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System Successes by David Arseneault
http://davidarseneaultproductions.info/
Do you want to give new Homewood-Flossmoor girls basketball coach Anthony Smith a good laugh? Ask him about the eight transfer students rumored to be practicing in his gym this summer.
‘‘Eight? Ha, ha, ha!’’ Smith said. ‘‘You got more than I heard. I heard it was more like five or six. .??
‘‘There have been a lot of inquiries about that, but I know that H-F does a thorough job of checking all of that out. I know that we have one, for sure, who is in school and just took a placement test.’’
The one is junior-to-be Faith Suggs, who was one of Plainfield East’s leading scorers as a sophomore. Otherwise, Smith said, anybody from another school who was spied by curious onlookers was, to his knowledge, simply taking advantage of an open gym.
Smith said his new program at H-F has been a work in progress. There was no organized summer-league schedule and no traveling as an actual Vikings team. He does, however, have a very clear plan.
‘‘We are going to put our work
ethic up against anybody in the country, not just the state of Illinois,’’ he said. ‘‘We are going to maximize our potential. It’s what I do.’’
ethic up against anybody in the country, not just the state of Illinois,’’ he said. ‘‘We are going to maximize our potential. It’s what I do.’’
His record stands for itself. In his 12 years at Bolingbrook, Smith won four state titles and produced nine consecutive sectional champions.
During that time, his program was a magnet for the best players in Bolingbrook and for others who managed to find their way to the district and be a part of a program that was well-known throughout the country.
Smith has his share of detractors, including some fellow coaches who question his ethics. But he makes no apologies for being someone for whom kids want to play.
‘‘I don’t know what it is, but kids do enjoy playing for me,’’ he said. ‘‘They do enjoy being pushed. I am available 24/7 to those kids, and the kids and their families do appreciate that and work hard for me.
‘‘If a kid wants to play for me, I’m happy to have them, as long as they are doing it correctly. If other coaches don’t like that, I understand, but I’m not going to change being me just because someone doesn’t like it.’’
Smith said he’s more excited about adding current H-F students to a roster that features more than a half-dozen returnees, including Ashley Johnson and Jaiveonna Norris.
‘‘We had a couple of kids who didn’t play basketball last year [6-3 senior center Kandace Tate and 5-9 senior forward/guard Kelsey Chandler] who I’m looking forward to working with,’’ he said. ‘‘When I saw them [at camp], I thought they might be transfers, too. But they told me, ‘No, we’ve been here, we just didn’t play last season.’ I was like, ‘Holy cow. Anybody else in the hallways?’ I’ll have to look in the hallways and see if there are more of ’em. Those two are going to help us out.’’
Meanwhile, past and present blended together in June, when Morgan Tuck and Nia Moore — two of Smith’s former stars from Bolingbrook — came to H-F and worked out with the kids who were there.
Smith certainly won’t be a forgotten coach in Bolingbrook history.
‘‘It was home,’’ Smith said. ‘‘I went to high school there, grew up there. I knew everyone there. The mayor there [Roger Claar], he was a girls basketball fan, and he loved it and supported it.
‘‘We turned Bolingbrook into a girls basketball town. We competed with the football program. Everybody knew that was the place to be at. We had it going there.’’
Music at Practice
When legendary Texas A&M coach Bear Bryant dragged his men into the unforgiving desolation of Junction, Texas , for training camp, the only sounds you could hear were the dithering slithers of rattlesnakes and the ominous cries of circling turkey buzzards. The real men, the Texas A&M football players he wanted to mold at his famous practices, toiled in silence, save for the occasional snapped bone.
All the above was fine for 1954. But now?
"I go through a practice without music and I think that's really weird," says first-year Wisconsin coach Gary Andersen .
It's a good thing that Andersen doesn't go through a practice without music, and he's not the only one. The past few years around college football , music has become increasingly popular at practice, blared to replicate crowd noise, to encourage non-verbal communication , to motivate players, and for the simple matter that, unlike running toward your deathbed in Junction, Texas, coaches believe music makes football fun.
Penn State athletic director Dave Joyner, who played for the Nittany Lions in the late 1960s, says someone would have had to fashion a record player with a giant horn to provide music on the field when he played. Heck, if such a sound system had been around, Bryant probably would have pumped out the audio version of Chinese water torture , which is practically what coaches were doing 20 years ago.
