How do you play when things aren’t going your way? "Resilience shows in a lot of different ways. How you play when things aren't going your way really defines you as a player." Championship players don't want to be the best player on the team each night Championship players want to be the best player for the team each night. pic.twitter.com/snOmZijrua — The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) May 1, 2023 ..read more

“What you think. What you do. What’s important to you.” "Character is an accumulation of your thoughts, habits, and priorities.  Those three things determine the choices that you make.  Then, the choices that you make – make you who you are." -Nick Saban The choices you make influence the path you can take. pic.twitter.com/hhHx2oODZ3 — The Winning Difference (@thewinningdiff1) April 4, 2023 ..read more

“I’ve never seen anyone work the way he does,” Thibodeau said of Brunson. “And he does it in front of everyone, he does it in our gym, does it all summer long, he does it at a game speed. He never has to adjust in a game because of the way he prepares himself. He conditions himself to play big minutes. Just a tremendous leader ..read more

(From Admired Leaders) Renowned Stanford Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer wrote a doozy of a book in 2015 entitled Leadership BS. It seems some titles create more noise years after publication, and that appears to be the case with Pfeffer’s book. It is getting some play once again in small and large organizations.  The chapters inside the book claim contemporary leadership advice gets it all wrong. Successful business leaders, Pfeffer attempts to prove through a series of research studies and anecdotal examples, do the opposite of what is generally thought to be effective.  A ..read more

An interesting approach from Admired Leaders when you can’t find a consensus. Working toward consensus when making a major decision is a worthy goal.  Consensus fosters goodwill for future decisions, as well as ensuring the buy-in so critical to executing or implementing the decision. But smart and strong-minded colleagues sometimes disagree.  When consensus is not achievable, leaders must have an alternate path to make the decision without resorting to making the call unilaterally. Reviewing the arguments on both sides of the decision and exploring the reasons one or more colleagues ..read more

What’s more important to you as a coach – your culture or your talent? I think a lot of coaches would answer that question by saying their culture, but that won’t always be reflected in their actions. It’s easy to say our culture is what’s most important, but it’s hard to pass up elite talent. I don’t know that there is a black and white answer to the question of culture or talent. You need a lot of both to win consistently. And there are plenty of players who are talented and great for your culture, so if you constantly face the question of culture or talent in recruiting, you probably aren’t ..read more

As a coach, what is your relationship with your decisions? Good stuff from Admired Leaders: Leaders develop a distinct relationship with the decisions they and others make. Decisions can be owned completely, partially, or not at all. Interestingly, the degree of ownership for a decision has little to do with the quality of the decision or whether the leader thinks it is a wise choice.  Even believing a decision is the right or best choice does not equate to fully owning that decision. The commitment to fully embrace a decision is left entirely up to the leader. It can never be forced or c ..read more

Tampa Bay Rays President of Baseball Operations Erik Meander talks about their approach. Are you willing to look at things differently, and judge how much weight should be put into certain areas regardless of how everyone else is looking at it? Their goals, he said, “are similar to any other organization’s goals.” And that is to win as many games as possible. But he conceded that they might look differently than other teams at the things that happen on a field and how those things connect to winning. Said Neander: “Does the industry put more weight on some of those than others? Less weight on ..read more

This is a very interesting post between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation from Admired Leaders. When trying to motivate our coaches, players and teams, I think this is often overlooked. We think of motivation as reward, punishment or incentive – giving our kids a penalty if they do it wrong, or a reward if the do it right. But that type of motivation generally helps in the short term, but doesn’t last. Studies have shown that the best motivators are intrinsic – autonomy, mastery and purpose. People are inspired by having control of their work, the ability to do that work at a high level, and ..read more

In September of 2021, Ed Cooley wanted to have a meeting with his veteran players. We were coming off a below average year at Providence College (the covid year, played in front of no fans) and we had lost our best player, David Duke, to the NBA. We were fortunate that the NCAA granted everyone an extra year due to the pandemic, so Nate Watson and Noah Horchler came back for one more year. They would be our starting front court. We had Jared Bynum, Ed Croswell, and AJ Reeves returning, and we added two graduate transfers out of the portal, Al Durham from Indiana and Justin Minaya from South Ca ..read more