John OSullivan - Every Moment Matters: How the Worlds Best Coaches Inspire Their Athletes and Build Championship Teams

EVERY MOMENT MATTERS

How the Worlds Best Coaches Inspire Their Athletes and Build Championship Teams

John O'Sullivan

EVERY MOMENT MATTERS

How the Worlds Best Coaches Inspire Their Athletes and

Build Championship Teams

2019 John OSullivan. All rights reserved.

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ISBN: 978-1-7343426-0-4 paperback

ISBN: 978-1-7343426-1-1 ebook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019919285

Changing the Game Project

60643 Thunderbird

Bend, Oregon, 97702

www.ChangingTheGameProject.com

Cover Design by:

David Miles, Bushel and Peck Books

Interior Design by:

Laura Jones, lauraflojo.com

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Why Coaches Matter

A good coach can change a game. A great coach can change a life. JOHN WOODEN The difference between an artist and a coach is that an artist can throw out his work at the end of the day. The coach doesnt get to start over. TERRY STEINER

I n early 2001, I sat in my office at the University of Vermont. It was a typical bone-chilling winter day and a quiet time of the year for an assistant college soccer coach. The phone was not ringing much. We didnt have any recruiting events to attend, and our players had just returned from winter break and could not start spring practice yet. Then the phone rang.

The call was from a former player of mine from my first coaching job at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. His name was Pat, and to this day, he is one of my favorite players I have ever coached. He was hard-working, honest, fiercely competitive, an inspirational leader, and just a great person, both on and off the field. It was amazing to hear his voice and even more exciting that he was coming to visit UVM, where he was applying to medical school.

As we caught up that day, he said something that changed me forever as a coach. John, I just wanted you to know that studying for the MCATs is really hard, and college was hard, but every time I want to put down the books or give up early when I am working out, I hear your voice, said Pat.

You hear my voice? I asked.

You keep telling me to push a little harder, do a little more, Pat explained. I keep hearing you say, Was that your very best? So, I pick up my book and study a little more. Or I go back and do another set in the weight room. I just wanted to say thanks, Coach. Because you are still coaching me every day, even though I havent seen you in a few years.

We finished up our call, and I hung up the phone and took a few minutes to digest what he had said. I shared the story with one of my fellow assistant coaches, and his response was, Thats great; how cool that he called you.

Thats not great, I thought. That sucks. He remembers everything I said and did. He was one of those kids I got along with great and was pretty positive toward. But he had a lot of teammates that I wasnt a very good coach for, that I was downright cruel to at times, I think. What about all of them? For some of them, I was their last coach because they quit.

When I left the office that day, I went through a rolodex of former players in my head. I was still only twenty-nine and not long into my coaching career, but it didnt take me long to come up with a few names that I had not been a very good coach for. It scared me.

It scared me because in that moment I realized that our words and actions as a coach leave a long-lasting impact. They can stick with a young athlete for the rest of his life. And these moments in which we speak to our athletes are often very emotional, in the heat of an athletic contest, and they occur in public situations in front of friends, teammates, and families.

What we say and do in that moment can make or break them. It can be a moment that builds them up and carries them through tough times, both on and off the field. Or it can be a lingering thought in the back of their mind, saying over and over, I am not good. I am not enough. In a nutshell, I realized that every action matters. That every word matters.

I realized that every moment matters.

Up until that time, I had spent my coaching career looking for the magic practice session that the great coaches were using. I had spent countless hours filling binder after binder with the X s and O s of coaching. And what I realized in that moment shook me to the core.

All those sessions, all that sport-specific knowledge was important, but it was not sufficient. There was no magic practice session or set of world-beating tactics I was missing. Yes, that stuff was critical to know, but all that came second to the human side of coaching.

I realized in that moment that coaching was not simply an X s and O s business. Coaching was a relationship business. My players would not care how much I knew about soccer until they knew how much I cared about them as a person. And in that area, I was falling short.

Fast forward to today, and I am still trying to develop both sides of my coaching game. I am as passionate as ever about finding and utilizing great practice sessions and building a methodology that produces creative, fast-thinking, and resilient athletes. But I am more focused on becoming a better version of me. And I am more focused on reaching every one of my athletes on a human level, getting to know the person and what makes her tick.

I am more focused on a concept that my friend Dr. Martin Toms so eloquently iterates: You coach a child, not a sport.

Coaching Is about Relationships

This book is different than other coaching books. It isnt about my winning season as we so often read about. Many coaches have covered that well. It is not about my losing season either as thankfully some coaches have been vulnerable enough to write about. It is also not a collection of sport-specific X s and O s. If you can spell Google , you can find plenty of practices and training plans these days.

This book is about the human side of coaching and making the most of every moment you have with your athletes. It is about finding your purpose as a coach. It is about the relationships and connections between athletes and coaches, among teammates, and among all the parents and other adults that influence how teams function and perform. It is about creating engaging training sessions that foster enjoyment and love of sport, as well as development. It is a collection of stories, anecdotes, research, and interviews with some of the top coaching practitioners, sport scientists, psychologists, skill acquisition experts, and educators in the world, interspersed with a few of my own stories from nearly three decades of coaching. It will help you coach in a way that allows your athletes to know that you care, so they will care what you know.

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