As an assistant coach at Georgia Tech , Penn State coach Bill O'Brien remembers being introduced to white noise , the UHF frequency. They would play it at certain practices so players would be ready for crowd noise on Saturdays. O'Brien would go home with a headache .
Penn State linebacker Glenn Carson knows the feeling. Joe Paterno piped static through speakers at practice in 2011.
"It was a pain, man," Carson says. "We hated it when that thing came out."
Coaches did this for a reason. As the game has sped up in recent years through spread and no-huddle offenses, communication has become key. O'Brien says teams need to practice with this tempo in practice and with the distractions of a glass-shattering crowd. Proponents believe fast-paced music offers a solution for both, while also being viewed as a morale booster.
"I spent a week down at Disney World this year," says Purdue coach Darrell Hazell . "It's interesting. If you sit back and evaluate people when there's music that's being played, watch how they're acting. They're upbeat, bouncing around, they're dancing. When there's not music being played, their shoulders are down. So I think there's a lot to it."
Music has long been connected to feelings of contentment and even camaraderie. Dating to the Apollo space missions , astronauts have woken up to favorite songs rather than typical alarms as a way of promoting bonding among the astronauts and ground control.
Teresa Lesiuk, assistant professor and interim program director of music therapy at the University of Miami , completed a recent study illustrating mood enhancement for information technology workers who were able to listen to music at their discretion, which led to greater productivity. Though no studies have focused on football, she says that familiar music, played at the right time, likely could have an activating effect on the players' moods.
Hazell is one of the many believers in music in the Big Ten Conference , along with O'Brien, Andersen, Illinois coach Tim Beckman , Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio and Indiana coach Kevin Wilson .
When Andersen was hired several months ago at Wisconsin, one of his first purchases was the Coach Comm tempo system. This expensive, portable gadget synchronizes practice with music or crowd noise. It allows a coach to program the system so that specific music mixes with specific drills, and times every aspect of practice. Andersen says his practices are now more efficient (one hour and 50 minutes long) and more productive.
"We wanted to have a distraction for kids to let them understand it might be music you like, it might be music you hate," he says. "It might be loud so you have to focus and learn and hear better and pay better attention. It forces you to pay attention. It forces you to coach in that environment on game day."
Teams such as Wyoming , Oregon , Utah , UCLA , Arizona and Louisiana-Lafayette also use the tempo system, and others would like to get one if they could raise the needed funds. A rather envious Wilson desires the Coach Comm system so he can program his voice to make announcements about a change in drills at practice at the same time the music changes.
"It's just like you're at the club on Saturday night and the remix of the song comes on," he says.
Of course, you also could bring the club to practice. Louisiana-Lafayette coach Mark Hudspeth has done that. Since last year, a student named Chris Hilliard (DJ Chris) has come to nearly every Louisiana-Lafayette practice and every home and away game.
At practices, he plays current music throughout. At games, he's in the locker room before the team, setting the optimal mood.
Hudspeth, 44, said his football coaches would never allow music when he played. He believes music promotes an environment of intensity and enjoyment. Every week they have a hip-hop day, Remix Wednesday and Throwback Thursday, when Hudspeth plays his favorite Run DMC and Sir Mix-A-Lot songs from the 1980s and early 1990s.
There is a danger to all this, though. Music isn't always a panacea for uninspired football or a catalyst for communication. The song, like any college football player, must rise to the occasion.
"We tried country one practice, but we had to start practice over," Hudspeth says. "It didn't resonate, even for the guys who like country."
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/sports/college-national/coaches-players-get-their-groove-on-with-practice-music-in-college-football-698773/#ixzz2bcNm7JWB
Component of Toughness- Trust
Trust is a big word in Gary Andersen’s personal dictionary.
After he was hired to coach the University of Wisconsin football team in December, Andersen knew nothing substantial would take place with the Badgers until a circle of trust could be built between himself and a group of players who have endured enough coaching turnover to be skeptical of the new guy.
Well, time’s up. With fall camp set to start Monday, the meet-and-greet session is over. From now on, the focus will switch to football and getting ready for a season the Badgers hope will end up with a fourth straight Big Ten Conference title.
