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By: Geron Stokes - Minster HS (OH) Originally Published in: 2018 Nike Coach of the Year Clinic Manual - by Earl Browning Provided by: Nike Coach of the Year Thank you, I appreciate you guys coming, I know it is late. I am excited about this because I think this is one of the most important things that the title of our job is associated with. I may be biased, but I think this is the best topic I could get. This is a passion and why we go into coaching. I am from Minster High School, which is located in northwestern Ohio. We play in the Midwest Athletic Conference. We have really big people and most of them are German Catholics. They are larger than most normal Americans. Most of them are in the 6'-2" to 6'-3" range. Our school wins titles in every sport they are in. Minster is a unique town and we are fortunate to be there. They are good catholic homes built around the catholic faith. I am going to get into the topic and when I start rolling I may repeat some stuff. I am going to get into my topic and how we teach this stuff. If you have any questions please ask them. I am really passionate about this stuff and when I get going, I assume everyone knows what I am talking about, but sometimes they do not. Our big deal is the person is greater than the process and the process is greater than the results. I studied this stuff and I believe in it big time. I was not taught this by my high school coach but I found it and I said this is us at Minster High School. That is who we are, what we believe, and what we stand for. For our entire program, our coaching staff, and me personally, want to work relentlessly. The topic is "how we develop leadership." Anything we have, you guys are welcome to it. I love talking about this. Shoot me an E-mail and I will respond quickly. To get this thing going I am extremely grateful for the situation I am in. Let me tell you something about myself. I am 32 years old and I became a high school head coach at age 23 at my alma mater. I was still living at home with my mother. They hired me and I had absolutely no clue at what I was doing. I knew I wanted to be a head football coach, but did not know how. I was lucky I did not get arrested or fired because I was an idiot. I wanted to study leadership. I never read a book in high school or college, but I wanted to study leadership. I have been on that kick since then. Personally I wanted to help out our players. I am thankful to be here. My defensive coordinator on our state championship team is 21 years old. We feel like we are two young idiots running around with a kind of madness. We are trying to make the program the best it can be. Early in my coaching career when I was 23, I went to a clinic and the speaker said this is a book you should read. He said, if you want to do something right, start reading books. I had never read a book in my life. But this guy was really successful, knew what he was talking about, and that was his advice. I started to read books. I want to give you some titles of books I have read this year. It is phenomenal stuff. Best Books of 2017:
I really believed you could not teach leadership. We used to complain that our players did not have leadership and there was no leadership in this program. I came to the conclusion that if we did not have leaders, it was because I was not a very good leader. I looked in the mirror and said if we do not have good leader, then I have to show them and be the model for what we want. I had to study everything I could from a leadership standpoint and I would be able to teach it and demand it from our team. Our story started at Minster five years ago. We took over a program that had some success. Our first year there was our most talented team. We got the job late in May. We had 13-I talent on the team. We have a couple of kids go to Tennessee and well as other places. We came in and tried to completely overhaul the culture right away. We got a lot of push back from the team. Our most talented team went 6-4 that year and did not make the playoffs. We did not get it done. We kept pressing forward and teaching this leadership stuff. Going into the second year we thought we all would get fired. But we kept pressing our ideas on leadership. The second year we completely over achieved and won the state title. From that point there has been no conflict with the players buying into what we were teaching. We were teaching the character stuff like crazy. Two years ago we had our least talented team and were state runner-up. They were the least talented but the best leadership. We kept teaching the character stuff and got hot late in the season and were state runner-up. This past year we started out bad, but won four games in a row in the middle of the season. We ended up 6-4 but made it into the playoffs. We won five in a row in the playoffs and won the state championship. This is our most important statement in our entire program. Who you become as results of the chase is the most important thing!" I believe in this stuff and I only hire coaches that believe in it. The coaching staff, our seniors, the players, and our parents believe in this. Our players do not play college football. We have two playing in college right now. Our players get the best things from playing on our team. I got into football coaching because of what my coach taught me. What I learned in football is who I became. When I got into football I became more disciplined and more responsible. I became better in school. My coach when I was finished playing high school football, did not care whether I could throw a drop back pass. He was worried about the character traits I had learned. As coaches we get caught up in that. They tell me a certain player is not a very good linebacker or he is a bad player. I tell them that this kids is not going to play football after high school. Who cares whether he is a good linebacker, develop him. All our players are done playing football in