Transcript
Speaker: Action. A coach is someone who tells you what you don't want to hear, who has to see what you don't want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be. Tom Landry.
Speaker: Welcome to the Captains and Coaches podcast. We explore the art and science of leadership through the lens of athletics and beyond. I'm your host, Texan Quilkin, and if you're just joining us for the first time, this is a show built on one belief.
Speaker: Sports don't teach lessons. Coaches do. Six months into my doctorate program, 20% of the way through an EDD in Educational Leadership and Organizational Innovation.
Speaker: Working on a dissertation in practice. No ivory tower, no high horse. I'm in the trenches coaching athletes, coaching teams. trying to figure out what actually works for developing team captains, future leaders.
Speaker: And I want to do something I don't do enough on the show. I do solo podcasts. I highlight some cool stuff that I learned from the classes or diving into the research. Well, today I'm going to pull back the curtain on some more tools that i'm I'm learning. where they're shifting my thinking and where research is pointing next that I'm going to deep dive and spend the next three years. So we're focusing on three things today, a reintroduction to something most of you have heard but may not fully sat with yet.
Speaker: and then where my research is going specifically into a gap, I believe most one of the most under addressed problems in competitive sports. And then lastly, a request, which actually we're going to start with, if you want to continue along with my doctorate journey,
Speaker: I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast, like, rate, review. That truly does help other, find other coaches, other team leaders, other parents that are looking to empower their young athletes with the show. So if you are, like, subscribe, do all that good stuff. I encourage you to do that now to continue it on because I'm not going anywhere and aiming to solve some fun problems, which I'm going to share with you today.
Speaker: All right, i want to reintroduce a topic that is near and dear to my heart that I've spent a lot of time connected with, with youth and child development, and now aiming to pull and connect into sports. And that's SEL, social emotional learning.
Speaker: Most of you have heard this term before. I've done a number of podcasts on it, even worked into a lot of my presentations the term social emotional leadership. That's my take on social emotional learning when working with teenage athletes or college level athletes.
Speaker: so where sel shows up it's in elementary school curriculum and curriculum from k through 12. that's what teachers use to to create their lesson plans and learning objectives and what they aim to accomplish for their students in their classroom where i want to reintroduce this is because I think it's it's being used in sport without being fully understood.
Speaker: And that's going after that assumption that sports teach lessons. There are great coaches out there that are aiming to to shape behavior, to guide youth athletes, and applying a lot of these tools, but they're not giving it a specific label.
Speaker: And if we're not measuring, if we're not managing it, we can't measure it. So that's the aim here. And that's that gap, that lack of measurement or understanding of the tools and impact you are having, that's where the gap leads to consequences.
Speaker: So SEL, social emotional learning, it was formalized by CASEL, the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning in the 90s. The framework organizes around five core competencies.
Speaker: And let's go through them Number one is self-awareness, one of the most difficult things to teach a teenager or a 20-something going through college athletics.
Speaker: Self-awareness, this is defined as the ability to recognize your own emotions, values, strengths, and limitations. You also are able to understand how these strengths, values, limitations influence your behavior.
Speaker: This is the athlete who knows when they go internal after a bad play and what it costs the team. Next up is self-management, regulating emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in different situations. You can feel certain things, but then you're able to regulate, impulse control. You can manage your own stress and refocus, reset.
Speaker: This takes tools. It takes practice. It takes a lot of time for us to learn to manage and regulate our emotions. this involves This is also connecting with setting goals and long-term goals.
Speaker: development, reaching out towards what we're aiming to be. So, and in following through and executing and delayed gratification and not going out or not eating that because you know you have this coming up or investing now in July because I want to win in the spring. That'd be representation and and of self-awareness and self-management.
Speaker: This is the captain who can hold their composure in the fourth quarter when everything is unraveling. When their team is caught in a doom loop, they can pull them out and help them realize, hey, we've been here before. We got this. They're right where we want them.
Speaker: Next up is social awareness, understanding and emphasizing with other individuals, including across differences. So you're empathizing, not emphasizing. You're empathizing with others across including differences. This is what leaders do. You're able to also read what your words are, how they impact other individuals.
Speaker: So your intent is also matching the impact versus a lot of the conflict where I didn't mean it like that. Well, that's low social awareness because you didn't anticipate how your words would impact others.
