Regionals

Onion Peeling

Layer 1:

Getting results further inspires results orientation.  The more a team accomplishes and achieves, the more likely that team is to fixate on those accomplishments and set similar results as their goals.  I believe results, winning and losing, are a distraction.  They are a force that takes a team’s attention away from what really matters.

When a team sets its goals and includes, “qualify for Nationals”, what does that goal even mean?  In October how do I use “qualify for Nationals” as something to focus on and motivate myself?  If I am on a team that’s never been to Nationals, do I even know what it would require to make Nationals?  “Qualify for Nationals” is a very weak goal.  It is an outcome, or a result, of a long process.  If your team meeting ends with writing NATIONALS!!! on a chalkboard and circling it ten times then your team is setting off on the wrong foot.

What does it take to qualify for Nationals?  You probably have to be a good Frisbee team.  How do you become better?  There need to be process goals that give you something to focus on throughout the year.  Something you can measure improvement of.  For example:

A team that makes college Nationals is:

·         Good at throwing

·         Athletic

Can I make this more concrete?

·         Good at throwing

o   Throw arounds off of the trapside

o   Complete uplines

·         Athletic

o   Defend deep balls well

o   Conditioned enough to run hard for a whole tournament

To me these are clear.  This is what we’re going to try to accomplish in 9 months.  At practice we’re going to drill these four things a lot.  We are going to get to a critical mass of reps so that when it does come time to cash in for a result, we can do it.  If as a team you can keep your focus on the process goals I think you will find yourselves achieving the results you’re looking for.

It exhausts me when a team gets hung up on individual tournaments results.  Did you improve and grow as a team?  Then what more could you possibly need?  Going into a weekend thinking we want to win this tournament can distract you from trying to grow in the long run. 

When NUT went to warm-up with 15 people no one was thinking “man we better win some games.”  All we had to do was try and we knew we’d get better.  That tournament was brutal.  Every other team we played was good.  We went 1-7.  Bodies were failing us left and right, but we just kept going.  If we had cared about the results at all, we might have started pouting, quitting, blaming, or fraying from the inside out, but everyone understood that the wins and losses didn’t matter.  The goal was to cut our teeth against the best and see what we could learn.  We could have been upset that we got destroyed, or we could have been happy that we learned the importance of getting the disc off the sideline or defending deep shots as a team.

Today NUT has a record of 15-13.  We didn’t break .500 until Sunday of Conferences.  Ask any of the players on NUT if they think going to Warm-Up was a good idea, ask them if they think it helped them as a team, and ask them if they think it played a role in making them who they are now. Then ask them if they had any idea that they were a .530 team.  Then ask them if they care what their overall record is.

Layer 2:

While what’s above is all fine and dandy, it is still derived from a desire to reach results.  I still feel like we are missing something.  Say today is Monday and you have a test next Monday.  When do you start studying?  Sunday morning?  Saturday afternoon maybe?  Aren’t we leaving a lot on the table?  A test is a result, nothing more, and as a result it is capable of motivating us only as the zero hour approaches.  What about Monday through Friday?  What about the 70-85% of the week we left on the table?  Every team is highly motivated from about March 20-April 20, but what about September 20 – March 20?  How often are we not getting the most out of 87.5% of our seasons?

What about reading a book for pleasure?  Why did you do that?  Why did you read 50 pages a day for 10 straight days?  There was no test at the end, no book club to talk about it with, not even a movie that you were trying to finish it before.  So why did you read that book?  Why did you go 10 straight days?  Why did you stay up late, or read on a crowded train, or sneak a few pages during passing period?  Because you liked it?  Because it was fun?

When I was in college, I often wondered why was it so easy for me to go to the gym and so difficult for my teammates.  How come no one else had a lifting plan or could find time to go?  How come league of legends was more important that getting some squats in?  The answer was literally next to me every time I went to the gym.  The reason I wanted to work out was the same reason they wanted to play league, we wanted to be with our friends.

