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Episode 15 - Dick Gould
87 Plays1 year ago
Dick Gould was the Men's Tennis Coach at Stanford University for 38 years from 1966 to 2004, during which time his Stanford men's tennis teams won 17 NCAA Men’s Tennis Championships. He was named “Coach of the Decade” for both 1980s and 1990s by ITA-Wilson. He is currently the Vice Chairman of the Board of TeachAids, a nonprofit that designs, produces and distributes health education all over the world.
Dick's new book “Anatomy of a Champion: Building and Sustaining Success in Sport, Business, and Life” is available on Amazon.
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Transcript
Joel's Return and New Season
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello and welcome to What's Next. I'm Joel. This is my show. So it's been a long while. A long break. A lot longer than I expected. The spring and summer, my schedule just got too full and putting out an episode every week was just more than I could accomplish. And so I had to put a pause on the podcast for a while. But stopping for so long and so unexpectedly felt like failure.
00:00:37
Speaker
And with failure comes shame. And to avoid more shame, I was really tempted to just quit and save myself future embarrassment when this happens again, because it will. But in the midst of that, in the midst of all those feelings, one thing that was really clear to me was this other feeling, which was that I've really missed doing this every week.
00:01:02
Speaker
I really get a lot out of it and a lot of you let me know that you were hoping I'd pick it back up again too and that meant a lot to me. Plus the whole point of this podcast is to make new patterns for myself. So with all that, I'm hesitantly, cautiously very excited to get started again. And I will just call this season two.
Introducing Dick Gould
00:01:27
Speaker
Today on the podcast is my conversation with Dick Gould. Dick was the men's tennis coach at Stanford University for 38 years. His Stanford men's tennis teams won 17 NCAA men's tennis championships. 17, that's a lot. And 50 of his players won all-American honors.
00:01:47
Speaker
And he famously coached John McEnroe at Stanford. Dick is now the Vice Chairman of the Board of Teach Aids, which is a non-profit organization that designs, produces, and distributes health education all over the world. I first met Dick, working on a video project with him at Teach Aids. We worked together on a project to create a concussion curriculum, thus changing the way people understand
The Art of Coaching
00:02:10
Speaker
concussions.
00:02:10
Speaker
I was really interested to have Dick on as a guest because as a young athlete myself, who played for a variety of coaches, I'm really fascinated by the impact a coach can have on their players and their team. And the ability to develop players and bring out the best in them both in and out of the sport is an art form. And year after year, Dick did that successfully at Stanford.
00:02:33
Speaker
This year, Dick has released a book called Anatomy of a Champion, Building and Sustaining Success in Sport, Business, and Life, which is his attempt to really distill a lot of what he learned and what he practiced over all the years at Stanford. And it's a really cool approach to writing a book that we'll get into in the conversation.
Casual Conversation and Post-Retirement Work
00:02:53
Speaker
But we had a really fun chat and I'm excited to share it with you now.
00:03:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean if you can see me that helps I can't see you, but I'll just trust that you're there. I'm there and I'm nothing to look at anyway, so how are you anyway? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. Good. How was your vacation to Hawaii? Yeah, we go over here. We got a little time sure on Kauai. We go for about a week and stretch it out a couple days on the other side of the weekend.
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah. Every other year or so we go to visit my brother on Oahu, which is nice. We spent a nice couple of days with him too. So it was a good visit. I like your hat. What's your hat? Oh, thanks. You know, I don't know exactly the history behind it, but it is in the old soccer leagues that used to exist in the US. This was the Chicago team's logo. Oh, no kidding. So my brother and sister-in-law got it for me for my birthday one year. I like that. So the old one, they're not there anymore?
00:03:57
Speaker
There is a team in Chicago now, but they're called Chicago Fire and their logos is very different. So this is kind of like a retro hat. I really don't follow the MLS. I'm much more interested in the Premier League and European football, but I'm going to a St. Louis City game, one of the newest teams in the MLS. So I'm excited about that. Oh, incredible.
