Transcript
Speaker: Action. I don't control players. I try to control the environment around the players so they can flourish. Pat Riley. Welcome to the Captains and Coaches podcast. We explore the art and science of leadership through the lens of athletics and beyond.
Speaker: I'm your host Tex McQuilkin and today we're talking about coaches blowing up over something very innocent. Wrong route, empty water, kids laughing in the back of the huddle. Probably one of my favorite memories in the past couple years of coaching is when we were in a huddle to finish up, this is the JV practice.
Speaker: And one of the coaches on our staff, he's in the huddle saying, man, we only got six or seven guys that can catch and throw. I only trust six and seven of you to get out there on game day.
Speaker: And he was bearing very stern, very serious, but he kept dropping six, seven. No idea what he was saying. I had an idea what he was saying.
Speaker: I was standing behind him, little smirk. Kids, JV, JV, junior varsity, they just start, you hear the the cracks and the crackle start to go up with each time he drops this.
Speaker: He didn't understand why they were not listening, why they were the cracking jokes, and he had enough. On the end line and freaking hammered these kids. And this is JV, so all the parents are lined up.
Speaker: waiting to pick the kids up and they just got to witness true punishment. And if you've played a high school sport for a year, you've seen this, experienced this, or got a story like this. If you've been coaching high school for a week, you've probably done this.
Speaker: In that sense of frustration, it just feels like these kids are not focused or listening and then you lose it. And you throw poles at them, not literally, poles running. You've got to run to poles on the football field, the baseball field, whatever. Up-downs, bear crawls, barrel rolls.
Speaker: Punishment when I was middle school football, if we got detention, we had to show up to practice after detention got out. We grab our our helmets and we just do rolls for however many yards. I can't remember what it was, but it was not fun.
Speaker: at all and there was not one kid that got a detention that didn't have to vomit before stepping into whatever was left of practice and it escalated too so whatever however many detentions we got it was a hundred extra yards on top of that so Man, good time. So the intention of our coaches was discipline, but we still had those kids that kept on getting detention. It wasn't the football barrel rolls that were going to stop them from doing this stuff.
Speaker: And if you've been that high school coach and you've administrated discipline during practice, you know they keep making the mistakes. I want to explore why.
Speaker: A mistake happens so we hand out conditioning or something that we personally think sucks and that this is currency for could correction in our mindset.
Speaker: We think, okay, I don't like this, I'm gonna give it to them and they're gonna shape and change their behavior. But it doesn't always happen. And here's the question i want you to sit with for the next 10 minutes for this podcast of what are those decisions that we're making, the tools that we're throwing at them, actually teaching?
Speaker: I'm going to get into why it fails. I'm not going to beat around the bush here because here's what I've come to believe and discover. 17 years coaching, been all over the globe, six six continents, all levels from, I mean, youth, middle, high school, college, and tip of the spear dudes.
Speaker: It is punishment-based conditioning. This teaches compliance. Well, the best teams, I don't want compliance. I want confidence. I want character. I want dudes to to know who they are and they step out in the field and they show everybody else.
Speaker: through their play and their attitude and swagger. That's what I want to, I don't only, i just, I don't want compliance to be a part of this because it doesn't lead to confidence.
Speaker: And an athlete who who gets 10 up downs for a mistake learns one thing fast. Don't get caught. Not, I'm not going to make a mistake.
Speaker: Not, I'm going to make a better decision next time. only, hey, I'm not going to get caught. I'm going cut corners and see if coach is watching me so that way I avoid this outcome versus actually learning and shaping my behavior.
Speaker: It's not also, how do I fix this when they make mistakes, genuine mistakes? Now they're trying to cover up their mistakes because they don't want coach mad at them. And it's not, how do I take ownership of my performance?
Speaker: It's how do I not get caught at this stuff? And We're not teaching the kids valuable lessons. They're getting really good at covering it up and that's what they're learning. And we're not teaching them anything.
Speaker: So there's also a second cost and one we don't talk about enough that we're gonna highlight here. When sprints or burpees and up-downs become punishment, we're quietly training our athletes to resent movement, to resent hard work itself.
Speaker: The same conditioning work, we need them to buy in and believe that they can do hard things, that our team can suffer and work hard together. So the 6 a.m. m sprints and practices, they know that they can trust the person across from them because they put in the work too. So now when we're challenged in sport, we show up and we have trust to the person next to us.
Speaker: resentment starts to build if we say, well, hey, Billy was late, so we're going to run. Now everybody mads at Billy and it creates a negative environment of like, ah crap.
Speaker: Here comes Billy pulling up to practice late again. Here we go. And now it it it creates negative environment versus an environment where our teammates are starting to hold each other accountable and in building something special that then is expressed on the field.
