Coaching Better Every Season


Book Description

Presents the best coaching methods and practices for each season on the sport calendar – pre-season, in-season, post-season, and off-season - and offers specific actions, tools, and guidelines for coaches to create a cycle of continuous improvement for themselves, their athletes, and their teams.




Changing the Game


Book Description

The modern day youth sports environment has taken the enjoyment out of athletics for our children. Currently, 70% of kids drop out of organized sports by the age of 13, which has given rise to a generation of overweight, unhealthy young adults. There is a solution. John O’Sullivan shares the secrets of the coaches and parents who have not only raised elite athletes, but have done so by creating an environment that promotes positive core values and teaches life lessons instead of focusing on wins and losses, scholarships, and professional aspirations. Changing the Game gives adults a new paradigm and a game plan for raising happy, high performing children, and provides a national call to action to return youth sports to our kids.




Coaching Up! Inspiring Peak Performance When It Matters Most


Book Description

Connect, engage, motivate, and inspire using top coaching techniques Coaching Up! is about inspiring those who matter to you to achieve peak performance. Whether you are a coach, a business leader, a civic activist, a teacher, a counselor, or a parent, this book will offer you a powerful, highly effective way to connect to the people you care about and move them forward toward their best selves. In sports, coaches have developed ways of connecting with their players quickly in the "heat of the battle," inspiring them to perform to their fullest potential and "leave it all on the field." Interestingly, although these techniques have not been codified, great coaches have independently developed remarkably similar models. This book aligns these techniques and distills their essence into a fundamental skill set that anyone can use to connect with, support, and inspire his or her colleagues, teammates, friends, and family members. At its foundation, great coaching is based on a solid set of techniques that can be applied to all areas of life. Essentially, those skills boil down to forging authentic connections, providing genuine support, and offering concise direction. While our everyday pressures may be less intense than those of a championship, the long-term game is even more important. Why not borrow from the best to develop the skills and abilities to win every day? Inspire and motivate people to higher performance Improve communication in high-stakes situations Be more effective both professionally and socially Getting inside the way great coaching works gives you an unparalleled glimpse at the core of inspiration. A great coach can make the difference between a mediocre player and a world champion. What would that difference look like if you could inspire every colleague in your business? Everyone who matters to you in your personal life? You can be the source of empowerment and motivation that helps the people around you reach higher, go further, and achieve more. Coaching Up! gives you the game plan—and shows you how to run the plays.




Coaching Agile Teams


Book Description

The Provocative and Practical Guide to Coaching Agile Teams As an agile coach, you can help project teams become outstanding at agile, creating products that make them proud and helping organizations reap the powerful benefits of teams that deliver both innovation and excellence. More and more frequently, ScrumMasters and project managers are being asked to coach agile teams. But it’s a challenging role. It requires new skills—as well as a subtle understanding of when to step in and when to step back. Migrating from “command and control” to agile coaching requires a whole new mind-set. In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins gives agile coaches the insights they need to adopt this new mind-set and to guide teams to extraordinary performance in a re-energized work environment. You’ll gain a deep view into the role of the agile coach, discover what works and what doesn’t, and learn how to adapt powerful skills from many allied disciplines, including the fields of professional coaching and mentoring. Coverage includes Understanding what it takes to be a great agile coach Mastering all of the agile coach’s roles: teacher, mentor, problem solver, conflict navigator, and performance coach Creating an environment where self-organized, high-performance teams can emerge Coaching teams past cooperation and into full collaboration Evolving your leadership style as your team grows and changes Staying actively engaged without dominating your team and stunting its growth Recognizing failure, recovery, and success modes in your coaching Getting the most out of your own personal agile coaching journey Whether you’re an agile coach, leader, trainer, mentor, facilitator, ScrumMaster, project manager, product owner, or team member, this book will help you become skilled at helping others become truly great. What could possibly be more rewarding?




The Sociology of Sports Coaching


Book Description

Sports coaching is a social activity. At its heart lies a complex interaction between coach and athlete played out within the context of sport, itself a socio-culturally defined set of practices. In this ground-breaking book, leading international coaching scholars and coaches argue that an understanding of sociology and social theory can help us better grasp the interactive nature of coaching and consequently assist in demystifying the mythical ‘art’ of the activity. The Sociology of Sports Coaching establishes an alternative conceptual framework from which to explore sports coaching. It firstly introduces the work of key social theorists, such as Foucault, Goffman and Bourdieu among others, before highlighting the principal themes that link the study of sociology and sports coaching, such as power, interaction, and knowledge and learning. The book also outlines and develops the connections between theory and practice by placing the work of each selected social theorist alongside contemporary views on that work from a current practicing coach. This is the first book to present a critical sociological perspective of sports coaching and, as such, it represents an important step forward in the professionalization of the discipline. It is essential reading for any serious student of sports coaching or the sociology of sport, and for any reflective practitioner looking to become a better coach.




Stop Competing and Start Winning


Book Description

The pairing of a business consultant with a Division I head coach may seem unusual, but management consulting has many lessons to bring to coaching. Conversations between friends connected by their love of volleyball developed into innovative ideas about how coaches can run the "business" component of their program, stay connected with their players, and elevate their team's success. Over the past five years, the authors have worked together to bring select concepts and tools from the world of business into the University of Utah's volleyball program. We have presented our approach to numerous coaches' groups, and, based on the positive feedback from coaches at all levels, we have decided to collect these concepts and tools into this book.Many coaches share a similar career trajectory. They started as players, entered coaching as a volunteer assistant coach or as a director of operations, earned promotion to assistant coach, and, eventually, were hired into a head coaching role. What they learned along the way depended on who they had to learn from. If they were fortunate to learn from great thinkers and communicators, they were well prepared when their turn came to run a program. If they had less capable teachers, they had to learn by trial and error and by developing on their own their approach to managing a program.But no matter how effective the coaches they trained under, they learned lessons from inside the world of their sport. Because of this, many coaches have similar bodies of knowledge. A given coach may be better or worse than their competition, but they are all drawing from the same storehouse of ideas.Winning as a coach requires incorporating ideas wherever you can find them and blending those which make sense to you into your program to make it more effective and more efficient. If you can access relevant ideas and tools from outside of coaching (whether from business, politics, healthcare, charity, volunteer work, or other fields), you will provide yourself with lasting competitive advantages.