00:04:21
Speaker
I haven't quite gotten used to soccer yet, but all is good. Good, good. Well, I'm really excited to talk with you today, Dick. Thank you so much for taking the time. Just for a little bit of context for the listener, you and I got to know each other through collaborating on some video projects in your current role at Teach Aids.
Coaching Philosophy and Player Development
00:04:41
Speaker
And I really got to know you much more on a personal level that way, which was awesome.
00:04:48
Speaker
nothing but kind and encouraging and a much needed force of positivity as we overcame all kinds of challenges on that project. But what was really cool was as time went on and started to learn more about you and that you had this incredibly illustrious career as the coach of men's tennis at Stanford. And you're the winningest coach in NCAA tennis men's history.
00:05:15
Speaker
17 NCAA championships and that puts you within the top five in all NCAA sports. You spent decades and decades in that role and you developed an incredible program and impacted the lives of hundreds of players. And now you've written a book about that time called Anatomy of a Champion.
00:05:38
Speaker
I reached out to you to do this interview and I didn't know you had written that book. And so you shared it with me. So I picked it up and I've read most of it at this point. I haven't had a chance to quite finish it, but I think it's really, really great. And the format of it is really fascinating that you've canvassed your players
00:05:55
Speaker
from across all your years of coaching and you ask them a series of questions and then you use their answers to create the depth of the book and all these anecdotal stories behind your writing and your reflection on all those years. And to have so many players take the time to do that is a gift in and of itself, but then to have the experience of actually reading all those
00:06:19
Speaker
thoughts and their responses to you as a leader during those years and how you've influenced them since then. Just that decades later, they remember these moments so poignantly. Was that not the best thing ever to get those back and read those, if not also a little bit scary and terrifying?
00:06:39
Speaker
Well, Joel, first of all, gosh, it's great to be with you again. It's been a long time since we worked together. And yeah, I miss that. We had some great experiences. And yeah, we did. It was a challenge, as always, in that industry from weather to think of. But it was a wonderful experience for me. And I'm still working with Crash Course and nonprofit teachings and concussion education. We're winding things down now and getting it all
00:07:03
Speaker
summarize, so they'll be there forever to be accessed for free by anyone. But about the same time I started working for Teach Aids on a Monday after I retired from Stanford on a Friday before. And when I retired, the genesis of this whole book thing came back from a comment a guy made to me when I retired 14 years into a director of tennis position before I started working Teach Aids. So it had been 14 years
00:07:32
Speaker
since I had coached.
Recruitment Challenges and Player Insights
00:07:34
Speaker
And about the middle of that 38 year tenure of coaching, a really good friend of mine was who's a very, very competitive person, started a major company in Silicon Valley and a couple of other ones as well. He was a baseball player, UCLA. In fact, he was in the Hall of Fame there and he was at UCLA when John Wooden basketball rain was going on. OK, but he's a sports fanatic. And he asked me, he was working on the Stanford field that I'd cross from the parking lot to go to my office one day each day.
00:08:03
Speaker
When he was working out, he asked me, Dick, how do you win so much? He was a big tennis fan and a supporter, frankly, and and really follow this and follow the guys well. And I said, Jack, you know, you have the best players, you're going to win. And and that's that's true. You can win without great players. Yeah. And then his question was before I took another step was, but there are a lot of coaches have good players, a lot of teams with good players that never win.
00:08:32
Speaker
Right. So how do you, how do you explain that? And I said, Jack, I just stand by my original answer. We have the best players. That's all I know. And yet that question nodded me for a long, long time. And I was busy coaching, so I didn't, you know, I had other things to do, so I didn't think much about it. And then the retirees director of tennis, which allowed me a lot of time, a lot of time to do projects. I wanted to get done before I retired completely.
00:09:01
Speaker
Um, it was building your stadium or audio visual aspects of it or, or whatever. And, uh, so I didn't retire until I was able to finish those things, but the sink kept on. I mean, even when I wasn't coaching. So when I retired, I said, you know, I got to figure out some way to answer Jack. And by that time, unfortunately he had passed, but the question is still not at me. Yeah.
