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| Positive Article |
3 Actions You Can Take Right Now To Make Your Team Excellent
By Dawn Redd
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. - Aristotle
I want my athletes to get as good as they can possibly be while they're with me...and I'm sure I'm not the only coach who feels that way. So when I stumbled upon an article called, The Mundanity of Excellence by Daniel Chambliss, I knew that I wanted to bring it to you guys. It's a study on swimmers, but I think it can not only be applied to team sports, but to us coaches, folks in the business world...anyone who wants to be better! The author defines excellence as the consistent superiority of performance...I think that's a goal we can all get behind! So let's check out how to be excellent.
Here's what our athletes need to do in order to be excellent
* Make qualitative improvements. So what does that mean? In the article, the author talks about how excellence doesn't come solely from making quantitative adjustments...by just doing more of an activity. It comes from making targeted adjustments within that activity, much like I talked about in The Secrets To Greatness Are Within Your Control. It would be silly for us to tell our athletes that they just need to pass more and more to get better...if they're passing the ball behind their heads! Yes, they've got to do more, but that "more" should be in the context of making adjustments as necessary. Doing more of the correct thing will yield great results. Other examples of qualitative improvements could be eating healthier, trying harder in the weight room, or practicing with more intensity.
* Practice excellence with the little things. As a swimmer quoted in the article says, "people don't know how ordinary success is." Excellence seems to be the meeting together of a bunch of small things that, when done well and with consistency, create a superb athlete. Those things could be going to the trainer, taking warmup seriously, focusing in on the minor angle changes that need to be made to take a pass from really good to perfect. Doing those things daily will put your athletes on the road to excellence. As the author says, "winning is nothing more than the synthesis of a countless number of little things."
* Find motivation every day. Athletes on the road to excellence find the everyday things (going to practice, warmup drills, etc.) fun, rewarding, and challenging...they're able to make them into challenges. The author tells a story of a swimmer who was fiercely competitive, who made everything into a race: who could get dressed the fastest, who could get to the pool the fastest, who could finish their warmups the fastest...he just loved to compete. This desire to win in practice helped him to develop a habit of winning and made competition ordinary. Therefore, the big swim meet really was just another meet, because he was so used to competing every day. Because there was no significant change in his approach to practices versus meets and his training mirrored competition...he became excellent.
I hope that we're all able to get our teams fired up about this concept... that being good isn't reserved for some secret society of athletes. But for those who are willing to consistently and attentively work at it.
Author's Bio
Dawn Redd is the Head Volleyball Coach at Beloit College. Come visit Coach Dawn's community of coaching nerds and team leaders over at her blog, http://www.coachdawnwrites.com, where she teaches how to become an excellent coach, motivate individuals, and build successful teams.
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