four years. We have to give them a skill set that will carry them on for 60 more years. If you do not believe in that you are cheating the kid. You have to believe in the "who", the person and spend time developing the person. You have to spend the time developing the person. I know that every coach in this room has said at one time or another these things. If our players were more disciplined, were more unselfish, were more trustworthy, then they would be a better football players. We spend time teaching the fundamentals of football and almost no time teaching discipline, trustworthy, unselfishness, and things like that. We said intentionally invest in the most important things. If you are going to complain about it that is the reason you are not going to have success. What are you teaching? That is a question I ask myself all the time. We have a mission statement and we all believe in it. My wife, my coaching staff, and everyone connected with our program believes in it. If you do not,or you cannot, you will not like me and cannot be around the program. Everything we do and every decision comes back to this mission. MISSION STATEMENT: Maximize every person's ability within our program personally and athletically. Graduate the hardest working, toughest, most loyal unselfish people. The people who consistently choose to do the right thing. Create memories and relationships that last a lifetime. I had two coaches in high school. One demanded the absolute best out of me. The other coach let me run the show. Guess who I talk to, love, appreciate, and care for to this day? The one that pushed me. I hated him in high school. That is why I tell my coaches, their job is to get the most out of their players every single day. My mission as head football coach of this program is to make sure we graduate the hardest working, toughest, most loyal, and unselfish people. When they walk across that stage that is what we are going to see. That is what drives us as the leaders of this program. We are coaching players that are not going to play football after high school, that statement should energize you to do your best coaching job to give them something that will help them down the road after they are finished playing. They get to create a bunch of unbelievable relationships and some awesome memories. The mission drives clarity and in turn gives identify to your program. It justifies why you spend so much time teaching leadership. It justifies why you spill your heart and soul into coaching football. I know what our coaching does and our coaching staff knows what our program stands for. You have to teach identity. Who are we going to be? This is who we are and we are not going to change. I think teaching identity teaches more leadership from a lesson standpoint. We want to create an everyday identify. We are going to be relentless. When we talk about being relentless, we not only want to defeat the opponent, we want to beat him bad. We illustrate relentless on the football field by being the first player off the ground. We emphasize being the first one off the ground. We talk relentless all the time. We teach relentless in every day meetings. We had a kid that tore his ACL in the second quarter of the 2016 championship game. He went in to get it operated on and found out he has a torn ligament in his left shoulder. He missed his senior year, but he came back to help us on the sidelines. We had another player knocked out with a concussion. The kid with the concussion found out that his little brother who was a freshman in high school had bone cancer. Why do we teach what we teach? It is not because we lost the state championship that year. We teach it because of the skill set to bounce back after something bad happens. If one of our players goes to the ground for any reason, we have six coaches telling him to get up. What is the deal? We want him to stand up right now. Every time they hit the ground, we want them to bounce back. We talk about "playing for 6." That is who we want to be. We want to know if the player will go as hard as he can for the duration of each play. We are not talking about simply practice or games. We are talking about the class room, weight room, your friendship, or every conversation you have with your mom and dad. Is the player fully invested and engaged in what they are doing? We want our players to go hard for six seconds. That is who we are going to be. Can you go as hard as we want you to on every football play? We want to know if the players are fully invested in everything we do. What if the coaches did that? What if they were totally engaged. That is our goal. Whatever happens, start back, and play again. This relates to football. The players will play like hell for you and regardless of the outcome, they will bounce back and play again. The way we teach it is "start, strain, and finish." That is buried deep within our program. What does that look like? To be really good and phenomenal at something, you have to have the guts to get it started. You have to start great and have intensity, focus, and energy to get it started. Interrelationship is required. Is there anyone in here that is married? The word "strain" is in a marriage. The word strain is in a family. The word strain is in your job. You are going to have to strain to do something great. However, whatever you do something great or not, you are going to have to strain. You have to embrace and love strain. With every task, there has to be finish. Start, strain, and finish are how we teach leadership. We do this every day in our program. We are going to do the right thing the right way. I believe that people do things because they are supposed to do it. How many things in your life do you do just because it is required? How many times in your life are you thinking about doing the right thing the absolute right way? I am talking about all things. We have a thing in our program we call "hard skills." For any simple fundamental that they do in practice