5 Things I Learned Inside a High Performance Enviroment

This past summer was spent traveling to one high performance camp to another for USA Rugby. This is now my third year in side the HP Program so I'm starting to feel I've become a seasoned pro at sleeping on dorm style twin beds, over-eating cafeteria food, and adapting to coaching in this unique environment. Below are five things I've learned in my experience of being an assistant coach at these events as well as being a head coach of an age grade program. I've taken these lessons and applied them to my current coaching position which has made for a positive experience for everyone involved. 

Do you agree with me? What have you learned? Please take the time to comment below...

1. People love meetings, but you don't have to love them
If you've worked in a professional environment you no doubt have been stuck in a room with a whiteboard asking yourself why couldn't we have just written an E-mail about this? 

We've been there bro...

Rugby suffers from this same abuse of meetings too.

What I learned was less is more when you're thinking about holding a meeting.

You can cut out a lot of leg work in your build-up to an event with presentations or well written emails. This serves two purposes; 1. It cuts out your needed meeting time and work to be done on the ground, 2. Once you ask the first question you will know immediately who has done their homework and shown up prepared.

Now, I'm not saying ALL meetings should be done away with I'm just saying most of them should be.

Acceptable Meetings:
- Med check
- Selection
- Pre/post game coaches talk
- 1 on 1's
- Morning team meetings to outline agendas

Unacceptable Meetings:
- Meetings to plan PowerPoint's
- Meetings to plan future meetings
- Any meeting longer than an hour
- A meeting without an agenda and set start and end time
- 'Group-think' meetings

A final note on meetings, make sure if you're the one running the meeting you aren't wasting your time or the participants. You wouldn't go to practice without a plan so why should you go to a meeting without one? Respect yours and others time. Be quick, direct, and prompt.

100% right

2. Trust your assistant coaches

If you are assigned to, or assigned, a group of coaches you need to trust them and their abilities. They, just like you, are there for reason and you need to get comfortable with the idea of prioritizing and delegating to free up your time to focus on what is important. You want to be a leader not a boss give them the room to coach to their strengths (maybe your weakness) and focus on your role.

Trust them...

Take a second and think about your conduct during a training session, now ask yourself a few questions; 

1. If you aren't the lead coach during an activity, who is? 
2. How often do you add "and another thing..." after they are done giving their coaching points? 
3. When they present something to you do you often add "Well, this is how I do it.." without asking why they want to do it their way?

If you can answer yes to 2 or more of those questions you might be undermining your assistant coaches authority with the team. That doesn't mean you should let the pirates sail the ship, but be tactful on how you approach the subject of skill improvement with them and do it AWAY from the team. A simple one on one meeting to discuss your expectations will do more for the coaches development, and respect from the team, than constantly talking over them in a coaching session.

3. Less is more which also leads to less stress

This is less equals more for the math challenged

This is particularly important in an HP environment. You're not with your club team anymore where you have to spend hours hammering away at the fundamentals and game understanding. These athletes that are either on the team or at a camp already have a strong grasp on their fundamentals and game situations so instead turn your focus to improving the individual skills (before and during training, never after) and stretching your own understanding and expectations of the game for both coaches and players.

You are dealing with the 1% in terms of athletic ability, try something new with that will challenge their abilities and stretch the limits of your system.

4. Speak less, listen more
This is especially important during meeting with other coaches. You are surrounded by some of the best minds in the game and their collective knowledge is greater than any website, YouTube clip, or book.

So shut up and listen.


You don't need to prove you belong by yammering on or tacking on comments after a point has been made. What you need to do is take notes about what other people are doing on topics that will make you and your club better. opportunities like these to learn don't happen very often, seize it by shutting your mouth and opening your ears.


5. Prepare for some haters and trolls
One thing I wasn't prepared for when I was the interim head coach for the 7s program was the backlash from trolls on the internet.  What really pissed me off was it came from some people I

Mouth breathing is one sign of troll-ism

consider friends and role models.

The lesson I took away is you need to have thick skin to coach at any level, but you need to have tank armor thick skin when you get to the next level of coaching. People are entitled to their opinions, but you need to understand that those opinions are made up from snapshots (games/press releases on selections/etc) taken from one brief moment in a very long process only you, the staff and team have experienced. 

Have faith in what you're doing and don't be afraid of possible failure. You're in that position for a reason so act like it. Find a someone who will keep you grounded and remind you in those moments of weakness that you are capable of doing it and LISTEN to them. In the end the worst that could happen is you're bad at it, which will only serve a greater purpose of teaching you what you need to improve on.