00:09:26
Speaker
And, uh, so I say, you know, I'm going to do, I, I've been in contact with all my players pretty closely and send regular things to them. And there were 200 of them who were counting in the early days. We had a junior varsity team as well as a freshman team and a varsity team. So the way that bigger teams, my first few years until he ins plays, made freshmen eligible and so on. So, but there were 200 players who were still alive. So I sent them 20 questions. I thought, uh, things like basic things, Joel, like
00:09:56
Speaker
Did we have a culture? What's the relevance of trust? How do we deal with egos, which in any company is a big thing. You have to have, for a great company, you have to have big egos. You will believe in themselves, but they also can destroy a team, a business team or a family team, anything. And then I got a hundred, a hundred, 83% of these guys, 166 of them responded to these 20 questions. Four things to vast enjoy these 20 questions. So the other question weren't relevant to the early guys because they hated winning.
00:10:26
Speaker
number of years. But I had 183% responded and most of them took two hours to respond to these things well. And most of them did. And I was, first of all, overwhelmed. And then I got the advantages back and said, what am I going to do with it? Yeah, right. That's a lot to go through. I cut them all and put them on the wall under the different questions I'd asked in chronological order.
From Politics to Tennis Coaching
00:10:53
Speaker
literally cutting faces of them on a wall of all four walls in my office. That's the header on your website. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's cool. And then from there I kept looking at them and looking at them in the teach aids office when we were working together and they were just sitting there and I couldn't work on them when I was working full time with teach aids. So I would use my vacation time and periods to much my wife's chagrin to try to piece these things together a little bit. Yeah.
00:11:22
Speaker
And I ended up putting them in different labels, which actually turned out to be chapters. And all of a sudden I realized what was happening was that I didn't set out to write a book. I realized, however, a book was evolving from this. Well, you didn't. So you were just wanting to... I wanted to be able to answer Jax's question. That's all. I didn't intend to write a book necessarily. Wow. Okay. And then the more I thought about it and got these things, I said, there's a lot of stuff here.
00:11:49
Speaker
maybe I should be organizing it in chapter form so that I could at some point, you know, pick and choose which of the quotes are relevant to a certain chapter or a certain subtopic. And so it kind of flowed and see what these guys had. And I was amazed, Joel, at the differences of answers. There was no one secret sauce. I mean, how do you answer much? Well, there is no one answer. And what do you guys remember from the late 60s when we were fighting the Vietnam War
00:12:18
Speaker
Cam Bote is being bombed and Martin Luther King's being assassinated. Kenny's being assassinated. What's the role of a tennis team in these young guys' lives? Not very much, not very high priority. So how do all these things kind of fit together? And how do we get better? And I stand by, I think he is recruiting. You have to have the best players. And all the good players want to go somewhere where the other good players are because they get better by playing good players each day. So no one wanted to make that initial jump to Stanford.
00:12:47
Speaker
a pretty good team, one of the top 10 in the country, more like seven or eight. Yeah, never one or two. We'll see UCLA and occasionally Trinity of Texas fund out. And there's a big gap between them and everybody else, including ourselves. So how do we bridge that gap with all these established programs over 20 years have been at the top?
00:13:09
Speaker
And so that was a real challenge. And we finally started getting better players. And after about six years, we got in a position where we could challenge for the top. So the
Coaching Beyond Tennis Techniques
00:13:19
Speaker
breadth of these answers, these questions span the very initial guys I had were a team of graduate students in different fields in Stanford could beat my varsity. My freshman team could beat my varsity. And we were the varsity of the team. I was taken to nationals at third best team in school.
00:13:37
Speaker
And we gradually got better and better and better and made some big jumps and finally got some good recruits in after many disappointments and, and we're able to get in the ballpark. Yeah. And then, then of course, what these guys remember, the variety of their answers just astounded me. Different questions, what they felt. Uh, there was no question that said, what was our secret sauce? But their question, what do you think contributed to this or this or this?
