ANTHONY GRANT 5 V's OF SUCCESS

What are your Values: You determine your values before you determine your vision.

What is your Vision: Set by the leader. Inspire, Influence, Impact the lives of your players.

“I can help you achieve by making you do things you don’t want to do.”

What are your Virtues: We have to know strengths of team and coaching staff. Players want to know are you competent, sincere, trustworthy, reliable.

What Vehicles do we employ? Where do you want to go? How do you develop the people in your organization? How do you add people to your organization?

What are our Vices? What are we going to have to overcome.

JOHN MAXWELL: 5 REASONS LOSSES HURT MOST

If you're like me, you're excited about the newest book about to be released by John Maxwell, "Sometimes You Win, Sometimes You Learn."  Here is a blog from The John Maxwell Company.  Click here to read the entire blog and have a chance at an autographed copy from Maxwell.


1. Losses Cause Us to be Emotionally Stuck“Anxiety and fear are debilitating emotions for the human heart. So are losses. They can weaken, imprison, paralyze, dishearten, and sicken us. To be successful, we need to find ways to get unstuck emotionally.”

 When we fail, it’s easy to fall into a trap of what-ifs, wondering how you could have won if only you did “this” or “that.” This pattern drains us with more what-ifs and weighs on our hearts. If we can learn to overcome and move on, our losses can turn to learning opportunities.

2. Losses Cause Us to be Mentally Defeated
“Too often losing goes to our heads. It defeats us and we have trouble coming up with solutions to our challenges.”

 In order to be successful, we must learn to manage disappointment instead of building it up in our heads. While we must aim for our goals, we also should train for losses, as we will face many of them over the course of our lifetime.

3. Losses Create a Gap Between I Should and I Did
“However, losing can also create a cycle in our lives – a negative one. Losses, especially when they pile up, can lead to insecurity. When we are insecure, we doubt ourselves. It causes us to hesitate when making decisions. Even when we know what we should do, we are reluctant to do it.”

No one wants to fail – and when we do, we are in danger of falling into traps of avoidance. We avoid making decisions, taking action, and learning. In order to succeed, we must show courage to move past those traps and bridge the gap from knowing to doing. Taking the first step always gets you back in the game.

4. The First Loss Often Isn’t the Biggest Loss
“When we experience a loss, we have a choice. If we immediately respond to it the right way, the loss becomes smaller to us. However, if we respond the wrong way, or we fail to respond at all, that loss becomes greater.”

 When we lose, we also lose self-confidence. Don’t avoid the issue, thus making the loss bigger than it is. In fact, there is a good chance more, and potentially bigger losses, are coming down the pipeline. As leaders, we must address the loss, learn from it, and move on.

5. Losses Never Leave Us the Same
“Losses change us. But we must not allow them to control us.”

 If we allow negative experiences of our past to control our future, we’re asking for limitations and discouragement. Each of us will experience loss in a different way, but we must all let go of their emotional grip and look to the future for new opportunities.

Each of these 5 reasons highlights why loss can be so difficult. It’s no secret that no one wants to lose, but knowing that we all will experience failure in some ways allows you to take risks. It’s important to remember, “you can choose to change, grow, and learn from your losses.”

Those are daily choices. Today, we’d love to hear about a time that you made the choice to learn from a loss!

 

LET US NEVER FORGET

FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME AND FRIENDS

Basketball is basketball...

Competitors compete...

Friends are friends!

DEAN SMITH: INDIVIDUAL DEFENSE AND TEAM DEFENSIVE PRIDE

The value of each player's awareness of the importance of team defense cannot be overestimated.  The quick transitions between offense and defense in basketball sometimes obscure the value of concentrated defensive effort.  Scoring occurs rapidly and more easily than ion other sports.  Because of this, players are more susceptible to believing that a letdown on defense can always be quickly compensated for on the subsequent possession.  Perhaps it's more convenient in basketball to rationalize inadequate defense with the old cliché about the best defense being a strong offense.  Unfortunately, the offense oriented statistics we have made popular in our sport do little to offset this accent.

Human nature, in general, is such that we instinctively feel more aggressive  and exuberant when we take the offensive, as opposed to finding ourselves on the defensive.  At North Carolina, we have tried to alter that accustomed role.  We believe in taking the offensive on defense.

We attempt to instill team pride in defense.  A team effort must be required in order to get the job done.  The pressing, pressure defense which is our primary attack requires five defensive players working together against four offensive men.  We are usually off someone, overplaying, always helping, and always looking for help.  Of course, we do assign individual match-ups prior to a game.  However, we seldom tell a player that he has the sole responsibility of keeping his man down.  His job is to contribute his efforts in an overall manner that will help our team keep our opponent down.