“I think in large part the period of transition with coach Andersen and his staff is over,” linebacker Chris Borland said. “We’ve had seven months now to get to know one another, to get to know the schemes. We’re ready once fall camp starts to hit the ground running.”Credit for that goes to Andersen and his staff. They set out to make a group of players they had never met feel comfortable around them, and it appears they’ve succeeded. With the heavy lifting about to start, a foundation has been laid that should minimize any problems created by Bret Bielema’s abrupt departure and Andersen’s subsequent arrival from Utah State.
“You just look for the trust to come from coaches to players and players to coaches,” Andersen said. “I had the leadership committee over to the house the other day — it’s 30 young men on our team — and just the way we can move around each other, the way conversations go, I don’t believe they’re very guarded any more. The way kids move themselves through the hallways, walk into coaches’ offices. We need to be approachable, whether it’s an academic question, a social question, and they come in and they do that now. I think we’ve made great strides there.”
Don’t just take his word for it. When the Badgers gathered for media day Friday, player after player spoke of how Andersen won them over by being exactly what he said he was — a coach who shoots straight with his players, who gets to know them on a personal level and who puts their interests above all else.
For wide receiver Jared Abbrederis, it didn’t take long at all for Andersen to gain the players’ acceptance.
“The day that we found out he called all of his Utah State players (to say goodbye), I think right then we knew we had a guy coming in who would appreciate us,” Abbrederis said. “Basically, right off the bat we knew he would be a good coach for us. That really helped, just knowing that he’s all about the players.”
Others took a little longer before they were convinced. That’s understandable given that turnover among assistant coaches had been a constant in the program even before Bielema surprised everyone by taking the job at Arkansas.
Most, though, said they were hooked the first time Andersen spoke to the team. The players immediately sensed that he was a stand-up guy who meant what he said.
“I think it’s been like this the whole time he’s been here,” offensive tackle Ryan Groy said. “Everything he said in the beginning has come true. Everything he said — how it’s going to be, how he’s going to coach, how practices are going to be — has come true and that’s just how it’s been. That has earned our trust.”
Indeed, Andersen’s style has played well in all corners of the locker room.
“I know Coach B and his staff truly cared about us, but I think the difference with this staff is, they do care about you and they take every opportunity to show you they do,” safety Dezmen Southward said. “There’s been many times when coach Andersen will just randomly call me. Not that he wanted to talk about football or class or anything like that. He literally calls me because he wants to know how I’m doing. That’s something you really don’t get everywhere.”
The players not only value Andersen’s honesty and genuine interest in their lives, they appreciate the little things he does for them. That is especially true of practice. Even in fall camp, Andersen will run shorter, snappier practices and get the players home earlier than they’re used to, which should help reduce the drudgery of camp and the wear and tear on their bodies.
“It just went a lot easier with this whole coaching staff,” tight end Jacob Pedersen said. “You’d think it would be harder because it was almost an entirely new staff, but this went really smooth. I think he demands your respect and we demand his. There’s kind of a mutual thing there. We trust him. We know he’s going to do everything he can to put us in the best position to win. When you’ve got a coach that’s doing that, you’re going to give him everything you’ve got.”
That won’t guarantee another Big Ten title, but it will assure that starting Monday the coaching transition will no longer be an issue.
Toughness by Jay Bilas (The Book)
In his book on the same topic, Bilas looks at the characteristics of tough people. He seeks out people in sports and business who are tough in their approach to sport and life.
Toughness Can Be Learned
"Toughness isn't physical. It has nothing to do with size, physical strength, or athleticism. It's an intangible, an attitude, a philosophy. Some people may be born with the aptitude to be tougher than others, but I believe that true toughness is a skill that can be developed and improved in everyone."
Toughness Is Ability To Be Focused
Roy Willams says, "Toughness is, 'I'm not going to lose sight of what I want to do by what you do, or by outside influences." How often do we see players lose focus because they don't have the toughness to handle missing shots, or refs not calling fouls.
Bill Self says, "Soft is when you choose the easier path when the right path is the harder one."
Toughness Involves Trust
"It requires toughness to to trust others, and to trust and believe in yourself. Trust is a choice."
"The toughest players and teammates believe in what their coaches and their teammates are striving to accomplish, and what they are capable of doing together as a team."
"A great teammate acknowledges the loftier goals and is willing to sacrifice for the benefit of the group. There is no true sacrifice without belief."