00:14:04
Speaker
And it was amazing because it turned out to be there are versions of the secret sauce. Sure. And one guy would say this, another guy say this, like I say, this were 30 different secret sauces of things that were important to them. And so that was a really fascinating experience to get this and then to try to put it in form where these quotes would
00:14:23
Speaker
be from different guys, not the same guy all the time, representing different eras, but actually four decades, almost five by one year. It was fascinating to see the consistency of the answers and things I never even get second thought to. You don't read a book on coaching and go coach, at least there wasn't in those days. And what Vince Lombardi did was certainly very different.
00:14:44
Speaker
than what I did as a tennis coach or as a person. And so there is no textbook I can read. I was literally coaching by the seat of my pants, just by the way I was brought up. So how did you get into coaching? What was the draw to coaching for you? Well, I didn't intend to be a coach. I went to Stanford and I was a political science major when I started out with the idea of going to law school. Okay.
00:15:10
Speaker
They're even going into government or politics, something like that. I wasn't supposed to stay a lawyer. I didn't think practicing law forever. Uh, but I was teaching tennis in the summer, just as a summer job.
Managing Egos and External Pressures
00:15:20
Speaker
Okay. If I were any good, I would have been playing tournaments, but I couldn't afford not to work. I grew up in a 13 acre lemon farm and, you know, my dad was working. My mom was teaching. Your dad was a lemon farmer.
00:15:32
Speaker
Yeah, a little 13 acre, a little farm that he got as a wedding present that he had, it was just the hillside. He had to terrace it and plant the trees and everything. And it was during the depression when he got out of Stanford. And so he was driving a chevron oil truck and servicing gas to the local farmers. And when he gets through work, come home and plant more lemon trees, but in the irrigation system and scratch and so on. So anyway, I
00:15:56
Speaker
I was, I was going to go to Stanford and studied law, but, uh, teaching tennis in the summer. So I started doing that summer job and I loved it and really enjoyed working with people. And I got to know the community, the city recreation director, not the guy who ran the local playground, but the overall city parks and recreation director. Okay. And we became good friends and I was a young guy. He's kind of became a mentor and.
00:16:22
Speaker
told me more about what he did, how he worked with Kebua city government and so on to get things done. And I became intrigued with that. So I wanted to change my major to recreation from politics, political science, but there was no such thing as Stanford. There was an education major, which was the closest thing to it in those days. Yeah. So I became a PE major and I never forget my, my political science professor looked at me, said, you what, you're going to be a coach. Yep.
00:16:51
Speaker
And so I said, this is what I want to do, but this is my closest thing to it. And, but I started, were you thinking that you wanted to, to coach? Not at that time. I wanted to go into recreation. This is, I didn't want to leave Stanford to major at some, to go study recreation as a major at some of the school. Okay. I took this and step, but I got, I loved it, Joel, but I'm an assignment where you're supposed to read three or four abstracts on a, on a subject and write them up, present them the next day in class. Well, I read 10. I just, I just, I loved it.
00:17:20
Speaker
And so then I realized you didn't have to be an All-American to be a coach, you know? Right. What was it that you loved about it? Was it working with people and the relational aspect of it or seeing people grow or what was it? Yeah, that's what I, in the summer job, that's what got me into it. I take these most, in those days, it was mostly kids rather than adult lessons and I would help them. I know I didn't want to take a tennis lesson at all. I didn't want to wear little white shorts around all my buddies.
Belief and Confidence in Players
00:17:49
Speaker
Apparently they worked in the oil fields or were farmers. And I didn't want to wear little white boots and ride my horse and shoot my 22. And well, my mom said, well, if you want to ride your horse, you can take a dentist lesson. And the guy I had, Joe, was an amazingly dynamic guy for a little hick town, farming town about an hour north of LA, near Santa Barbara. In fact, he was even in that town, the community was amazing.
