“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.” – Nick Saban
In his book Saban: The Making of a Coach, Monte Burke goes into some depth on Nick Saban’s introduction and adherence to what’s known as “process thinking.” During his time at Michigan State, Saban became allies with a professor of psychiatry named Lonny Rosen. Process thinking is the breaking down of things into smaller parts that can be handled without stress and lead to bigger and better things. Process thinking is something that you can apply to workouts, meetings, practices and to entire seasons.
This past off season, I spent a lot of time working on what our “championship process” would be for our football program. I’d like to outline what that looked like in the hopes that it might demystify it for those that are wanting a more organized and specific path to their goals.
First, the resources that I used to help me with what we came up with were:
- Brian Cain Peak Performance in particular his book the 12 Pillars of Peak Perfomance.
- You Win the Locker Room First by Jon Gordon and Mike Smith.
- Above the Line by Urban Meyer
- Urban’s Way by Buddy Martin (details’s the “Plan to Win”)
There are six steps or levels on our “process pyramid.” We start with on the bottom with what we do the most and and have the most control over.
- Live Our Core Values
- Fundamentals of Elite Performance
- Daily Focus
- Game Focus
- Season Milestones
- Season Vision
Live Our Core Values. We had the program develop a set of core values based on what we think we represent, what we want the “5 minute test” to be, and how we want to represent ourselves. I pushed a Google Form to the kids and they answered questions that I used to select works like “Toughness” and “Relentless” as our core values. I have written a whole post about this process alone but, my one take away I would offer is that if your kids can’t write down your core values on an index card on demand, you don’t have core values. You have to sell these every day to your program. A great way is each day has a different theme a la “Win Forever.” We used an acronym of “P.A.N.T.H.E.R.S.” to help our kids remember them and we’ve made 500 posters with them we’re giving to everyone that will take them.
Fundamentals of Elite Performance. The next thing we emphasize are what we call the “Six Fundamentals of Elite Performance”: Nutrition, Rest, Strength/Conditioning, Time Management, Relationships, Mindset. Each one of these fundamentals could make up an entire post. The main idea is that if your athletes (and coaches for that matter) don’t take care of these six things, they are limiting their ability to be their best. Mindset could be “faith” or “spirituality” but I chose mindset because I think it’s a little more inclusive. We talk about these six areas along with our core values before our strength and conditioning workouts or prior to practices. By enumerating these “fundamentals,” it provides us a way to be specific about our expectations for being healthy individuals, not just high performing athletes.
Daily Focus. We have three things we emphasize here: 1. Go 100% from A to B 2. Finish everything 3. Have a one ____________ focus. The first two points I’ve taken from Urban Meyer’s book “Above the Line.” The last point is really “The Process” in a nutshell. We want to have a one play focus as players, a one game focus as team, etc. We don’t want to be playing the last game or trying to win a game on one play. One way to measure the first two is to grade practice and game film based on three categories–Did they get two hands on the ball carrier/assignment? Did they chase the ball carrier/assignment? Did they loaf? The University of Houston does this and coaches who were new to working with Coach Herman have said it’s the best thing they’ve learned from him. Again, this is something athletes have total control over.
Game Focus. We had discussed as a staff using Tony Demeo’s meaningful stats for this part of our process but we instead chose to go with “The Plan to Win” that Gary Anderson uses at Oregon State and that he got from Meyer when they coached together at Utah. We made this decision because we felt it gave us better flexibility in how we set our game targets. The Plan to Win consists of five main categories: 1. Score in the Red Zone; 2. Protect the Football; 3. Play Great Defense; 4. Win the Kicking Game and 5. Win the 4th quarter. There are metrics out there to illustrate how that works but I like this because it allows us to come up with metrics for what that means for us. It provides some flexibility with how we measure success in these areas. This starts to get out of the control of individuals and shifts to a team focus. However, if we collectively perform at our best, we should be able to hit these targets.
Season Milestones. I started with the number of league wins we needed to make the play-offs but I changed this to season milestones after reading the book You Win the Locker Room First which I highly recommend. Basically, you set goals or milestones week to week to focus on based on where you’re at during that time. There is nothing worse than having a goal that you’ve plastered everywhere and on anything that is unattainable after 3 games. This allows you to adjust over the season. At this level there is even less control by our team as you can’t control officials, conditions and the level of competition. Again, the focus is that if we take care of the root, the fruit will be there.
Season Vision. These are all outcome goals–Win the State Championship, make the playoffs, practice on Thanksgiving, etc.
Enjoy the Moment/Ignore the Noise/Trust the Process. I framed our “Process Pyramid” with these three phases because I think they represent an important part of the philosophy with which we operate our program.
Enjoy the Moment encourages our players to enjoy the big and little successes and experiences that we have throughout the season. We don’t want to be so driven by our ultimate goal that we don’t appreciate our time together or success as it comes. Probably the best explanation I’ve heard of what I’m trying to express came from Pete Carroll on an episode of Michael Gervais’ Finding Mastery (I can’t recommend subscribing to this podcast enough).
Ignore the Noise is my way of expressing that we need to look within ourselves and to our team to evaluate who we are and how we are doing. Well meaning people whether they are fans, media members or parents, tend to exaggerate how good or bad a team or season is. Who we are as a team or as an athlete is independent of the good or bad opinions of others. Further, we do not want to compare ourselves to others in either a positive or negative way. As Frosty Westering said we measure who we are versus the version of our own best self. Which leads us to…
Trust the Process. We want to focus on what we can control and start with the small things. As Brian Cain says, excellence in small things is excellence in all things.
I hope that outlining what we did to flesh out “The Process” is helpful for your program. This is a work in progress and I’m excited to continue to add, amend and flesh this out as we implement it into our program.
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