Speaker: There's also a lot of people out there that are unable to read another person. So they're barking orders at them from a leadership position, whether it's a captain or a coach, and they're not able to read the body language. They're holding that kid or that athlete accountable for feeling sorry after they treated them terribly.
Speaker: So that's low social awareness. So we are able to recognize these social norms, body language, and we're able to empathize and understand how the behavior that our actions elicited from others and how it lands in the room.
Speaker: This is the athlete leader who reads the locker room and knows when to push and when to back off. So you can lead the mental and emotional state of certain individuals on your team, and it takes time and reps to then lead the mental and emotional state of a whole team.
Speaker: And that takes leadership skills, which leads us to our next point. Leadership skills. So you're communicating clearly. You're actively listening. You're cooperating. You're navigating conflict.
Speaker: and building trust amongst your team no matter their age, rank, grade, whatever it may be. This is the relationship, the racial relational infrastructure of a team and allows you to then lead the mental and emotional state.
Speaker: But it must be built at that individual level first. And lastly, and most importantly, we have responsible decision making. i would argue this is on and off the field.
Speaker: So you're making thoughtful, constructive choices about your behaviors and social interactions. You're taking into account different ethical standards, safety, the well-being, how this is going to impact yourself, your future self.
Speaker: Homer Simpson's got this hilarious clip. where he takes mayonnaise and then a bottle of vodka, pours it into that big jar of mayonnaise, shakes it up, and Marge is saying something about consequences or Lisa, whoever's the the moral voice in this particular clip.
Speaker: And he's like, ah, that's a problem for future Homer. And then downs this vodka mayonnaise conca concoction and then passes out. So that would be a very poor decision.
Speaker: so all five of these competencies self-awareness social awareness self-management relationship skills and responsible decision making they make up sel so we can see where it's instilled within the elementary school the k through 12 education model and structure but then assumed in sports. It's a simple list, but it's very hard to teach and almost never explicitly taught when it comes to athletics. It's assumed that, oh, I played football. This is going to, it taught me to be a man. It's going to teach you to be a man.
Speaker: No. And then kids are handed titles or forced into different sports versus the the parent or the coach taking responsibility for what that sport taught them.
Speaker: so here's my perspective on what's missing and especially at the college athletics level where i was college athlete spent a lot of time there as a sport coach and strength and conditioning coach man so yes about a decade at the college level specifically within sport coaching sport and strength and conditioning side i mean at the highest levels and not it's it's not a developmental space at the highest levels you could argue division three division two where you spend four years and in lower level d1 where you spend four years with the program they're aiming to develop you
Speaker: but it's a performance-driven culture i had two college coach two college head coaches in my playing career one was solely focused on performance and shamed the hell out of us to get there and we competed and played well despite him because we didn't want to be we didn't to allow him to be right about what he said about us or our teammates That's one way to get something somebody to do something. Then we had another coach come in who was focused on developing us as young men and a very transformational coach versus a transactional coach, which we had there.
Speaker: And now I can't even imagine entering in now the transfer portal that's open multiple times a year. So now the developmental, oh, as soon as this gets hard, you get the opportunity to leave and walk away versus learn about yourself.
Speaker: And it could be an unhealthy environment, could be a nasty coach, or it could be the right coach who is forcing you to to grow and challenging you in the right ways. And you decide,
Speaker: okay, I'm out. So, you know, and coaches are are chasing logos too. And I'm not going to only blame the players that are not willing to face hard things. Coaches are going after those logos, those big names, as much as the kids are.
Speaker: So everybody's climbing some form of logo ladder or where they're, they got low self-awareness, where they believe that they are but their skill set says otherwise and they're not willing to put in the work to close that awareness gap necessary there.
Speaker: So the the first thing that gets cut when you're trying to win right now is the slow, patient work of actually building a human being. You're more focused on human doing and executing now or else.
Speaker: And I understand those pressures. I've been in those locker rooms, been in those environments where the the coach's job is on the line. I get the pressure, but at the same time, those kids, they're going pro in something other than their sport.