00:18:18
Speaker
His daughter was a gal named Nancy Chafee, and he coached her to becoming a, basically a world top 10 women's player. She ended up marrying Ralph Kiner, who was the Major League batting champion at the time, home run champion. And so he knew I didn't want to be there. And I get there a little early and my parents dropped me off. I'm waiting for my lesson to start. And just ahead of me, two little 14 year girls are on the court, Joel, and I'm 11 years old, the hormones are just starting
00:18:48
Speaker
over and I thought these guys had little hot pants on. They called him those days and hollered tops and yeah, man, I'm thinking this sports not too bad. I take your time ladies. I'm fine to sit here watching that. And then I go to the court and and Harold Chafee knew I didn't want to be there and he made every ball I had exciting and he equated every ball with another sport. He said you step into the hit like Rocky Marciano, who was a heavyweight champion in the world.
00:19:17
Speaker
steps into the punch, you watch the ball come off your partner's racket, like Ralph Kiner watched it come out of the pitcher's hand. And everything I did was equated to another sport. So then I wasn't just isolated on a little tennis court. I was playing a sport. Yeah. We had just finished Little League tryouts, which was brand new and community at the time. And I tried out and I was going to be a pitcher on a team. I tried out my position in those days and was going in to pick my uniform up the next week and be assigned a team.
00:19:45
Speaker
And I never wanted to do that. I was sold and gross for this tennis thing. I came back, we had a gravel driveway. I hit the ball against the wall of the garage. It bounced back, hit the gravel, bounced right or left. And I tried to hit it back again and it just had me enthralled. And I never put my racket down. So I just kept playing all during school and during the school year, not in the summers, but during the school year. And then I got to Stanford where I could play every day.
00:20:13
Speaker
And that's where I started getting better with the competition and the everyday play. So was it after playing at Stanford that you started doing the coaching in the... Yes. Well, I was at Stanford with a summer job working for the mentor rec department, primarily.
00:20:29
Speaker
I was life guarding and teaching swimming at the local pool in the afternoons by teaching tennis every morning. Most of the kids, I absolutely loved it. Was it when you were teaching tennis to those kids that you sort of were, were you having kind of flashbacks to your coach and, and sort of being in that role now? Absolutely. He was my mentor and I was trying to make exciting to them. I was trying to, they didn't want to be there either. The folks probably just said, this is a good idea. Yeah. So it's an idea for tennis and I really wanted to win them over to the sport. Yeah. And so it became a great challenge for me to make that lesson exciting enough.
00:20:59
Speaker
And if you think back, think back to the teachers you had and subjects you probably would never, ever have taken, that they would, you know, the teachers, remember those that had a passion for this subject. And some were able to bring it alive to you, whether or not it was something you really enjoyed or were looking forward to taking in the first place.
00:21:18
Speaker
So that's kind of how I got into it. And then so eventually it led into coaching and I love that part of it. And then a team, I got my teacher credential and taught at a local high school for a couple of years. I coached freshmen football, ninth, 10th graders. And then I coached the varsity tennis team and taught in the classroom, a couple of classes. And I just loved it. Yeah. And then
Communication and Collaboration
00:21:40
Speaker
a junior college, a two year school, open a brand new school about a mile away from high school. And my job there was just.
00:21:48
Speaker
Coaching the tennis team and just coaching tennis in the PE classes. Okay. And I was there four years, then my coach at Stanford retired as well as things you're at the right place, right time. You go look a little bit of a name in the community, get a little bit of a following. So I look at you in terms of a resume. I got the job at Stanford and I didn't know what to do with it. I was telling everyone, I got this damn job, Joel. Yeah, Michael, we're going to win the national. And I told my boss, the guy I met, yeah, I think we can win a national championship here. And Stanford was.