From "Basketball Multiple Offense and Defense" by Dean Smith

NOTRE DAME'S BRIAN KELLY SEEKS OUTSIDE HELP TO IMPROVE HIS PROGRAM

How hard do you as a coach work to improve how you do your job?  We all work to help our players do their jobs better but are we determined enough and secure in what we want to achieve that we would go out and ask an outsider to take a look at what we do and critique it?  I came across this post on SI Wire and came away more impressed with Brian Kelly.  He obviously did an amazing job getting Notre Dame to the National Championship game last year when know one last September even had them on the radar.  He won several Coach of the Year awards.  But instead of resting on his accomplishments, he went out and asked Bill Belichick to please take a look at his program through a microscope.  The great ones are continual learners!  Here is part of the colum:

Shortly after Notre Dame’s lopsided loss to Alabama in the BCS championship game, coach Brian Kelly began brainstorming methods for reviewing his program’s strengths and weaknesses. Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports reports one of Kelly’s wishes came true: He talked three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Belichick into consulting on Notre Dame football.

Kelly and Belichick first met last February at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in California. That’s when Kelly popped the question:

“I asked him if he could spend some time watching games and we could discuss,” Kelly told Yahoo! Sports.

Belichick was immediately intrigued at the prospect of studying Notre Dame’s program.

“I just really enjoy talking football,” Belichick said. “So much goes into the entire process that it’s impossible to run out of things to work on – coaching, playing, practice, preparation, scouting, technology, how the whole structure fits together.”

In March, the Patriots coach went to work breaking down game film with Notre Dame’s coaching staff, analyzing its schemes and dissecting the program’s deficiencies. Kelly said the most valuable time Belichick spent was coaching his coaches how to coach.

Read the entire column here.

WHAT BILL BELICHICK LOVES ABOUT THE GAME OF FOOTBALL

I came across this short column by Mark Daniels for BostonHerald.com -- great insight into Bill Belichick and why he got into coaching and why he still loves it:

This season will mark Bill Belichick’s 38th year in the NFL. The Patriots coach started out as a special assistant with the Baltimore Colts in 1975.

That position only paid him $25 a week.

Today, as he enters his 14th season with the Pats, Belichick got a bit nostalgic. When asked what it was about football that he loved, Belichick said it was simple.

“I like football,” he said. “I like the game. I like the players. That’s what it’s all about… it beats working.”

Speaking of working, Belichick was asked if he had any odd jobs before getting into coaching. Like most high school and college students he did, which included waiting tables and working for the Mayflower moving company.

His favorite summer job, however, was working for his dad’s summer football camp. It gave him his first taste of football coaching and he’s been at it ever since.

“Yeah, high school and college - I had plenty of (odd jobs),” Belichick said. “But I was fortunate that I was able to work at my dad’s football camps, which was two to three weeks over the summer. That was really a great experience for me. It was a summer job that was a week off from my other summer jobs. That was waiting (tables) or working for Mayflower moving or whatever that would be.

“It was good because I had the opportunity to work with a lot of coaches. College coaches, a lot of guys who eventually became coaches. A couple coaches… that I actually worked with my first year at the Colts that were at my dad’s camps. There were three of them on that staff. So, you know, that was a great opportunity for me to work in those camps. There was a lot of good coaches that were working with kids who were in high school, junior high school. Not that I was a full-fledged coach or anything, but just the experience of being around and seeing a lot of the things – hearing coaches talking, exchange ideas, seeing coaches coach different techniques at the same position. It was a great experience. That wasn’t a high-paying summer job, but it was a good job. Glad I had it.”

BRENDAN SUHR AND 5 TRAITS GREAT COACHES POSSESS

From A Step Up Assistant Coaching Symposium, Brendan Suhr shares five traits that great coaches possess.

1. Energy, enthusiasm and passion -- everyday.
2. Determination -- mental toughness.
3. They are optimist = competitive advantage in being optimistic.
4. Develop skills -- Tip: become an expert in some part of the game.
5. They love their players -- can be tough on them if they don't know you love them.

POSITIVES THAT DERIVE FROM A TALKING DEFENSE

·         Intimidates opponent.

·         Gives defense a head start.

·         Gives man on ball more confidence.

·         Wakes up a disengaged defender.

·         Catches a mistake before it happens.

·         Energizes team.

via Kevin Eastman

BIG-GAME PREPARATION: LESS IS MORE

"The key to performing under pressure at the highest possible level, regardless of circumstance, is preparation in the context of your Standard of Performance and a thorough assimilation by your organization of the actions and attitudes contained within your philosophy of leadership. I might do even less strategizing for a Super bowl game, because in the midst of the extreme pressure I placed a premium on fundamentals, the skills and the execution ability the team already possessed as a result of our concentration and hard work going all the way back to day one of training camp and the previous training camp and the one before that."
 
From "The Score Takes Care of Itself" by Bill Walsh