Speaker: We need to aim to take into consideration who they're going to become from the sporting experience. and put them in the best position to succeed on and off the field and that that environment sel is being asked that that's the environment that social emotional learning is being asked to operate in where a lot of coaches environments they're not being honest with you they're expecting you to be honest to sacrifice them to give but then the next moment they're going to turn their back on you in an instant and that's unfortunate so how do we then
Speaker: prepare and give tools to these athletes, allowing them to navigate these environments. And that's what I want to look into. And I mean, we even take a look at the youth sport and some college programs.
Speaker: SEL shows up and it's coached to Lifford and it's done very well. and The adult is the scaffold, they are the structure, they are the the the tools, the pillars in place that allow these kids to to learn and navigate these environments. The coach is doing the emotional processing with the group.
Speaker: The coach is the one naming the moment, reframing the failure, facilitating the conflict. In a lot of ways, that works. And research supports it, especially at the high school level. There's a lot of SEL research connected to high school sports, and I love to see it.
Speaker: And we're and we we are aware that coaches have meaningful influence on the psychosocial development when they're intentional about it.
Speaker: So a lot of the youth, it's being assumed, parents are stepping in and they're aiming to do the right thing where it's unintentional. They just feel that that's the appropriate thing to do.
Speaker: Then we get into pro coach forms at high school because they also have to teach classes. So they're exposed to SEL. So whether they're intentional or not, they're taking SEL structures and bringing it into practice and developing great plans that then are developing individuals.
Speaker: Again, not all high school coaches are doing this, but there are a lot of great ones out there that are carrying over SEL into the sports environment and allowing those to teach those lessons, allowing the the coaches to lead kids in that environment and allow sport to be the vehicle for the lessons that they're teaching.
Speaker: But here's where this breaks down. We hand the athletes a captain title and we expect SEL to transfer. We've been modeling it. We've been showing it. So then we assume that they've been listening. We assume that they know how to lead because we led them.
Speaker: We expect the captain to now do what the coach has been doing. Hold the emotional climate of the group, manage conflict, develop their teammates, and we give them almost no preparation to do any of We've built entire developmental systems on the assumption that watching good leadership produces good leaders.
Speaker: It doesn't. Not reliably. Not at scale. What happens when the adult scaffolding is removed and peer leaders at the collegiate level are expected to carry SEL functions themselves?
Speaker: So recall, teachers are coaching sport at the high school level more often than not. How it's structured in Texas where I am at least, the head coach holds this position at the high school level and they are responsible for maybe a class or two.
Speaker: Then, if it's an assistant coach, you're responsible for your assistant sport duties and teaching multiple classes. You have the tools to then teach an SEL brought into sport, whether it's intentional or not. i hope it's intentional.
Speaker: So what happens when that intentional scaffolding leaves and we graduate and go play collegiate sports? Now we're in a performance environment. We assume that, okay, the high school coach did this well, that now those kids have those tools in a very competitive performance-based environment, not necessarily focused on the development of the human being, focused on performance and the human doing.
Speaker: And that's the question i am spending the next three years trying to answer. Where does SEL carry into college athletics once the teacher, once the scaffolding, once the SEL is gone?
Speaker: All right, so my dissertation that I'm aiming to build, this is a dissertation in practice. I'm applying it. I'm in i'm in the trenches. I'm on on the field with all y'all.
Speaker: So my dissertation is building towards new psychometric instrument, a validated assessment of captain-specific leadership development, But before I can build that instrument, I have to understand the terrain. And that's that's where I love the opportunity with this podcast because I get to travel to all these awesome universities, awesome high schools, and learn from the best of the best in the business on how they're continuing to develop even though they're focused on performance. What tools? Are they assuming? Are they are they modeling and doing it? Or are they defining and being very specific?
Speaker: So in order for me to form this, I need to start with research questions. And I have three that I'm goingnna introduce to you today. What I want to share with you, I don't want to share them with you because they came directly from this platform, from 16 years of coaching, from a lot of conversations with a lot of you out there that are in the field coaching, and a lot of the awesome conversations that I've had on the podcast that you've had the opportunity to sit down and listen to.
Speaker: And I have this I'm making it my vocation. I truly am connected to this and helping connect the lessons that sport is assuming with the intentionality. And it starts with these research questions. So number one.
Speaker: How do collegiate athlete leaders describe their awareness and use of social and emotional learning skills within their peer leadership roles?
