Dan Blank - Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because Youre a Girl

(and other truths about winning)

By
Dan Blank

2006

This manuscript is protected by U.S. Copyright law. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced or distributed without expressed written permission from the author.

This book is dedicated to all the players Ive ever coached who genuinely believed there was no such thing as an unwinnable game.

Well-behaved women seldom make history.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Okay, youre a girl, you play a sport and you want to win and win a lot. Fabulous.

The problem is that, well youre a girl. That means coaches dont talk to you the same way they talk to boys. Youre the recipient of a nice little double standard in which the world lowers its expectations of you because of your gender. Chances are that every coach youve ever had softened his message to you because youre a girl and not a boy. Let me tell you something: That stops right now.

Im going to let you in on a little secret: When its time to play, I dont care how nice you are. I dont care that you made the Deans List or volunteered as a candy striper or saved a whale. When its game time, all I really care about is that you do everything in your power to win the stinkin game. Got it?

Im going to teach you everything I know about winning. And Im going to weave these lessons into the story of a group of soccer players I coached at a small NAIA school in Daytona Beach. Why? Because they got it. They werent super talented or super athletic, but when it came to competition, they totally got it. They arent celebrities. You wont know their names and you havent seen them on television, but dont be misled. Inside the bubble in which we lived, these girls became notorious for their willingness to do whatever was necessary to win.

Eventually I left that school and moved on to become a Division I coach. As I write this book, I have been a Division I coach for seven years. I could hide behind the Division I label and write about the players Ive coached at a much more high-profile university, but Im not going to do that. Why not? Because this book isnt so much about what I taught a group of female soccer players; its about what they taught me. Its all those lessons I learned from observing a group of players that overachieved on such a grand scale that their achievements deserved to be documented. I want to give credit where credit is due.

Many of the players youre about to meet werent highly recruited by the nations top programs because they were flawed in some form or fashion they werent big enough or fast enough or talented enough. And most of them didnt fit the girl-next-door image that we prefer in our female athletes. These girls were hardly typical. They were renegades and hellions and misfits. They werent afraid to color outside of the lines, and no one ever accused them of compassion at least not during a soccer game. They were loud and obnoxious and funny and they didnt care what you thought about them. They became the most hated team in the Florida Sun Conference because thats exactly what they wanted. But make no mistake about it they were winners and you can learn a lot from them.

Its time for you to stop worrying about the way youre supposed to act and to start focusing on the way to bury your opponents. So, lets take off the kid gloves and start talking to you like a competitor instead of talking to you like a girl.

There are many coaches who are excellent at teaching the game. They are superb at helping you to improve technically, tactically and physically. Those coaches make you a better player. But make no mistake about it, theres a difference between being a player and being a competitor. Most athletes strike some type of balance between the two. But winners, regardless of their level of technical/tactical/physical ability, always have their competitive gas pedal pinned to the floor. When game time arrives, those other abilities are stagnant. You wont become magically faster, smarter or more talented between the first whistle and the last. In order to impose yourself on the contest at maximum volume, youve got to maximize your competitive fury. Let me put it to you another way: All other things being equal, the competitor beats the player.

The game you play exists in a bubble, and you need to compartmentalize it accordingly. If you want to succeed in the theater of competition, then you have to make peace with the rules of engagement that exist in that theater. You have to rid yourself of that tiny voice that keeps nagging you; the one that says you must always work and play well with others. Youve got to give yourself permission to do what is necessary to win. If you dont, believe me, youre going to lose to the competitor who does.

Ive been coaching female athletes for 24 years and I believe they can be neatly divided into two groups: those who get it, and those who dont. The ones who dont get it far outnumber those who do. Thats why coaches are so elated when a player who gets it ends up on their roster. Those are the players that win championships.

The ones who dont get it are programmed to complicate their existence as athletes because they've never truly figured out the purpose of competition. They are forever walking an impossible high-wire, struggling to find a balance between competitiveness and relationships and being the girl that society wants them to be. Their competitive life is a never-ending compromise, a search for a comfortable middle-ground so that their desire to conquer won't threaten their social status or their relationships with teammates.

That compromise dilutes their value as competitors. Although their competitive volume has the capacity of reaching ten, they won't turn the dial above seven. Instead of charging mightily into the arena of competition, they are always dragging one foot in a puddle of mediocrity.

The beautiful few who get it are not hamstrung by this compromise. They have no problem separating their off-field relationships from their competitive duties. The two entities exist in two separate containers. They can be great competitors and they can be wonderful friends. They are hardly ever both at the exact same moment.

There is one very simple element that separates those who get it from those who dont: The ones who get it fully grasp that the very simple premise of competition is to separate the winner from the loser. Thats it.

The ones who get it have this premise digested. It dictates the way they approach competition during matches and training sessions. It categorizes their relationships with teammates relationships that differ radically between moments of competition and all other moments. They dont bow to anyone during the throes of competition. They play to win because regardless of what you've been told, winning is in fact the end-all, be-all of competition.

The primary purpose of this book is to teach those who want to get it, how to get it.

I am a women's college soccer coach. My job is to teach young women that they have every right to want to win as much as men do, that they dont need permission to do what is necessary to achieve victory and that they should never apologize for conquering an opponent.

From 1998-2006, I served as the womens soccer coach at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Due to the specialized academic curriculum of our university and our limited amount of scholarships, one thing was guaranteed: We would never be as talented as the best teams in the nation. We didnt have the academic curriculum to attract the very best players, nor the scholarship money to buy them. To beat those teams and many others, we needed to maximize the tools that we had. And the most powerful tool at our disposal was always going to be our attitude - our