00:22:15
Speaker
Terrible in sports at the time. And about the time I came in, a guy came in who was a very, very positive football coach named John Ralston. I wanted to be the Broncos coach. He took Stanford to success. He rolled with Rose Bowl championships. And everything he did, we were hired about the same time, was positive. Whereas everything I heard in the department from not only athletes like myself, but from our coaches, well, we'll never be good enough. We can be pretty good. We'll never be good enough to be at the very time. In any sport. And all of a sudden,
00:22:45
Speaker
We started winning. We started winning in tennis and football and water polo in the seventies. And all of a sudden we're winning in every sport all of a sudden. And I like to think that John Ralston, myself had a little bit to do with changing that attitude. You got better players and players who believe they could win. Yeah. So, so when you got into that role, did you feel over your head or did you feel? Yeah, of course. Cocky little kid thought I knew it all. I had, I had good, good, good luck coaching in high school and
00:23:13
Speaker
And then I went to junior college. We went to state championships at a brand new school with no tennis until that time. And four years, almost won a third championship. So I was getting really cocky. And my players had gone and played at top colleges and did well in split championships. You know, yeah, I thought I knew it all. I really knew nothing, you know? But one of the biggest things I learned, Joel, and I bring this out in the book, was that I go into one of our first team meetings and I was telling people, my boss, yeah, we can win a championship.
00:23:42
Speaker
I was telling my buddies, yeah, I think we win national championship. They're all laughing at me. Yeah. Literally laughing at me. Yeah. Well, that's nice. Yeah. Ha ha. And then I sit down a team meeting and one of my players, first players, mentions it. She says, yeah, Coach Murray set us all down. One time he told us your goal was win the national championship. And we just looked at each other, rolled our eyes, says, we told you, Coach, this is never going to happen at Stanford. And of course, this is when everything was breaking loose with Cambodia and Vietnam and assassinations
Continuous Learning and Balancing Responsibilities
00:24:11
Speaker
and everything else. Yeah.
00:24:12
Speaker
And winning a championship was not, it was a goal I couldn't relate to. My point is, and that was one of the first things I learned was that you better set a goal. Your team that you're leading can relate to. And if they can't relate to it, it is no good to even have it as a goal or stated as a goal because they'll never get it. Yeah. So that was one big thing. And the second big thing I learned, I've told you already was that, uh, make it exciting. And I'll never forget when I was in college, my last year or two, I worked for my coach at Stanford.
00:24:42
Speaker
who was a club pro and he couldn't leave the club to give lessons at the private home courts in the area, which people wanted him to do. They didn't want to go to the club. They want to take the lesson on their court. So it sent me out to these courts to give lessons. And so one summer, right at the end of the summer, a person called and wanted him to teach their kid a little six year old girl, five year old girl, very, very tiny.
00:25:03
Speaker
at their home. He said, Dick, can you take care of this for me? So I go up there with a couple of weeks left in the summer. She signs up for four lessons. And in those days, the racklets were big, heavy wood rackets. And the rack was bigger than she was. And she couldn't. And there's no such thing as a two-handed, four-handed backhand in those days. And she would hit a hold and choke up in the hand a little bit and try to swing. And she had a beautiful swing. But I have her a half hour, and she couldn't connect with the ball. I said, oh, that's a great swing, Susie, or whatever her name was.
00:25:33
Speaker
That's what I want. Or, you know, I love your shoestrings. What color are those? How'd you get that little ponytail in your hair? Did your mom do that? Did you do that? It just thinks anything I think of to compliment, to try to make that experience, she's having a good one. So we became pretty good friends that way. And after about the third or fourth lesson, she finally connected with the ball, put it all together, and it went over the net in a cord and I started clapping, jumping up and down. She started jumping up and down the biggest smile I ever seen in your face.
00:26:03
Speaker
All of a sudden in midair, she stopped and froze, it seemed like. And she looked down at the ground below her and there was a little puddle of water for me. She got so excited. She couldn't contain herself. She realized what had happened. She looked up at me in a gasp and ran into the house out the front door and never saw her again. So that's where I took that first lesson to make it exciting.
00:26:28
Speaker
And then when I was coaching football, I tried to, I thought to be a good football coach, you had to be tough and you have to bring toughness and you get by you being tough. So, you know, ninth and 10th graders, they're all over the map puberty wise and they, some guys are six feet tall in ninth grade and weigh 200 pounds and others are four foot five and weigh 80 pounds, you know, and they're all in the same team. Yeah.