Speaker: This centers around a captain's lived experience. What do they actually notice? What do they actually do? And critically, do they have the language for it? Do they have the tools to then face the challenges that they've taken on as a team captain at the college level.
Speaker: My hypothesis is that most captains are doing SEL work without knowing what it's called. They're reading in the room, they're managing conflict, they're supporting teammates through failure.
Speaker: But because no one has ever given them a framework or name the competencies, they can't reflect on it systematically. They can't improve it intentionally and they can't teach it to the next generation of leaders coming up behind them.
Speaker: They can't put words to it. And I mean, even still coaching lacrosse, still connected to that community very deeply. And we talk about our college experiences and a lot of the coaches that I've worked with in the past and work with.
Speaker: We have team captain stories and they can't name why they chose to listen them or why they decided to why they're the greatest captain at their university in their history.
Speaker: They can't name it. It just is. Well, there are attributes that we can name, and I feel they're highly connected to those five SEL competencies. So that's question one. Question number two, what conditions within collegiate sport programs support or hinder athlete leaders' development and application of ah SEL competencies?
Speaker: This examines the structural and the environmental layer of their sport because this isn't just about individual captains it's about the systems and the environments they're operating inside of and i go back and i reference and i talk a lot about my two college coaches transactional versus transformational those were two completely different environments completely players played to spite play not quit not let that coach be right they hated this man and that's what brought us together
Speaker: The other coach, he wanted to create an environment based off his experience as a player, and now he gets the opportunity to have have a head coach and knew that look he felt lacrosse taught him this. If you want to check that out, podcast with my head coach, John Reynolds.
Speaker: is episode 25 still trapped coach still got it so that's the environment that unfortunately i was one of his team captains he brought me in on on in creating We were doing SEL stuff and we didn't even know it. It's just what we felt right and that was the direction that we aimed to pull the program.
Speaker: Now he's making NCAA tournaments. Congrats, Coach. Been there 20 years. So the platform that we established in year one has led to great success for the team.
Speaker: Congrats to them again. Okay. So going back to the the questions in my my thought process, does the program have formal captain development?
Speaker: Does the head coach model SEL or just demand results? Are they high expectation and high support? This goes to David Yeager's research, and he's connected to SEL a lot. I'm going leaning into to his work and hopefully him. He's right here at University of Texas.
Speaker: Podcast number 63, maybe, something like that. But David Yeager, Captain's Coach's podcast. Google it. Okay. Well, a lot of his is a growth mentor mindset, that's our goal is to high support and high expectations.
Speaker: But then a lot demand results. So it's high expectations and low support. And they just push people into leadership roles and expect them to take over without teaching them.
Speaker: so it this is not a psychological safe environment the expectation is for them to succeed but you're setting them up for failure so i want to know what environments our collegiate team captains i' i'm going research lacrosse specifically are created ah are they allowed to do they have high expectations with low support or high support or high support and low expectations they're given everything without the expectation. I've seen that at the Division I level of many football programs where the kids are given stuff before they've proven anything, which is very interesting. So that'd be the opposite.
Speaker: um Continuing with the questions, is there psychological safety for a captain to admit they don't know how to handle something and then ask for help? Or they punished for not having the tools and that just trickled down down to the team?
Speaker: Is there a time built in for leadership development at their college? Or is it assumed that this just happens by osmosis? Or assumed that they should have been born with these skills, they don't have it, so they're they're never going to get it?
Speaker: The same captain in two different program cultures will produce two completely different outcomes. We need to understand why. the answer. Okay. Last but not least, question three, how do coaches perceive the social and emotional readiness of their athlete leaders to support teammates' development?
Speaker: then Now I want to bring in the coaching perspective. How aligned are the coaches and the captains on what the captain is actually capable of? And this goes directly into my Listen course.
Speaker: And I encourage you, I give you my first lesson free, listen.captainsandcoaches.com. And I read an email that I got from a coach who had zero faith in his team at all.
Speaker: And it was in the middle of a season reaching out for him for a film swap. And he gave one of the greatest replies of all time. And I don't want to spoil it, but I encourage you check out the first listen, the course of the first lesson within the listen course, listen.captainsandcoaches.com.