and do not do it correctly, they drop down and give us two push ups. You want to be great and do things the right way. The player does not have to be called out by a coach. If he does something wrong, he drops and does two push ups. That reminds the player that he is supposed to do the right thing the right way all the time. I could be teaching in a defensive setting. I am watching the right side of the defense. When I turn back around there is a player doing push ups. I asked him what he was doing and he told me he over pursued on the play. That is good stuff when it happens. We are teaching that player to discipline himself. To hold himself accountable because he cares and values doing things the right way. We talk about F.A.M.I.L.Y (Forget About Me I Love You). We are in a town that values state championships. The least talented team we had, did not care about state championships. They wanted to be the tightest knit group that had ever come through Minster High School. We helped them along. We told them to forget about you individually. It was all about serve and give. What can you do on a daily basis to serve your team, our program your buddy, and our family and give on every single down. What can you do? This was awesome what happened within our program this year. We have all our field equipment stacked in our locker room. It all has to go to the field every day. The coaches are usually the first out of the locker room. As they passed by, they picked up something to carry to the field, which is about a half mile away. No one asked anyone to take any equipment. Each player that passes that pile picks up something to carry to the field. Our all-state quarterback, who was Ohio's player of the year picked up two yellow dummies and carried them out to the field. We have players watching film on their own. Not because they want to watch film and learn about football, they are serving and giving. That is what good people do. That is where "forget about me and I love you", comes into the game. We want to be the best practice team in the country. How can we measure that? We cannot. Those are behaviors that will keep you in an attack mode the rest of your life. You have to value practice and attack it every day. To teach leadership, you have to "model the way" If I am going to talk about leadership, I better be living it. I better be serving and giving and playing for 6. I better being doing everything in my power to do the right thing the right way. You have to model the way. I went to our school administration and got them to let me teach leadership as a class. By teaching this class, I am giving back to the kids. The second reason is I get to talk about it every single day. I read books like crazy. Not because I like to read but because I have to model the way. I come to clinics and talk about leadership because I like it and because I have to model the way. I just saw an example of this in the first session this morning. I listened to Dana Holgorsen. When he was finished and the coaches walked out, they left their empty cups and did not push their chair back under the table. I bet those coaches that did not clean up their crap are not teaching their players the right way. I do not want to be that guy. You cannot teach players to do it the right way, if you do not. I am not perfect, but you have to strive to do things the right way. I demand our coaches model the way. We slip just like everyone else because we are not perfect. But we must be mindful of it. We try to create peer-to-peer accountability. This is hard for human beings. No one in the teaching profession holds other teachers accountable. It is hard for the principal to hold teachers accountable. I think this is a major skill in leadership. We talk about it all the time with our team. If a player makes a mistake in front of a coach, our coaches do not automatically go to the guy that made the mistake. They go to the player beside him. They make the correction with the player next to him. That makes that player have a real conversation with the player who made the mistake and he does the coach's correction. When we first got to Minster, we had players crying in the weight rack working with a heavy weight. The player standing behind him did not say a word. That was hard for him to say anything. You do not want to correct someone, because it is hard. We coach the other kid to make sure he has a conversation with the kid. We recognize people in our program that call other people out. That is a major value in our program. There are two ways they can do it. They can do it in front of other teammates or in private. He is still his teammate but it is the right thing to do. We do accountability groups like everyone else. In the winter after the season, we have the incoming senior class come to my room and we have a draft for accountability groups. The senior is responsible for the group. If one of their players misses a practice or the weight training program, they have to go through the senior leader. After he does that he has to talk to me. For him to miss an activity he has to talk to two people. The seniors have a foxhole group of people they are in charge of. This gives the senior an opportunity to lead. They are in charge of the group. We have one senior now who is having trouble communicating. If the player does not talk to the senior or me, that sucks. In the military, if you leave a guy behind, you do not know where he is. When this happens in our program the players go to "suck island." They go to the corner of the weight room and do burpees. The rest of the players cheer them on or poke fun at them. If we are going to change something in our program, I text the seniors and they communicate with their group. This is a communication chain with the seniors in charge of it. We have peer-to-peer coaching. Our freshmen and JV programs practice with the varsity. On occasion we step back and tell the freshmen and JV coaches that they are running practice today. We