Players Will Do What You Train Them To Do

Understanding and embracing this simple, yet powerful idea will directly impact on how well we coach a player or team.

How well are you teaching your players or team to do what they need to do to be even more successful - especially at crunch time? How can you improve on motivating your players, on building a stronger culture of leadership, and on strengthening your player’s mindsets of persistence and confidence? Together these things combine to better position a team or an athlete for success, for winning, especially when the score is close.

Regardless of the sport, the difference between winning and losing is only a couple plays. I’ve heard that most wins occur because the winner executed just two percent better than their opponents.  Think about your sport – would the outcome for most of your games have changed if just a few plays had been different?  What if you can improve your teaching by just two percent?  A two percent improvement will result in a significant improvement in winning. As the coach, how well we teach our players matters.  A lot.

Vern Gambetta from his weekly blog (Gambetta – Training the Best to be Better) wrote:
“Great coaches are learners. The learning can be formal or informal, the key is to keep learning and growing. Arie de Geus (author of “The Living Company”) said it best. “Probably the only sustainable competitive advantage we have, is the ability to learn faster than our opposition.”

How actively do we work at learning how to teach something better? How effective are our cue words? Our phrasing? Can we focus our comments, and phrase feedback so that it points the athlete to the right things, or to the next play? Recently I asked a player I was coaching how they wanted to be coached.  Without hesitation she said, “Don’t tell me what I just did.  Tell me what I need to do!”

As important as it is for a coach to know their sport’s fundamentals, strategies, and tactics, a player or team will struggle when facing an opponent that has been better taught how to compete and play.  Especially at pressure moments, everyone tends to resort to their most dominant response. This is basic performance psychology.  In other words, the better a team is taught, the more successful they will be in those deciding moments of a game.

Coach, are you getting better at getting better? What have you done lately to become a more effective and efficient teacher for your players? How well you coach (teach) your team does matter, and usually the best prepared team or player will win.  Remember, players will do what you train them to do!