Make the Leap


Book Description

The key to unlocking your potential isn't in training harder or doing more sophisticated workouts. It's in thinking better about your training. Think better, train better.Make the Leap provides athletes and coaches a step-by-step guide to thinking more effectively about all aspects of training. It begins with an explanation of what "leaps" are, why they happen, and the "Build, Leap, Sustain" Leap Cycle all athletes go through.It then breaks down, via 11 Optimal Training Principles, 4 mental model spotlights and numerous stories, visuals, and tactical suggestions, exactly how to think better about your training. Some of these topics include:- the importance of attitude and mindset- the Hidden Training Program and how to reveal it- systems vs purposeful practice and when to implement them- North Star goals vs Next Step goals, and how to set each effectively- the four types of mistakes and how to make them better- and many other topics, including the author's powerful Momentum ModelTwo-time National Coach of the Year Ken Reeves said of the book: "A mental running clinic in book form, Make the Leap allows an individualized approach for each person that reads the book. Put it next to your bed stand for that 15 minutes of reading every night. It has the potential to inspire and educate you each and every reading."Olympians, hall of fame coaches, and competitive runners all agree: this book will help you and your athletes think better, train better, and make the leap.




Coaching Young Athletes


Book Description

This guide introduces and explains the basics of coaching, such as coaching philosophy, sport psychology, sport pedagogy, sport physiology, sport medicine, parent management, and sport law.




InSideOut Coaching


Book Description

In this inspirational yet practical book, the man Parade called “the most important coach in America,” subject of the national bestseller Season of Life, Joe Ehrmann, describes his coaching philosophy and explains how sports can transform lives at every level of play, from the earliest years to professional sports. Coaches have a tremendous platform, says Joe Ehrmann, a former Syracuse University All-American and NFL star. Perhaps second only to parents, coaches can impact young people as no one else can. But most coaches fail to do the teaching, mentoring, even life-saving intervention that their platform provides. Too many are transactional coaches; they focus solely on winning and meeting their personal needs. Some coaches, however, use their platform. They teach the Xs and Os, but also teach the Ys of life. They help young people grow into responsible adults; they leave a lasting legacy. These are the transformational coaches. These coaches change lives, and they also change society by helping to develop healthy men and women. InSideOut Coaching explains how to become a transformational coach. Coaches first have to “go inside” and articulate their reasons for coaching. Only those who have taken the InSideOut journey can become transformational. Joe Ehrmann provides examples of coaches in his life who took this journey and taught him how to find something bigger than himself in sports.He describes his own InSideOut experience, starting with the death of his beloved brother, which helped him understand how sports could transcend the playing field. He gives coaches the information and the tools they need to become transformational. Joe Ehrmann has taken his message about the extraordinary power of sports all over the country. It has been warmly endorsed by NFL head coaches, athletic directors at major universities, high school head coaches, even business groups and community organizations. Now any parent-coach or school or community coach can read Ehrmann’s message and learn how to make sports a life-changing experience.




HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership Lessons from Sports (featuring interviews with Sir Alex Ferguson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Andre Agassi)


Book Description

Leadership and management lessons from the sports world. The world's elite athletes and coaches achieve high performance through inspiring leadership, mental toughness, and direction-setting strategic choices. Harvard Business Review has talked to many of these high performers throughout the years to learn how their success translates to the world of business. If you read nothing else on management lessons from the world of sports, read these 10 articles by athletes, coaches, and leadership experts. We've combed through our archive and selected the articles that will best help you drive performance. This book will inspire you to: Improve on your weaknesses, not just your strengths Take care of your body for sustained mental performance Increase your confidence and manage your energy before an important event Turn a struggling team around Understand the limits of performance metrics Focus on long-term goals to overcome setbacks Understand where the analogy of sports and business doesn't work This collection of articles includes "Ferguson's Formula," by Anita Elberse with Sir Alex Ferguson; "Life's Work: An Interview with Greg Louganis"; "The Making of a Corporate Athlete," by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz; "The Tough Work of Turning a Team Around," by Bill Parcells; "How an Olympic Gold Medalist Learned to Perform Under Pressure: An Interview with Alex Gregory"; "Mental Preparation Secrets of Top Athletes, Entertainers, and Surgeons," an interview with Daniel McGinn by Sarah Green Carmichael; "SoulCycle's CEO on Sustaining Growth in a Faddish Industry," by Melanie Whelan; "Life's Work: An Interview with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar"; "Major League Innovation," by Scott D. Anthony; "Looking Past Performance in Your Star Talent," by Mark de Rond, Adrian Moorhouse, and Matt Rogan; "Life's Work: An Interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov"; "How the Best of the Best Get Better and Better," by Graham Jones; "Life's Work: An Interview with Joe Girardi"; "Why There Is an I in Team," by Mark de Rond; "Life's Work: An Interview with Andre Agassi"; and "Why Sports Are a Terrible Metaphor for Business," by Bill Taylor.