I went to the gym with my best friend, Rabuck.  I never went to the gym and thought to myself, this rep is for sectionals and this one is for regionals and this one is for NATIONALS!!!  I always went to the gym and thought to myself, I get to hang out with Rabuck.  Squatting was just what the two of us did as friends, and it was something I wanted to be better than him at.  We’d wake each other up at 6am and drag ourselves to the gym, but we did it together.  Would we have done it alone?  Ray was in Australia for one semester, and every time I thought about ditching the gym, I thought about Ray pushing it in Australia.  I thought about how I couldn’t let him come home from study abroad and be pushing more weight than me, and so I hopped over to the gym and slammed some reps.

Every time I threw on the quad with snackman I never once thought to myself, this throw is for the game-to-go.  The only thoughts I had were, this is awesome I am hanging out with snackman.  Every time I did sprints with Papi, Sidrys, and Rabuck I was just pumped about hanging out with my friends.  Every handler and marking drill I did with Walden just because I wanted hang out time with Walden.  Nationals never motivated me to put in extra time, hanging out with my friends motivated me.

I was highly motivated, never by results, but because it was fun to do things with my friends.  To me this suggests an entirely different avenue for goal setting.  What if we set goals like:

·         Everyone wants to come to practice

·         Everyone is friends

Again, these are outcome goals.  Can I dig deeper and make this more tangible?

·         Everyone wants to come to practice

o   Practices are well organized and have a goal in mind: making people feel like their time is well spent

o   No one is afraid to make mistakes: practice is a time to do something stupid and learn from it, not have your friends whine and moan at you for making mistakes

o   Practice is not a chore

§  No one feels like they have to be at practice, it is a choice not a requirement

§  If you show up to practice, we’re going to practice with you

§  If attendance is low we aren’t going to waste your time complaining about low attendance we’re just going to start putting reps in

·         Everyone is friends

o   Everyone in the program believes and wants you to improve

o   Having 24 good kids is more valuable than 5 great kids

o   The team cares about who you are outside of ultimate

o   No one values you as a human based on your ability as an ultimate player

o   The entire team believes in each other

As I tried to write process goals for “Everyone is Friends” I kept spinning my wheels thinking about how these are outcome goals of some deeper process.  “The entire team believes in each other” is nothing more than the result of a positive culture.  What breeds a positive culture?  How do we get to relentless positivity?

Layer 3:

I.H.D.

For me the past three years have always come back to I.H.D.  The idea is so concise and easy, that it fits everything I look at.

I.H.D. is different every time you define it, which is one of the reasons I love it so much.  Just the act of defining I.H.D. can be an excellent exercise in where your head is at and what matters to you in this moment.

Intensity:

As the ancient Sumerian proverb goes, “no man should perish without knowing the full extent of his body.”  Intensity is the drive to find that extent, to see how far you can go, to know the difference between “hurts” and “pain”.  It is going hard so that your teammates are conditioned to go against someone who is going hard.

Humility:

Humility is caring about the team more than the team cares about you.  This should inevitably create a positive feedback system.  If everyone cares about the team X, and since each individual is, in a sense, the team then the team will care about you 24X.

Discipline:

Discipline knows that when the pressure mounts, you will naturally fall into whatever is habit.  Discipline is making habits pressure ready.

Opinion revision - caring about your women's team

I use this blog for very selfish reasons.  I use it as a place where I can put words to thoughts and attempt to dump out the things that are swirling in my mind.  By design most of these posts are half-baked; I am trying to clear my mind, not write a Pulitzer.  A consequence of writing half-baked ideas is that I get half-baked understanding from anyone who reads it.  (I guess if I am only fleshing things out 50% and my readership understands 50% then that is 100% understanding from them.  So good job readers, bad job Kevin.)

This post is a feeble attempt to retract a previous idea:

Some time ago I wrote “Defensive teams walk around wearing big boy pants.  They tend to be tough, like handslaps, and not care about the success of their women’s team.”

I want the opportunity to muse on the final clause of the sentence, from the perspective of now.  I think that it is great to support your women’s teams.  It is the easiest way to double the size of your family.  This weekend at Conferences NUT and Gung Ho celebrated the success of each other.  NUT spent their bye watching Gung Ho and Gung Ho watched NUT when they were finished for the day.  Both teams could have watched their own future competition, they could have left to get food, or gone to the hotel, but they stayed to support each other.

I thought this was great.  I was a big fan of this.  I felt like it gave NUT a chance to relax and unwind.  I think we were mentally stronger because of it.