Bilas tells a story to illustrate need for trust. He describes as a young team they lost at Carolina to the #1 Tarbheels. On the way back some of the players were talking in glowing terms about how good Carolina was. David Henderson interrupted and said, "We didn't go there to suck up to those guys! I don't want to hear how good you think they are. We were going there to win, and we should have won. If you didn't go there to win, then you shouldn't have made the trip. There is no reason we should not have won. No reason at all." Bilas' point with the story is to say Henderson had a belief in his ability and a belief in his teammates ability- that trust made him a tough competitor.
Trust involves developing a feeling it is not about the opponent or about the refs- it is about us. After Duke was blown out by UNLV in the Final Four- the next year Coach K showed the team the tape of that game before they again played UNLV. While some of his ass't coaches worried it would send a message about how good UNLV was, Coach K's purpose was to show in that game how Duke could have changed the outcome by correcting their errors. The message- it is not about UNLV, it is about Duke.
Tough Players Don't Rationalize
"Accountability is being held to the standard you have accepted as what you want, individually and collectively."
Coach K says, "Toughness is the ability not to rationalize. Rationalization is to make an excuse for not achieving more that you have to that point."
Move to Next Play
Whether the last play was good or the last play was bad, tough players move on to the next play.
Jon Gruden, "One snap at a time."
Bill Self talking about meeting adversity. He says, "If you meet those circumstances differently you're not tough."
Collective Toughness- Trust
"You are not tough alone. The best teams have a collective toughness, and toughness is contagious."
"It is easy to believe in yourself and your team when everything is going well, and wins are piling up. Adversity is where your belief is tested and where true toughness is tested."
Bill Self says, "Peer pressure can make us do things we shouldn't do, but it can make us want to do the tough things, the right things, too."
"Talking is essential to wining a team's confidence. Communication is about connecting and being connected." Players must learn to talk on the floor so "teammates must be able to trust completely that you are there to help them."
NASA talks about- "Responsible to the element, accountable to the mission." That means you take care of your task but ultimately realize the total mission is most important.
Grant Hill says- "When players are willing to hold each other accountable, I think it carries more weight and has more impact. And the coach doesn't have to be the only voice."
"Every player on the team is a 'role player.' The most important role of all, the role of being a great teammate. Accepting and embracing a role is really about the selfless willingness to sacrifice. You have to accept you are second to the team."
Jon Gruden says- "Accepting roles is about a 'big-picture environment,' and it takes a maturity to accept it, to be convinced to buy in fully."
"Toughest teams are the most together teams."
"The toughest teams are not just made up of great players, but of great teammates."
"Being around tough and tough-minded people can and will make everyone else around them tougher. The contagious nature of toughness, of commitment, takes that team to the highest level. If you have a player on your team who loafs, it will allow others to loaf. The best of us fall prey to that lowering of standards."
Toughness Involves Being Prepared
Bob Knight says, "Everyone want to win but only a few are willing to prepare to win." He goes on to say, "You must have the will and concentration necessary to prepare."
Bilas says, "A consistent theme among tough people that I know, they each take confidence from their work."
Herm Edwards says, " When it's your turn, when you have a shot, an opportunity, you have to be prepared for it and take advantage of it." Herm was one of 22 defensive backs as a rookie competing for a spot on the Eagles roster.
Edwards says, "I was mentally tough consistently."
Roy Williams says, "It is like the stock market. The more you invest, the more it means to you. That's ownership. Everything important starts with your investment in it. People say 'all in."
Jon Gruden believes preparation produces confidence, and confidence produces toughness.
Toughness is Discipline
Coach K says, "Discipline is not punishment. Discipline is doing the right thing at the right time, to the best of your ability."
"If we wanted to win a championship, we needed to approach every single game as championship game and give a championship effort in every single practice. Our opponent is not determining our standard of performance."
Bilas commented on his career, "I did not want to be common, I wanted to be uncommon."
Kevin Eastman says, "We focus on excellence in every single action. We are not taking 500 shots. We are taking one perfect shot five hundred time."
Because of a lack of discipline, sometimes players look for short cuts. Tom Crean calls these "hero plays," where a player tries to do something outside of the team concept, or outside what that player is capable of doing.
Toughness Involves Courage
"Courage isn't the absence of fear or doubt. Rather, courage is overcoming it."
Coach K says, "You are not tough alone, and you are not courageous alone."
