Originally published in an Adam Sarancik Book

"Never confuse winning with succeeding. A successful league and team is one that inspires its players to want to come back again tomorrow."

Too often, leagues and teams define their success by their won-loss records. And yet, if evaluated objectively, those wins and championships were more a consequence of a few elite players and mediocre competition than general player development. The individual skills of the overwhelming majority of players on every team did not significantly improve at all during the season or, if they did, they were a result of private coaching outside of the league.

Here are some concrete steps leagues and teams need to take so that every player on every team along the entire ability spectrum improves and develops every season:

1. Leagues should redefine success and distinguish it from winning. Success is having systems and a process to develop better people and better athletes, not just better players. Success is when the players use the life skills they learned on their team to be better sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, students and friends. Success is also when the players learned athletic and self-care skills that will benefit them in all sports and later in life.
2. In practices and games, coaches and leagues should prioritize rewarding intangibles such as leadership, kindness, forgiveness, tenacity, perseverance, etc. Educational talks and role plays using quotations, role plays, and guest speakers should be proactively programmed into every practice and training session so that life lessons are taught within the game for beyond the game.
3. The philosophy and systems must be required for all teams and coaches in the league. The system should also be monitored and progressed year-to-year so more is expected from the players as people and as athletes every year.
4. Leagues should do much more than administer practice and game schedules and adjudicate coach-parent-player disputes. Coaches should be trained and should prioritize being master teachers of individual athletic and sport skills not just playing the game with better tactics and strategy. Leagues and coaches must regularly assess and monitor whether the athletic and sports skills of every player on every team is improving. This may require re-thinking how practices are structured. Instead of receiving "instruction" from the same set of coaches for all aspects of the game, players may need to attend mini-clinics 2-3 times per week from league coaches or instructors who specialize in teaching different individual skills of the game. Coaches must teach using all of the learning modalities, auditory, visual and kinesthetic, appropriate for each player.
5. The players in the league should be divided into different levels and the "games" they play may need to have different formats so that maximum engagement and development are achieved. Leagues, teams and coaches need to move away from prioritizing points, runs, wins and losses to objectively look at how many attempts and successes of the fundamentals of the sport each player has the opportunity to make and actually made during a game.

If these criteria were used and steps were taken, leagues and their teams could honestly state that they are working for the benefit of all players and not just a select few.

Adam Sarancik is the author of four Amazon Top 100 Best Selling books, Coaching Champions for Life – The Process of Mentoring the Person, Athlete and Player; Takeaway Quotes for Coaching Champions for Life; A Ground Ball to Shortstop - How and Why Coaches See Their Game Differently Than Anyone Else; and Teacher, Role Model, Mentor: Lessons Learned from a Lifetime in Coaching.

Adam Sarancik is the Author of Four Amazon Top 100 Best Selling Baseball Coaching Books:

• Coaching Champions for Life – The Process of Mentoring the Person, Athlete and Player
• Takeaway Quotes for Coaching Champions for Life
• A Ground Ball to Shortstop – How and Why Coaches See Their Game Differently Than Anyone Else.
• Teacher, Role Model, Mentor: Lessons Learned From a Lifetime in Coaching.

  ]]> https://coachesinsider.com/football/holistic-coaching-for-the-benefit-of-all-players/feed/ 0 113890 https://coachesinsider.com/football/run-block-progression-with-bart-miller-univ-of-illinois/ https://coachesinsider.com/football/run-block-progression-with-bart-miller-univ-of-illinois/#respond Wed, 25 Jun 2025 11:26:09 +0000 https://coachesinsider.com/?p=95878 Watch as Coach Bart Miller explains and shows practice and game video of this run block progression. The progression starts with a 2-step punch using a 2- or 3-point stance in the cage. The focus is on taking 1 and 2 steps trying to get the 2nd step in the ground and getting ready to strike. The fit phase simulates the lineman taking their 1st and 2nd steps and making contact with the screws of the helmet and the hands. They must transfer power from the floor through the hip into the block. Coach shows examples of a front side inside zone drill and taking wider aiming points against wide 3 and 5 techniques.

Carlos Locklyn was formerly coaching at University of Oregon.

By: Alan Stein, Jr.

Originally Published in: Raise Your Game

I don't believe there's such a thing as a "million-dollar idea." The phrase implies that all you have to do is come up with an idea and the money will start flowing in. But that's not how it works. It's never once worked like that. Vision doesn't stop with coming up with an idea; if it did, there would be way more billionaires sitting around thinking up more ideas. It's about executing that idea, and that execution requires others' help. You have to sell your vision by building a dedicated and tight circle that feels strongly connected to you and to it. True leaders live and die by their vision and get others to do so as well. Communicating your vision is a must. According to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, "85% of your financial success is due to your personality and ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. Only 15% is due to technical knowledge."

Vision is about carrying both the big and the small, the now and the later, the intangible concept and the tangible steps. "The most productive people push themselves to come up with big goals," wrote Charles Duhigg in Smarter Faster Better, "and then have a system for breaking them into manageable parts." Draw a connection between what you ultimately want to accomplish, along with what you want your organization to be, and then break it all down into the manageable steps it will take to get there.

"Any vision, however far-reaching, remains only a fantasy unless steps are taken to realize it," Maury Klein wrote in The Change Makers, a book that profiles the greatest entrepreneurs of the last 150 years. "What separates the great artist from the ordinary practitioner is not only grandeur of vision but, even more, the ability to bring it to fruition." Remember, the word "vision" in business is usually associated with predicting the future, but the word itself is simpler than that: it just means to see. No one will see exactly what you can see. Keep your eyes open.