What does bother me? (All future comments are specific to the 2013 season)

All comments, even flubs, stem from somewhere.  So where did I get the mojo to make this statement?  It was winter quarter of 2013, my first season with NUT.  It was a Saturday night practice and the team rolled in and one of them (who will not be named, but man I’d love to give this bro some heat) told me “we went 2-2 today!”

“What are you talking about?”

“We beat Georgia and Delaware, almost took Tufts but lost on universe and dropped big to Iowa but it’s okay because they are really good this year.”

It took me an absurdly long time to realize they were talking about Gung Ho.  Once that realization set in I got incredibly angry that they kept referring to Gung Ho as “we”. 

This was a season where Gung Ho had an entire team of girls who were “bought in” to the idea of going hard.  They were crushing pod workouts, they worked their throws outside of practice, they were incredibly close as a team, and leadership was razor sharp in their focus, and their best player laid down a top 5 Callahan season.  This was a Gung Ho team that was putting in the work.

Just 10 yards away, in the exact same practice facility, sat NUT.  We had about 5 kids hitting the gym, our best player gained a significant amount of weight throughout the season, disc skills were below dysfunctional (the reason NUT runs seven cuts is because this team was so terrible at throwing arounds that I had to do something to get the disc off the sideline, often to no avail they’d just turn it cramming the cram side.), leadership was in constant turmoil, and the team struggled as it got pulled in multiple directions.  Conferences 2013 NUT had to work to qualify for regionals, that performance is indicative of our overall season.  Regionals 2013 NUT was able to peak and get 5^th and regionals, that performance is indicative of the heart that the seniors showed in their final tournament together.

It is my opinion that NUT 2013 shouldn’t be allowed to hijack Gung Ho’s feel goods that come from putting in work.  No you may not get excited that “we” won.  You didn’t do anything.  Maybe if you went to the gym half as much as them or showed half as much heart you would have been able to create some feel goods for yourself.  If they are putting in the work and you're sitting there eating potato chips then you may not feel like you are a part of their success.

Fine, celebrate them.  I encourage you to be happy for them, but never let it out of your mind that it is “them” not “we”.  They did it.  Gung Ho won.  NUT did nothing.

Tangentially it constantly perplexes me that NUT could practice next to a team who periodically makes Nationals and never try to learn or steal anything.  NUT would sit around scratching their chins pondering how to get people to become better Frisbee players and apparently it never occurred to them to turn around and watch for an hour or two.  But hey, those are girls and there is absolutely nothing a men’s team could learn from them? #amiright?  This is my nomination for biggest waste of opportunity in the history of NUT.  In summary there is a reason when Gung Ho needs a coach current and former machine captains start lining up, and when NUT needs a coach they end up with me.

TLDR

·         Be friends with your women’s team

·         Cheer for your women’s team

·         You may not feel like you were a part of their success

·         Have some pride

Creating Buy-In

This post has unrelated digressions denoted in italics.

17 days ago I wrote about Kevin Yngve, my co-coach at Northwestern, and his particular style of Yng-Fu.  What ensued was a miniature journey of the soul that I am going to attempt to lay out, I will be using this post as a way of mapping out my thoughts and feelings and as a way to attempt to see if I can draw a conclusion about a topic that I have never grasped.

Creating Buy-In:

Moments after posting Yng-Fu Colin Reid, a god amongst men, gchatted me about how he also didn’t understand buy in, we commiserated about how this was a skill neither of us grasped.  We didn’t understand why everyone isn’t just internally motivated like us. 

Fast forward to the Illinois Alumni weekend.  After witnessing the most anemic effort by Illinois since the dark days of 2012, there was a lot of conversation about how to bring the fire into games.  What motivates a team?  What gets people chomping at the bit?  How do you get people to play with their hair on fire?  The few kids on Illinois who cared enough to even ask the question, it seemed as if the rest had already checked out for the year, started pressing the alums who had successful collegiate careers about how to get some fire.  The answers from my peers were all mostly along the same vein.  “You’ve gotta get angry,”  “You need a few people on the team who are fired up,”  “someone needs to make a play and spark the team,”  “no one is pushing the team to get going.”  I mostly kept quiet during this conversation because I disagreed.