Speaker: and that This conditioning work that we value as discipline is actually having a negative effect. And we need them to buy into the the the tools that we are applying so their development becomes something that their brain files under.
Speaker: Bad thing that happens when I mess up. That's our intention. We want it to be, okay, I remember this feeling. Last time I made that mistake, I'm going to make a better decision this next time it comes up.
Speaker: We don't want everything we do in practice to steal reps from practice and getting better as athletes and start to build resentment and negative movement patterns. And I can go full strength and conditioning coach on you, but I'm not.
Speaker: so
Speaker: I don't want behavior, I don't want poor movement to transfer into play. And the second that whistle stops, the lesson is gone with the punishment.
Speaker: There's nothing about self-awareness that we're building, or guilt and reasonable thinking that, okay, next time this happens, I'm going to take ownership of this and take responsibility here.
Speaker: We're not forming good decisions when we are punishing and making the whole team suffer with one kid's mistake. There's nothing about accountability within that. just relief that it's over when it does finish for the team.
Speaker: So the line that I keep coming back to and the one this whole show was built on, sports don't teach lessons, coaches do. And that goes for the negative sense of that as well. So punishment isn't a lesson.
Speaker: This is a transaction. You made a mistake, you paid a physical cost, we're square. And that costs time too. Nothing actually was learned in that transaction.
Speaker: So if punishment isn't the answer, what is? That's what we're here to talk about with the podcast. And I call this punishment. aiming to reframe how discipline is taught in athletics.
Speaker: I want to give tools to my athletes so they become more responsible, become disciplined, and then start to hold their teammates accountable and we build a culture of leadership in an environment that Pat Riley talked about in that quote at the beginning of the episode.
Speaker: So the idea in one sentence, punishment is a movement-based discipline that builds a skill instead of extracting a cost. The shift is simple to say, but hard to live out.
Speaker: And instead of asking, what's the consequence? You ask, what is the competency? And competency, these are skills. I lean into social emotional learning as competencies. That's self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship building skills, and then responsible decision making.
Speaker: So am I applying tools and giving my tools to athletes that are building these social emotional competencies? I call it social emotional leadership.
Speaker: So every corrective moment becomes a chance to do these things for our athletes. Another model I want to establish here to help you ah really lean into punishment, it's define, model, shape, and reinforce.
Speaker: Before the season, hopefully, you define a standard of how your athletes operate. Then you model it personally as a coach and get your team captains to model it. Then you shape behavior when it's not in line.
Speaker: And then we reinforce it. We've got to call out wins. We've got to praise our athletes when they are doing what we defined as the standard and the expectations all the time. So to define, model, shape, reinforce.
Speaker: Recall that. I lean into it a lot within the podcast because if It's an awesome tool for not only teaching movement, we're teaching leadership, and shaping behavior within the the the respect of my team.
Speaker: So define means that an athlete knows exactly what standard they missed, not just that they messed up, period, go run. Model, this means that you show them what it's like when it's done right.
Speaker: Shape means you use movement, real physical work, to build the behavior that you actually want and not just make them tired and move poor.
Speaker: Oh, man. Just I had the opportunity to observe a high school football practice recently, and the up-downs were atrocious. That's not go to help prepare them to be better football players at all. It just made them tired with piss-poor effort.
Speaker: Okay, then reinforce. This means you come back to it when the going gets tough, and it sticks past that one moment. You recall, you learn the lesson, and you have a tool to take into the next time this opportunity presents itself.
Speaker: So underneath all of it, this isn't just physical, it's built around skills that actually carry over into life. And this is those competencies that I mentioned earlier, social emotional leadership, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship building, responsible decision-making.
Speaker: Funishment is the vehicle for teaching these and how we get sport to teach these lessons because we coach are leading them with intention.
Speaker: And it was never just about fitness or conditioning, drilling somewhere with with a clever name. That's not punishment. No, it's intentionally leading with the heart, leading with the lesson, building social emotional leadership competencies through movement. Okay, so how this solves the problem, let's make it concrete because I know that what some of you are thinking right now, this sounds like no consequences or going soft on these guys or ignoring problems because we don't want to discipline them.
Speaker: It's not. It's not at all. This is actually more difficult than the traditional discipline that you had because a lot of it involves a conversation and then holding the mirror up on real consequences that the athletes have led themselves to by the decisions they made.
Speaker: So stay with me. Old way. An athlete shows up late to practice. Team runs. I get it. New way. Athlete is late. We define the standard. Punctuality protects the group's time and shows respect for everyone else's effort and others around you.
Speaker: There are other people on the team. You model what being on on time and accountability looks like. We can point to a captain or a senior or the best player on the team or somebody that changed behavior that led them to success.