step back and the younger coach take the practice. It is not going to be perfect, but it gives the coaches an opportunity to communicate and an opportunity to lead. We are teaching players how to lead. They are going to be successful, they may fail, but they are learning how to lead. The most important thing is who you are as a person. Who you become as a result of the chase. If we are going to intentionally invest in it, we are going to meet every day. We have a big room, which is like a college lecture hall. We meet in there every day. When we walk in the kids are going nuts. There will be some major energy going on in the room. The seniors are up front and the groups are organized. When we come into the room we are going to present and teach every day. This is the highlight of my day. We pick something out and teach it. We do it just like a history class. We want to teach a lesson. We started this two years ago and kind of refreshed it this year. We go through this process and a lot of it comes from "What Drives Winning." An example of a topic we want to present and teach is "what is the goal of this team?" One of the most selfish players on the team for three-and-half years bought into this in his senior year and had a hell of a year. In this meeting, he said that the goal of the team was to achieve something that you could not accomplish by yourself. That was the definition of team. We are together as a team because we cannot do this by ourselves. If that is the goal of the team, what three things will hold us back from maximizing our potential? I bet it is not offensive line play. It is going to be toughness, undisciplined, selfish, or completely buy in to what the objectives of the team. The things that hold you back has nothing to do with the actual football parts and everything to do with the character and leadership part. We were writing on the white board and the team was shooting out answers. None of the things had anything to do with football. When we see the problems we can focus on it and drive it home to our players. What is the number one trait that holds a team back? The answer is selfishness. Why do marriages not work? Why do families break up? Why can I not have a real conversation with my wife? It is uncomfortable for me because I am taking care of my needs. We talk about those things. Why does the linebacker not read his guard? Because he is selfish and not focused on what his job is. The number one thing that holds players back is they are worried about themselves. Every year we have our team write down a word that become their goal. That selfish kids for three and half years wrote down teammate as his word. If every player on your team became a teammate success will follow. Teammates become great dad and employees. The next thing we talk about is what is holding you back. Now we are talking about the individual. Sometimes we have players that are a little scared and lack confidence. I am sure you do too. If the player lacks confidence and the team needs you to play with confidence, the player has to overcome that problem. Everyone always talks about character. How do you define character? Character is who you are as a person. Because the linebacker is not reading the guard is not character, it is undisciplined. We make it personal and sometimes our players do not like that. But in the end they will be like me when I was in high school and my relationship with my coach. Character comes from two types:
Your performance skill will get you to the top. It will get you any job or football position. Moral skill keeps you there. I have seen really good football coaches fired because they could not get along with the people in the community.
We show this card to our players and during the season, they have a weekly goal card. We do it on Monday. We ask them to pick one performance trait and one moral trait that they are going to get better at during the week. It is unbelievable what our players come up with. One kid tells us he wants to be more focused. He is going to watch 15 minutes on Hudl tonight. He may not know what he is watching but he is going to sit down and watch it because he knows that is one of his weaknesses. He may say, he wants to be more accountable. He is not going to jump off sides today. Anytime I jump off sides, I am going to do 5 push ups. This allows them to be better as a football player and a person. We have players that say they want to be more appreciative so they are going to write three thank you notes to people who have helped them out. It is crazy what they come up with, but they are the only person who truly knows what their weaknesses are. On Wednesday, we have the players who reached their goal for that week stand up in our meeting. We usually have 90-percent of our players stand up. I have to do the same thing and improve on some of my weaknesses. We hold each other accountable. That is leadership ability. We start the team meetings and most of the other character building activities during football season. Most of our players are multiple sports players. We lift at 6:00 in the mornings three days a week. We may do something as far as lessons during that time, but most of the leadership and character activities are done during the season. During the team meeting it could last two minutes or forty minutes. If we have a big discussion, we cut practice time and finish the discussion. That great discussion is more important. How can I talk about all these things and cut the kids off, because we have to go practice football? We are working with the kids. One of the big slogans in our program is "Better People make Better Wildcats." Our quarterback is a stud. He is the best football player we have had at the school. However, he is our best leader in school, the most disciplined kid, the most honest kid, and most trustworthy kid. That does not happen by accident. He is our best person. "The toughest team always wins." That is what we tell our team. The first year at the