My first impression was that the team was built faultily.  I reflected on how often Frisbee teams chase a player that they want.  It feels like every season the team I am on has some guy who needs to be convinced to play Frisbee.  We waste all this time trying to convince someone who’d rather be partying to come play Frisbee with us instead.  When they do show up the team gets a half-hearted effort and little buy in from them because that guy feels like he “has” to be there.  Maybe if instead of chasing athletes and trying to convince them to do something they don’t really care to do we could just take the kids who want to be there and try to make them as good as we can.   If we gave them our attention and just got to work, then we’d never have issues with fire or intensity.  If there are players who want to play for us with no pressure to play for us, then we’ve got a team that will never need to be fired up.  Rooted into the fundamentals of this thought was the idea that you can’t externally motivate someone else. (I could hear Walden’s cackle in my mind foreshadowing that this can’t be the final conclusion.)

Tangentially I thought about how I think complaining about poor practice attendance is a waste of energy.  Instead of wasting time and energy complaining about who isn’t at practice why not just worry about who is at practice and try to make them as good as you possibly can?  Make practice worth the while of people who do show up and maybe people will then be incentivized to show up.

Then I had the great fortune of riding home with Nick Pro.  We spent the trip talking about what gets a team to play with some heart.  I told Pro how I don’t like the “get angry” culture because it is too close to the line between positivity and negativity.  (An aside that may undermine my perspective:  As we all know anger is just one letter away from danger.  It may be more than coincidence that anger is just a D away from danger, and as my fellow alumni were trying to articulate “sometimes a team is just a D away from playing with fire”, which would in fact be dangerous.)  After this I told Nick about my idea about not chasing athletes, he countered that he thought everyone wanted to be on the team.  Furthermore he thought everyone was happy on the team and that no one was on the brink of quitting the team.  He didn’t see it as a constant struggle to keep people on the team and that practice attendance was higher than in years past so he didn’t feel like no one was half-heartedly in.

Bagging that idea for the moment I began telling Pro that I personally like a positive culture.  I think negativity is a poison that weighs a team down.  As I was in the car feeling this way an uncomfortable contrast was staring me in the face.

In college my goal as a freshman was to become a role player for Illinois.  My motivation was to a part of that team, to be relied on to accomplish a job, and to deliver on that reliance.  I feel that most of motivation was derived from a desire to belong.  It was a very internal fire; I was going to go until I proved everyone wrong.  There are several moments where people sold me short and they bothered me, they bothered me so greatly that I worked to make them eat their words.  Unfortunately Frisbee players have short memories and never remember their slights against you, so there is never any word eating.

1.      Fall of 2008, Charlie O’Brien (the captain at the time) said if I worked hard I “might” be able to make the A-team as a senior.

2.      Fall of 2008, Jason Mickey “all rookies are worthless”.

3.      Spring of 2009, Tom Rudwick said that unless you make the A-team as a freshmen you can never get onto the OLine.

4.      Fall of 2009, Ryan Smith “you could be a good B-team player this year.”

5.      Spring of 2010, Ryan Smith was a little hobbled at practice and said he didn’t want to throw with me because he couldn’t move around enough to get my errant throws.

6.      Fall of 2010, Adam Wright – “Are you worried that Hidaka coming back will ruin your chance at playtime?”

7.      Fall of 2010, Adam Wright – The handlers are the only reason Illinois can win this season.

8.      Everything Brad Bolliger has ever said to me ever.

These things bother me.  They get under my skin.  They motivate me to prove the speaker wrong.  They motivate me.  Knowing that this is what gets me going, I projected this outward towards my teammates.  I was motivated when people questioned my ability, work ethic, and manhood.  So in order to motivate my teammates I questioned their ability, work ethic, and manhood.  I gave them a hard time for not being able to do something.  I ripped on people for deficiencies in their game.  I was actively a part of the negative and “get angry” culture.  I would send out snarky emails when practice attendance was low.

So here I am now, an individual whom at two distinct points in my life is motivated in completely different ways.  Does this complicate everything?  If you were trying to motivate me you’d not only have to figure out what motivates me, but you’d have to know what motivates me at a given moment.

