a chart he handed out to his players at the beginning of every season. He defines success this way: "Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming." Industriousness and enthusiasm are the cornerstones of the pyramid, and at the center is skill, an attribute that comes from working so hard on the fundamentals continuously that they become almost instinctive. Fine musicians still practice scales.

Another book is by a sports psychologist who thinks that self-image, your subconscious beliefs about yourself, heavily influence your behavior and performance. Believe it and it will come true. He uses the example of the anorexic who sees a fat person in the mirror. In this girl's subconscious is a memory of a period when she really was fat or perhaps only a day when she thought she looked fat in a particular dress. She sees a reflection of her own negative beliefs about herself.

Our subconscious doesn't know the difference between real and imagined. Feed it positive thoughts and eventually that belief can be changed, the psychologist says. Encouragement goes a long way.

One year in California I managed a youth baseball team that had more gumption than talent. We could be losing 10-0 in the first inning, but the team never became discouraged and never gave up. We wouldn't let that happen. Often enough we came back and won those games because the other team stopped trying and we never did.

Managing that baseball team provided at least two more lessons. Before one game I promised to treat the baseball team to pizza if we won. Win or lose, I had already ordered pizza to be delivered to the dugout afterward, of course. As Coach Wooden says, success is knowing you did your best, and that team always did.

The other lesson was this: 12-year-old boys don't want mushrooms on their pizza. I'll let you know what college students want.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.