Speaker: If you're watching YouTube, I just linked it right here. Note, okay. um Yeah, so bringing in that code coach's perspective. I can't just leave this on the kids and allow them to to to hold it. What is the environment?
Speaker: So I'm going to test that environment and see if there is a gap. If coach thinks that they're providing the tools and then player thinks or feels they're not provided the tools,
Speaker: Sounds like an opportunity. Okay. so i So I suspect we're going to find that misalignment between what the coach feels they're giving and what, ah where yeah, feels they're giving and the kid feels they're receiving.
Speaker: So, I mean, coaches often overestimate or they, ah, they should have learned that or I said that. And then they I have the expectation that they're going to remember amongst all the other freaking things that I said at that practice or expectations. So yeah, coaches are going to overestimate what their their captains are equipped to handle, not out of negligence, but because the coaches themselves are are competent in areas and they assume the transfer down to leadership.
Speaker: i That's my positive hope on this. If you're in a toxic environment, I want you to be honest within the results that you share with me. Let's get real. Okay, so all three questions together are triangulating the same gap, the one between what we expect from our captains and what we're actually what we've actually prepared them to do.
Speaker: If you are a coach listening to this, think about your last captain. What did you explicitly teach them about managing a teammate going through a mental health struggle? about navigating peer conflict without coming to you first, about building trust inside a roster where some athletes love them and some athletes resent them.
Speaker: Why? why Why applying one tool works for one kid but not another? And then you blame that kid for not connecting with you.
Speaker: If the answer is is not much, That's not a character failure for the captain. That's a system failure for them. They've left the SEL scaffolding, the the teacher behind, and now they're entering into a performance environment.
Speaker: Do they have the tools? And that's the problem I'm here to solve. um Six months in, one foot in the research, one foot on the turf, that's where I live.
Speaker: This show has always been about the space between the science and the work, about giving coaches and captains language and tools to close the gap between who their athletes are now and who they need to become.
Speaker: The doctorate is sharpening that mission for me, and I'm loving every minute of it. It is not easy. Trust me, especially in season, it's a lot of time.
Speaker: But pushing those tools to the kids, seeing what sticks, what lessons are rejected immediately, and learning on the fly. The research questions that I've shared with you today, they're getting clear, and they'll probably evolve, and that's okay.
Speaker: But this is where my heart is right now, and ah I'm very excited to to share it with you. And the work, the real work for me is is just getting started. I'm a coach, I'm a practitioner, I'm a facilitator.
Speaker: a lot of the research stuff is new for me. So it'll be a high learning curve there, but leaning into the passion and I've talked about my mission for Marymount. It was my alma mater as an undergrad, as ah a grad assistant coach and where I started my coaching journey and now getting my doctorate there.
Speaker: So, man, there's there's there's a lot of push and motivation and, I mean, passion and and love and support. for me behind this so i'm i'm grateful and grateful all y'all for listening so if if this episode hit something for you if you've had an experience as a coach as a team leader from your athletic career i encourage you share it shoot me an email text at captains and coaches.com and yeah reach reach out to me if there was a coach that had a positive impact reach out to them let them know
Speaker: Because, dude, assholes ruin everything. One bad seed may have ruined their season, ruined their year, hopefully not ruin their career. So if you had a positive experience from a coach, reach out to them.
Speaker: If you had a captain that you believed in that meant something to you, reach out to them. Because they're probably going through it right now. Life was not as ah easy as it was as being a team captain in college. I'll tell you that. It's complicated.
Speaker: And there were a lot of lessons learned, a lot of assumptions that certainly carried over, but a lot of things missed that, yeah, that aimed to highlight.
Speaker: and And man, a lot of missed conversations back then too. This conversation, it needs more voices in it. so i encourage you to to get loud share share with me share with others and yeah hold on to this thought sports don't teach lessons coaches do and if if you want to continue to follow this journey along like subscribe to the podcast this is going to That is also going send it to other people that are like-minded and get this suggested and keep this this snowball rolling downhill.
Speaker: I appreciate that. If you want my continued learning, continued notes, continued lectures, sign up for the newsletter at newsletter.captainsandcoaches.com. Shout out to our sponsor, Train Heroic, who put all my strength and conditioning programs on there. They've been highly supportive this mission and and grateful for them. So that does it for the show. Thank you for tuning in and helping us raise the game.