When I was voted captain of Illinois I reached out to Stupca looking for some advice.  He told me that the most fatal mistake of a coach is thinking that players struggle in the same way that they struggled as a player.  The deficiencies that hold me back are not those deficiencies that hold back my boy Sahaj.  If Sahaj is struggling with a throw, I can’t just assume he struggles with it for the same reason I do.  I can’t teach Sahaj to run an upline the way I run an upline.  There is an element of tailoring to your boy that needs to be done.

This brings me home to Pat and the biggest blown chance to truly learn something of my life.  “Learn what motivates someone, and use it.”

·         Andy Kilinskis needed someone to reassure him.  He needed someone to tell him that he wasn’t just a space filler on the field.  He needed to be told that he could take shots, that he could have a role as a play maker.  He needed to know that there is room for him to grow into.

·         Adam Wright just wants to feel like he fits in.

·         Drew Levorsen wants to make a statement.  He wants to feel like people are watching and that they notice him.

·         Neal Phelps just wants to play sports against people that challenge him competitively.

·         Ian Preston just wanted to have some pride in what he was doing.  He wanted to feel like if he worked hard then that was enough.  As long as he showed up and slugged out a day, he could hold his head high.

·         I still don’t know what was going on in Dane Jorgensen’s mind.

I think buy in, and what makes Yngve great, requires an acute awareness of who you’re talking to, where they are in life, what else they are worried about, what else they have weighing them down, what makes them have fun, and what they need to feel like they matter.  Then after accumulating this awareness, you need to tailor everything you say and do to their frequency.  If I am blasting on 96.5 FM there is no way Andy Kilinskis is going to hear me on 101.1 FM, and Bradley has no chance of hearing me on 1000 AM.  Can you as a leader make 23 people feel empowered to be himself all while having a team with a single identity?  Can you make everyone feel like they have a role to play, that they matter, and that they don’t need to change who they are in order to execute that role?  Yngve can.

Forgetting who you are

The 2011 Rose Bowl, Wisconsin has a running back named John “The Hammer” Clay.  John Clay came into the season on the watch list for every running back award, he was a Heisman candidate until and MCL injury sidelined him for three games and took him out of the running.  Clay was one of the three best running backs in the country, and he played for a team that had running in its blood.

Wisconsin has a stable of running backs, but at 7:34 remaining in the Rose Bowl with the ball at their own 23 Bielema went to Clay.  Bielema knew exactly who is team was, he knew exactly who is best player was, and Clay went up the gut for 14.

The very next play, Bielema still knows exactly who he is. Clay up the gut for 30, he has 43 yards in two carries.

The badgers burn a timeout.

Enter a young Montee Ball, Clay is still struggling with the injury, and he gets a sweep to the outside and picks up nothing.

Montee gets four, up the gut.

Scott Tolzien completes an 11 year pass to move to sticks.

Clay goes up the gut for 5.

Clay goes up the gut for another 5 yards.

Third and inches, they give it to John Clay who hammers it up the gut for the conversion.

In the first half Clay had 12 yards on 4 carries, at this point in the second he has 60 yards on 6 carries.  TCU hasn’t stopped a single power run from Wisconsin.  The senior is a man playing possessed; he is carrying his team to the promise land.  If Wisconsin wins they will win behind Clay, if Wisconsin loses they should lose with Clay holding the ball.

 Wisconsin has 8 yards to go and 2:51 on the clock.  Clay takes them to the 3 yard line, up the gut.

Montee Ball gets the edge and scores a touchdown for Wisconsin.  They are now down 2, with 2:00 on the clock.  Wisconsin lines up for the 2 point conversion, they have a fresh John Clay, everyone in the house knows what’s coming except for Bielema.  In this moment, with the chips on the table, Bielema forgets who Wisconsin is and he lets Scott Tolzien throw the football right into the defensive line.  They didn’t even set up a play action; they went for a shotgun set pass.

I still can’t believe it.  I probably never will get over it.  You have a guy named the hammer and you’re going to throw it for two yards?  Why didn’t they run?  Why didn’t they trust in who they were?  Nothing bothers me more than when a team forgets who they are and tries to be cute.  Why do teams do this?  If you’re a power run team, then you need to be a power run game in crunch time.