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.

Ceilings

My previous post is intimately related to this one.  Anyone can make the A team, anyone can be valuable to the A team.  The road is long and tiresome, but the map is clear.  Obviously everyone is starting a different level and everyone will have to travel different distances, but in the words of dear Walden, “as long as you care enough you can make it.”

When a young whippersnapper who is lacking in athleticism (his gait is small, his mobility is poor, his strength is low, he isn’t explosive) it is easy to feel sorry for him, it is easy to say, “he will have to work so hard just to catch up,” “his ceiling is pretty low,” and it is easy to use these thoughts as excuses to never even try to make it.

He will have to work so hard just to catch up:

Saying this allows me to sympathize with him for not even trying, it allows me to be the nice guy that feels bad for me new friend.  It allows me to steal from him and opportunity to experience pushing himself.

I often wonder what people mean by “he has to work so hard.”  What is the image of “work so hard” that they have in their mind?  I think that putting in 12 hours a week is enough to make incremental improvements throughout a college career, I think that if you routinely budget this amount of time then you will improve all the way through your senior year.  Is 12 hours a lot?  I would never ask someone to be in the gym for more than an hour and a half.  I would never ask someone to go the gym more than 3 times a week.  Are my expectations still too high?

His ceiling is pretty low:

This one is great.  Vandervoort used to argue that you don’t want kids who played high school ultimate because they’ve already peaked and they aren’t going to improve very much moving forward.  This is a joke.

No 18 year old has peaked.  No 23 year old has peaked.  If you think that people are capable of playing a sport for 3 years and maxing out, then I’m not that interested in being friends with you.  I feel strongly that the lowest ceiling I have ever seen is still high enough to be valuable to a college Frisbee team.

Just because your ceiling is low doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.  Just because my ceiling is lower than someone else’s doesn’t mean I can’t be better than that person.  I think that there are many teammates who have had higher ceilings than me, but I’ve still been the better Frisbee player.  (I wish I had the guts to name names).

Even considering someone’s ceiling is a waste of time.  The only reasonable action to take is to try.  Try to get little better every day.  Try to squat .5x times your body weight, then .66x, then 1x, then 1.5x, if you make it this far go for 2x.  You can add an inch every single week of your college career and by the time you are ready to graduate you will not have made it to your ceiling.  This isn’t a reason to not try.

Back to my boy Sahaj:

Recently Sahaj did some film study of Justin Lin and Bobby Ley, he said he learned a lot but the one comment he had was, “they’ve been playing Frisbee for years, and I’m not going to get to their level.”  I told Sahaj that I get that, and that is completely fine, but that isn’t an excuse to try.  You can still learn things from good players; you can still strive to be better and to emulate them.  My boy Sahaj understands that he isn’t done until he is at their level, which he might never get to, which means he might never finish.  My boy Sahaj gets it because he is a thug.

The Blueprint

The road to becoming more athletic:

Times per week:	Activity:	Minutes per activity:
2	Squat	30
1	Deadlift	15
2	Plyos	20
1	Sprint	40
4	Throw	40

This sums to 5.25 hours of time outside of practice.  Add in 6 hours for practice and it takes a whopping 12 hours a week to become a valuable Frisbee player.  You're in college, you have as much time as you choose to have.

Ego

Ego

Ego is blind

Ego is arrogant

Ego is unfounded

Ego is unable to learn

Ego doesn’t make mistakes

Ego is never the responsible for failure

Ego is better even if it loses

Ego is already the best

Ego is suffocating

Ego is poison

Ego is loud

Ego

If I were to put one word to every season that is considered a “bad” season, that word would be ego.  Ego is death to a team. 

Ego is the mid-regionals club team that is worrying about “advanced topics”.

Ego is the club player who thinks he is above college drills and drilling the fundamentals.

Ego thinks he would be the best player on a national’s college team, if only he had tried harder in high school to get into a better college.  Ego is the best player in the region but no one recognizes it because it is in a small program.  Ego is too good for his college team.

When ego loses it doesn’t accept defeat.  Ego points at its teammates and blames them for holding it down.  Ego points at the other team and knocks them for getting lucky.  Ego assumes it will win that game 9 out of 10 times.  Ego says “if.”

·         If it wasn’t so windy I would have won

·         If we hadn’t dropped that pass in the endzone I would have won

·         If they didn’t call that foul I would have won

·         If they hadn’t made so many lucky catches I would have won

·         If they hadn’t gotten away with so many travels I would have won.

Ego fouls when he gets beat.  Ego calls travels he doesn’t see.  Ego calls fouls that didn’t happen.

Ego is not welcome in my dojo.

Competitive

You’re playing basketball with your college roommate.  You’ve got about two inches on him and you won the first game by a few points.  His feathers are ruffled and he’s starting to get angry but he agrees to a second game.  The second game starts and you make the unfortunate decision to block a shot.  He is so mad, he yells about how you’re only good because you’re tall and he storms away.  You stay and shoot around a bit before heading home, showering, and hitting up the café.  Your roommate comes up and apologizes, he explains how he is “so competitive he couldn’t play anymore,” he tells you that he didn’t want to let his competitiveness turn him into a jerk so he stopped playing.