Speaker: I, as a coach, model that. I get to lead the warm-ups every single day. I'm very punctual when it comes to practice. If work, life gets in the way, Well, then I hand the warm-up off to the captains. Now I'm giving them responsibility. So I'm modeling delegation, connection, and leadership when life does get in the way of me being on time to practice because that happens.
Speaker: Now, we shape it. This is the hard conversation that I have with kid. Maybe that does involve movement, but the movement tied to the actual behavior, not a random physical task that takes away from skill development or practice or coordination and movement patterns.
Speaker: So maybe our time block is cut down for their favorite part of practice. Instead of doing more conditioning and pushing practice back five minutes and then taking them away from something else to it coming after practice, no, we find a few minutes during their favorite part, their reward. In lacrosse, it's six on six. We're competing.
Speaker: but we take away their favorite part and then install some movement-based learning within there. So we're not cutting practice short. We're not pushing practice long, and we're not yelling at them and running for running's sake. No, we're showing them that, hey, we're going to take this three minutes that you owe me,
Speaker: We're going to do some movement and we're cutting three minutes out of the fun part that you enjoy the most. and Finally, we need to reinforce. I call this close the loop. If we teach a kid a lesson, we can't just make it implicit that, hey, I made them run.
Speaker: He'll learn the lesson or she won't make that mistake next time because I punished her. I need you to close the loop. Teenagers are smart, but they're also not.
Speaker: So if there is a lesson that we imply, i need you to make the implicit, explicit, and very clear on why we did that. Why we did three minutes of punishment, and I cut three minutes out of the fun part of practice, and we still finished on time because I respect your time.
Speaker: Make that clear, reinforce, close the loop, ensure that they understand why they did this, not imply that they'll they'll learn their lesson because they won't. It's like those stupid rolls that I did in middle school. I still got detention and I still rolled.
Speaker: Didn't change much there. ah Getting sick just thinking about it. Okay. So reinforce is you come back to the athlete, either that moment after we did our punishment, after the practice, or later in the week when they actually did something awesome.
Speaker: Reinforce what they did well, and then reinforce the decision of the the bad decision they made last time and what happened. Ensuring that it sticks. Hey, this is what happens when you do well and it feels good.
Speaker: recall what it felt like when you made a mistake ah and that negatively affected you or the team okay notice what didn't happen nobody got let off easy If anything, this asks more of the athlete, not less. It asks something of their thinking, not just their legs or their lungs. And that's part ah that surprises coaches most when they first switch over to this punishment mindset.
Speaker: Funishment is more rigorous than punishment and not softer. And we're building leaders because I'm having difficult conversations with the kids and I put them in a position to gain experience having tough conversations and calling their peers out in a respectful manner so we change behavior.
Speaker: That's the goal here. This is more challenging than just barking at them and making them do stuff that I hate. So the the shift here, one line to sum it up for you.
Speaker: Discipline stops being something you take from an athlete, and it becomes something you build in them. That's what I built with this new course, just launching it right now. Here's our announcement. It's called Funishment, Reframing Discipline in Athletics.
Speaker: It's for high school, college, strength, sport coaches, parents, whoever's dealing with coaches you feel can run better practices or how do I give my kid tools to deal with these coaches that are, i mean, taking aim at them versus aiming to help and empower them.
Speaker: So anyone that's using discipline as punishment against your own kids, here's tools to help your kids understand, protect themselves, and how to shape and change their behavior quicker.
Speaker: So this is just a run through of the course. I have movement based how I run my my my lectures, my presentations, and everything that I do in my courses. It's lecture based into movement. So I talk about it in a lecture piece and then I bring that to the weight room, to the floor, and talk about how we actually apply it.
Speaker: Because that's what I want you to do. I want you to apply these tools at practice on Monday. We're going to start with a a a reframe. We're not not running. We're not not doing certain movements and forms of conditioning. I give you tools and then what lessons that those tools teach.
Speaker: So linked up in the show notes. If you're on YouTube, find it right here. you're listening, go to fun.captainsandcoaches.com for this new course. I had a lot of fun making it, exploring the research, the science. Yeah, deep dove this. It's something I'm proud of.
Speaker: If you listen this pod you made it this far, 25% off to you who's dedicated, coach, parent, athlete, kid, whoever's listening. Pod25 at checkout, P-O-D, all caps, 25 at checkout for 25% off.
Speaker: First lessons on there free. If you're exploring too, just check that out, fun.captainsandcoaches.com. I'm getting riled up because I got practice today, and got to get to it So thank you for tuning in to the Captains and Coaches podcast and helping us raise the game.
Speaker: Amen. See you. Cut.