school, we lost. You have to define what toughness is. It is part of leadership and has to be taught. Toughness is doing the right thing the right way. We bring the National Guard in to work our players out. It is part of our "do not seek comfort" there. We are on the field at six in the morning. That is when the sprinklers come on. Life is uncomfortable. Our kids are exercising with the military sergeant yelling at him. The sprinkler is hitting him right in the face, but he will seek no comfort and continues to work. Three years ago, those kids would have headed for the sidelines. This year these kids loved it and hung in there. Average people find comfort. The great ones are not going to find the comfort. They will always rise to the occasion. The next idea is "so what, now what." When bad things happen, what are you going to do about it? We had a really immature, selfish sophomore wide receiver. During the season he grew up a lot. In the state championship game on the second play, we threw a pass to him. He did not catch it and it bounced into the air and they intercepted. He looked at me and said "so what, now what." Our leaders on the field told him to forget about it and make the next play. He cannot reverse the play. Now how is he going to respond to the play? That same series, he picked off a pass in the end zone and took it for a touchdown. We had a kids who got cancer under his rib cage. I have never seen anyone with that kind of attitude. His attitude was "so what, now what." He was going to deal with it. He told us he would be back and he would be all right. The only thing you can control is how you respond to the situation. To me that is leadership. There are things that you have to do and some things you get to do. We played a game this year in a driving rain storm. No one wanted to be there. Not me, my wife, our players, the officials, or the ball boys wanted to be there. It was raining and 33 degrees. We talked to our players about being grateful. We told them they should be grateful they get to play in the rain today. You get the opportunity to have great ball security. You get the opportunity to play with your buddies. They do not have to go to practice today, they get to go play. That changes the entire mindset. You do not have to go home and spend time with your kids, you get to go home. You do not have to do anything. You get to do it. The team we played in the rain, had way more talent than we did. We turned the ball over one time and they turned it over six times. Our players were grateful to play the game. It was all in the perception of the game. We have a thing we call "thankful Thursday" Every player on the team has to write down something they are thankful for. Then we have a senior put his phone on speaker phone and make a phone call. If you do one thing from this presentation this is the one you want to do. The kids that tore his shoulder ligament and his ACL called his brother. He told him he wanted to thank him for being the role model for him. For talking to him when he was struggling. Always model the way for me and lead me in the right direction. The older brother was in college. His older brother thanked him from the bottom of his heart. Our entire team was listening to the personal conversation between two brothers. To me that showed leadership. We have a thing called "alley cat vs. house cat." One of my assistants and I felt we lacked quality in our program. We came up with a list of 13 qualities that we wanted our kids to have. There were things like team first guy, strainer, resilient, and others. The players in the team meeting have to stand up and promote themselves to be an "alley cat or a house cat." They made those determinations by the list of qualities we gave them. The alley cats were the tough scary type of individuals while the house cats were less tough. Our school is in a wealthy community, where the kids are considered silver-spoon types of kids. I know you are wondering how this relates to leadership. This promotes another internal conversation piece. They have to stand up in the meeting and tell everyone why they are an alley cat instead of a house cat. At the start of the year pick the five performance skills and moral skills that you would like to be known for. Have the players write the end of the year banquet speech for coach. What will he say about you at the banquet? Incorporate your 10 skills into the speech. The players wrote down what he wanted to become and the skills he possessed. Is he living those things every day? He is the one who wrote them down. Was he just talking to make it sound good or was he sincere about what he had become. We were lucky to play 15 games the last two years. We have seen players going from being selfish to being unselfish. We have seen kids go from no confidence to bubbling over with confidence. When you write it down on a piece of paper, it means more. There is a story I want to pass on. It is about a golf ball. When golf balls were first made, they were smooth. After they were played with for a time, they got dents on them. What they found out was the more dents on the golf ball, the further they traveled. God made us all golf balls. We give all our kids golf balls. When I called to check on the player with the torn ACL, he told me he was just a golf ball. He said he was fine, that football was just a game and would not affect him the rest of his life. That is powerful stuff. That is leadership. That kid bounced back and did not feel sorry for himself. I have a lot more stuff than I could get to. If you would like to see the entire power point, Email me. This is awesome stuff. I did not put this all together. I stole it from someone else. If you believe that the kids is the most important thing, then invest in it. At Minster High School, we have. I cannot assess if that is why you came to listen tonight, but I believe you wanted to. Any questions? I appreciate you being here. Thank you very much. |
How We Develop Leadership