You’re trying to get to know a girl.  The two of you are hanging out playing some scrabble, the game is still in its infancy but you’ve managed to lay down some pretty good words and you have a lead.  She quits right there.  She tells you that she is so competitive she doesn’t want you to see her lose.  She doesn’t want you to have a negative image of her, and she is so competitive she doesn’t want to play.

You’re trying to organize a game of capture the flag.  Your boy stares you right in the face and says, “I’m too competitive to play, I don’t want to be a jerk so I’m not going to play.”

Yo bro, you aren’t competitive you’re a sore loser!  When did being a competitive become synonymous with being a sore loser?

Competitive:  having a strong desire to compete.

Sore Loser: one who does not take defeat well, whereas a good sport means being a "good winner" as well as being a "good loser".

A competitive person wants to compete regardless of winning of losing; they just want to feel the thrill of competing.  A sore loser is a jerkface when they lose and they don’t want people to see that.  A sore loser doesn’t even want to compete because the risk of losing is too high.  A competitive person doesn’t care if he/she is going to lose, they’re just amped up for some good ole competing.

It infuriates me because being competitive should be a good thing.  A competitive person should be fun, they should be up for playing whenever, and they are the reliable 7^th for when you only have 6 to go to a tournament.  I understand that sore losers recognize the weakness within themselves, I understand that they are so disgusted by themselves that they must cling to another word, and so they have chosen to ruin and cripple the beauty that is competitive.  My message to these people: Stop demeaning the value of competitive by confusing it for being a sore loser.

The sore loser is the one who doesn’t want to go to Easterns because he thinks the team is going to lose every game.

The competitor is stoked he gets to play at the best regular season tournament of the year.

The sore loser doesn’t want to finish regionals after being eliminated from Nationals.

The competitor is fired up to play one last game with his team.

The sore loser doesn’t try out for the local elite club team because he has no chance of making it.

The competitor appreciates every second he gets to play against the best players in his city.

Yng-Fu

Yngve is the guy that I can never agree with, or maybe we are always agreeing and just saying it differently, or maybe neither of has any idea what the other one is trying to say.  Everything is an argument.  The nature of my relationship with Yngve, has forced me to reconsider my own personal canon and question whether anything should be canon at all. In such a young sport is it even possible that we know what the best way to approach the game is?  Is it safe to lie something down and say this is good, or should we be questioning any and every preconceived notion.

When it comes to Yngve I do not have things that I’ve learned.  I have things that I discovered I do not know.  The hardest part of not knowing something is that we don’t know what it is that we don’t know.  Yngve is the guy who asks so many questions and pokes so many holes in the ideas I lay down that he has shown me many things that I do not know.

1.       “You said something vague about…”:

Every time I try to make a point or express a sentiment, Yngve tells me what I said was vague and hard to grasp.  He tells me that it doesn’t really mean anything to him and is not solid or relevant to him and that if he were one of the sophomores listening to me he would have just nodded along but had no idea what I was trying to convey.

I rush when I speak.  I have this theory that everyone’s attention span is the length of a goldfish and so I work to say one or two ideas in as little words as possible.  I want to just throw something clean, concise, and sticky.  The problem is that it isn’t sticky at all because I made it too concise.  I tell people to drive their hucks but they have no idea what a driven huck is, I show someone where to position on handler defense but they have no idea how to get to that spot during a scrimmage, I tell people to spread out but they have no idea where to spread out from.

My goal for moving forward is to spend more time talking.  I’ve erred on the side of saying too little for too long, I am going to go back to saying too much and trying to find the middle ground.

2.       How to create buy in:

Yngve is the master of buy in.  My own voyage of ultimate has been through the lens of “I want to play ultimate”, “I want to play sports”, “I have pride so I am going to try hard regardless of team culture.”  It always shocks me when people say they aren’t having fun at practice, or that they don’t feel motivated, or they don’t really care about trying to be competitive at regionals.  I am surprised and caught flat footed when people say these things to me and I have no method for how to react or comfort them other than to question their manhood.

Yngve knows how to make people want to be there.  He has a way with taking those who have given up on themselves and bring them back into the fold.  I think it has something to do with Yngve’s own trip down the road of potentially quitting.  Regardless of what it is, his success next to my struggle at it has revealed a gaping hole in my ability to get people to want to be there.

Give me someone who wants to get better and I can go to town, challenge me to get someone to buy into a team and you might as well have them walk away from the team now.

3.       Jersey’s Matter:

It is my opinion that whatever I am wearing I will try as hard as I can.

It is Yngve’s stance that a bad jersey design reflects poor leadership.  A failure by leadership to design a jersey that the team would want to wear is a strong indicator that leadership is out of touch with the team and incapable of getting the most out of their team.  A bad jersey yields lackluster results.