Last piece of advice on this topic, like and re-tweet every post about you...

40 Questions for 1 on 1 Sessions

We are just wrapping up the season here and the final step to putting 2014 to rest was the full team 1 on 1 conversations. I try to stay away from words like 'assesment' or 'evaluation' simple because I want it to be a conversation about the season, both good and bad, and those words often carry negative associations when attached to any meeting.

It is often hard to start conversations with players, especially some younger college players, because they view you as an authority figure no different than a teacher or parent. So, you simple get answers like 'it was fun', 'yep', or my favorite 'No, we did everything good/perfect'. This is an evasion tactic to avoid answering hard questions or addressing subjects some players think will upset you (I did it with parents and coaches when I was that age too). So, if you're truly invest in improving as a coach and team you need to hear what they have to say and how to get it out of them. They know the social dynamics, personal and team struggles that we as coaches aren't privileged to and can give us an honest view of ourselves as leaders and our systems as they pertain to the team that uses them.

Below are some tips and forty questions that will help you start the conversation with your players. I hope you find them as helpful as I did when using them.

3 Tips:
1. Shut your mouth and open your ears- Its a common problem in any conversation, people listen but don't hear what is being said. What does that mean? We love to sound smart and polished, so we often are thinking of our witty response as someone is speaking to us. Important nuggets of information go unnoticed and chances for you to ask a question, that might open the mysterious black box of your player, are missed. So, listen to what they are saying and then think of your response to when they just shared with you. Yeah, about that response...

2. Ask the 'W's' often- Who, What, Why, When, Where and hoW. Overuse 'why' and 'how' too. Questions like "What was your best game?" are easy to answer but the follow up of why or how will give you an insight to the process that lead to the positive result, and that is what you should be looking for.

3. Leave the ego at home- We coaches are a narcissistic bunch by nature. We are as good as our ego lets us believe and its not a bad thing, most of the time. But, during these sessions you need to check yourself and that ego because your players need to trust you to say what they feel.
Will you also agree with it? Hell no.
Will it sometimes hurt your feelings? Yep.
But at the end of the day this is how your players feel about you. They are entitled to those feelings and if they have something to say you better dang sure listen. Nothing can be more destructive then trying to argue your point about their view on something. So shut up, write it down, and move on. Than listen to what other players say, are they giving you the same feedback? If that is a yes, you might have found what you were looking for, a way to be better.

Here are my Top 40 questions:

1. What was one of your “worst” games this year? Why?

2. What was one of your “best” games this year? Why?

3. What has been one of your biggest disappointments as a rugby player?

4. What has been one of your greatest accomplishment as a rugby player?

5. What has been one of the best teams you have been on and why?

6. What has been one of the worst teams you have been on and why?

7. What has been a hardship in your life?

8. Who is a “hero” in your life and why?

9. What has been one of your greatest disappointments? What was the best team you have been on?

10. What was the most lopsided loss?

11. What was the most lopsided win?

12. If you didn’t come to rugby, where would you be?

13. When are you the most nervous while you are competing?

14. How do you tend to workout/train when by yourself?

15. In your family, who “likes” your sport the most? Why?

16. What other sport would you like to compete in if you were not playing rugby?

17. If you could be the head coach of a team for a year, what would you change?

18. What is something that is unique about rugby?

19. What is difficult about rugby?

20. What is satisfying about rugby?

21. What is the most challenging thing for you to do in rugby?

22. What was the scariest thing you have had to do? Are you glad you did it?

23. What was the last thing you saw someone do that really impressed you?

24. What is your favorite hobby? Why?

25. What are you goals for the winter?

26. Did you fill out the coach survey?

27. What are your goals for next spring? 7s? Developmental 15?

28. How do you communicate best with people? Them with you?

29. Are you considering running for an officer position? Which one?

30. How do you plan to help progress your club this year?

31. What Position do you want to play? Why?

32. Favorite thing we do at training? The least?

33. Giving your commitment level, what can we do better as coaches to help you stay engaged?

34. Do you want to play representative rugby?

35. Are you going to keep playing when you leave school?

36. Do we honor the tradition of (Club Name)? How?

37. How can we honor the tradition better?

38. Toughest player on the team? Why?

39. What are you doing to work on your mental game?

40. Are you having fun?

Did I miss one? Share it in the comments.

See you pitchside,