00:26:54
Speaker
And so I don't really think that anyone really grows up or is born loving contact, but I think you can learn to enjoy physical contact. And, uh, so my, my, my take one, we always spend part of our time in working with fundamentals with a little tapping drill where they'd start about seven or eight yards apart, so close, it couldn't get hurt. A little team of 30 people were standing around.
Insecurities and Mutual Learning
00:27:18
Speaker
I was the only coach. I'd blow my whistle and these two guys would run from about eight yards apart at each other, right down the line.
00:27:24
Speaker
One guy had the ball, the other guy had to make a tackle. This guy named Eddie Matias, I blew my whistle. Eddie runs down the line and slips and falls to a right to avoid the towel. Eddie, get your butt up, let's do it again. Eddie runs down this time, he slips and falls to his left. Come on, Eddie, son of a gun. He gets up and does it again and falls back on his back. And he's lying on his back and I go over him and put my head right down to his head, yelling at him as loud as I can.
00:27:54
Speaker
every foul, vilest word I can think of. And I finally ran out of words, swear words, ran out of breath. I stopped. And when I stopped catching my breath and realizing what I'm going to say now, and the whole team's watching this, mind you, because someone else was up next to do it. He looked at me and waved me off his middle finger and he said, ah, you Mr. Gould. And I go, my mouth is dropped. What do I do now? I looked around to the team and they didn't know what to do.
00:28:23
Speaker
And all of a sudden I just started laughing ridiculous in the situation. And this taught me a really good lesson. And I had always heard Vince Lombardi, who I idolized, was really a tough coach, but a tough coach and a fair coach, two different things. In that picture, being a really tough guy, beat up on those players. And whether that was right or wrong, I have no idea. But I was trying to be someone I was not. And so that was really the first lesson, that private lesson, that private home.
00:28:51
Speaker
was to make what you do exciting as my coach had taught me. And then doing this football coaching, I learned I had to be myself. I couldn't be someone I was not
Life Lessons from Coaching
00:29:00
Speaker
going to be.
00:29:01
Speaker
And those were important lessons for young guys starting out, because there was no book written on how to do this and how to do that. You learn these things. Yeah, I think you said in the book, for better or worse, I was Dick Gould. I love it. Probably worse. Well, I think that's really fascinating. So one of the things I really love about your book is this idea that it comes up again and again. Your players really took away from their time on your team.
00:29:30
Speaker
is like very few people are talking about tennis technicalities. They're all talking about life lessons and ways in which the culture
00:29:40
Speaker
The culture of the team influenced how they made decisions and influenced how they saw themselves and saw the players around them. And so much of it comes down to, I don't know if psychology is the right word, but it's a mindset. It's a way of acting. It's a way of
Conclusion and Book Information
00:29:57
Speaker
believing that shapes how players and people make decisions. And so much of success in sport and in life, I guess, does come down to, I think,
00:30:09
Speaker
how people feel about themselves and they feel about their role on the team and all of that stuff. So how did you come to that realization of you're not just developing tennis players, you're developing people to be the best that they can be, not just on the tennis court, but as young men? Well, very, very question. And Joel, as a parent, you're a coach. You coach your kids every day.
00:30:35
Speaker
You have a job. You're coaching your fellow workers. You're being coached. I mean, all of us are coaching every day of our life. I think being yourself is one thing that's really important. I did have a style of play I believed in, but that wasn't how you held the racket or anything else. It was more an overall style of play, which is important, which I do believe in. I think it really helped us a lot that I kind of fell into as I got more accomplished in what I was doing. But you're right. And so what happened with this book
00:31:05
Speaker
by the way, my collaborator was one of my players in my first championship team, Tim Noonan, and he's a writer, he's written about 50 books, and I was fortunate enough to have him a collaborator on it. You pick it up and you think it's gonna be a tennis book, it's written by a tennis coach, but it's not gonna get anything in or out of play tennis, out of the fore end or back end or anything. It turns out to be a book on leadership. That wasn't intended not only not to write a book originally, but it wasn't intended as sort of to be a book on leadership. I think this experience of leadership
00:31:33
Speaker
Told by those being led is a very important thing. Yeah. Great lessons come out of this. Well, so do you feel like that that approach to your to your coaching and how you led your teams at Stanford, did that come out of just this desire to be authentic? There are two things. First of all, we did. I asked them, do we have any core values because I didn't have a chalkboard set up and core values written down time and again, they mentioned humility.