Steve Kerr describes, "I trusted the process, I trusted the work I had put in, and I was willing to live with the results."
Tough Have Persistence
"It takes toughness to push your limits."
Soccer great Julie Foudy says- "Your threshold is not what you think it is."
Bilas makes a great point about approach to getting better. He talked about how he used to see the purpose of hard work was so practice and games would be "easier." Grant Hill taught him the purpose of hard work was not to make things easier but to make it so you would perform at a higher level- but still be uncomfortable as you pushed your limits.
Bilas' high school drama coach told him, "Don't tell me how tough the situation is, show me how tough you are facing the situation."
Tommy Amaker says, "What is confidence? Hard work plus success equals confidence. You don't just get confidence. You have to earn it."
One Word by Jon Gordon
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| Even Willow knows the concept of One Word. |
One of the topics was on self-modification. The professor claimed self-modification is much harder to accomplish than the modification of other people. He went on to claim the problem for most of us when it comes to self-modification is we start out wanting too much change in ourselves. We know the target we want to reach and we try to get there today. So we have not been reading but we want to get to where we are reading 100 pages a day- we start with a plan of reading 50 pages. We want to lose 30 pounds so we set out to lose 5 pounds per week. Usually with the plans we start out great but we cannot maintain. This is the problem with the classic New Year's resolutions. The lesson was keep it simple and be patient.
Often with my teams, either I would come up with a list of goals or I would have the team come up with a list of goals. In either case, they would be great lists to submit to a coaching course. The problem usually was there were too many goals. While all were good, I could not remember them all, and the players could not remember them.
This past spring, I had the opportunity to listen to Coach Groth from Illinois speaking. He was talking about his job when he came into Illinois about changing the culture. He was talking about the same things I had heard in "Behavior Mod" class. His idea was to give their lists of goals an acronym. He keeps their rules or goals short lists and has them put into an acronym. His logic- keep it short so can be remembers, and use the acronym so the players can more easily remember.
This is similar to Dick and Tony Bennett's 5 principles of their program. Because the list is short, I am sure their present and former players can recite the lists from memory.
Jon Gordon in One Word takes it a step further. His claim is to be effective in self-modification- whether it is a business, an individual, or a team- you need to have a singular focus. In the book he describes how each New Year's, he and his family participate in a different kind of process of establishing a resolution. Each individual in the family picks out one word which will be the focus of their entire year. And then later, the family as a group picks out one word that will be the focus of the family's year. His logic is that by keeping it so simple, it is easy to have clarity.
He mentions words such as:
Life- focusing decisions and behaviors to show you value life- how you eat, exercising.
Service- focusing on doing things for others.
Patience- being able to not over react to things around.
Energy- being a source of energy to other.
Toughness- how do you handle adversity.
The idea is to pick out one thing to be your focus- change one part of your personality (individual or team) at a time.
This morning I was walking our dog. She loves to go for a walk, and she is very good on the lease. She will walk right by my side. She seldom pulls or has to be pulled. But she will sometimes get distracted by rabbits, squirrels, or other dogs. When she starts to pull away, all one has to do is say the word- "Heel". With the single word she refocuses and is off again.
With Willow, the discipline of the one word is all it takes. Gordon is saying instead of someone else telling us the word, we need to have a word we tell ourselves when we start to pull away from our desired goals.
American Cemetery in Margraten Holland
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| Rubbing sand from Omaha Beach on William Allen's stone. |
Each family of the fallen soldiers was given the choice to have the soldier buried in Margraten or to be returned to the United States to be buried in a private or national cemetery. Once the decision was made by the family, the decision was considered final and could not be changed.
At one time there were over 17,000 soldiers taken to Margraten. Today the cemetery holds only American soldiers, and it has over 8,000 fall US soldiers from WW2 buried there.
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| William Allen's grave. |
We had the opportunity to place flowers on the grave. The Supt. then explained a special practice they do with families of the soldiers. The stones of white marble with engraving are very difficult to photograph. To help them be more photographed, they provide sand for the family members to rub over the name so it can be seen. The sand is shipped in from Normandy beach. The significance of the the sand is that the soldiers who are buried in Margraten all started their invasion of Europe at Normandy beaches in France.
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| Over 8,000 fallen US soldiers are buried in Margraten. |
Our visit was a very emotional experience. It certainly makes one appreciate the sacrifice made by these soldiers.
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