00:32:02
Speaker
respect and how and how throughout the book how they were led by example but not by things I said but things I did how I treated other people or whatever better or worse I think that's one thing that that was really really came forward we're always examples for our children you can tell you can tell the people you work with your kids or anything you tell them anything they're gonna learn more about what you do
00:32:24
Speaker
and how you act than anything else. And if you treat them with respect and treat people the same with respect, then that's going to go a long, long way. So was that something that you learned from your parents then? My parents taught me great values. And I think in the 50s, it was a great, when I grew up in the 50s, it was a great time, late 40s, 50s. It was a great time in the world that World War II was over. Ethics were important. A handshake was important. It was as good as one word.
00:32:53
Speaker
You didn't have to worry about people fudging or stuff. It was just a different world than it is today. And you got to be accountable for what you do. One thing that was interesting too, I know a lot of great coaches were never great players. They were good players, but never great players. And I ended up being a good college player, probably won the top 100 in the country or maybe right around there, but not one, two, three, or four. I couldn't quite catch up with the guys that started way ahead of me. But I was so intense.
00:33:20
Speaker
proving we could win to satisfy my own ego when I started out, proved that I could do something in tennis, which I couldn't do quite as a player. And I think a lot of great coaches, like Bill Walsh was not a great football player at San Jose State, but he was a great coach. I had the pleasure of working. John Ralston was not a, he played at Cal, but he wasn't a great player there. And these guys became great coaches. And I think, first of all, they really studied other coaches. They studied other players.
00:33:48
Speaker
They studied other systems. They were wanting to learn to get better. And then there was an innate something in them that they wanted to prove something to themselves. They could do it at a higher level. Right. And I think that was the case with me. And, uh, I was so intent on winning. I would go to my guys and say in the early seventies, guys, we win this match. Then we can do this. We've got to win today, guys. Cause that's going to set us up for tomorrow and on and on. I put so much pressure on my guys. They walk on a court and they could hit a ball.
00:34:19
Speaker
inspire myself, he finally won. And the next year I had a couple of guys leave the team, he won again against all odds. And, uh, and then all of a sudden I said, Hey, I've done this. I don't have to win again. So I stopped talking about winning and I started talking more about improving and getting better. And that became, that really had an effect on these guys. And just mentioned the book over and over again, coach, we never heard you say we have to win. We never heard you say you got to win this match. Yeah.
00:34:47
Speaker
Yes. We got to get better. We got to, we are getting better and showing us how we're getting better and put an impact that head on it. Yeah. Comparing yourself to who you were yesterday is the best way to grow and not comparing yourself to somebody else or to having to win to appease your ego in some way. So important, Joel. And I think that along those lines, it's equally important. You know, some way or other, we go to first grade or kindergarten, whenever it was, you think back.
00:35:17
Speaker
And at some point you might've come home with a little paper on it with 10 words. D-O-G-C-A-T. All 10 words spelled right. And the teacher put a gold star, I remember on the page in those days, write a smiley face on it and write the word with, underline it with exclamation marks, perfect. And some way along that upbringing,
00:35:40
Speaker
we thought we had to be perfect to be successful. But success and perfection are two completely different things. You'll never see a perfect athlete. You'll never see a guy who wins 24 points in a set.
00:35:52
Speaker
And this is not going to happen. 2018 in a golf course. Look at the Major League batting champion last year. He had 333. He failed to get it two-thirds. The time forgot. The best passer in football fails to complete a third of his passes. There's no such thing as perfection, but we can always strive to be a little better tomorrow than we were today or this afternoon than we were this morning. And I think when we realize that we don't have to be perfect, it takes a lot of pressure off ourselves.
00:36:20
Speaker
For most players, what is it that gets in the way? And my hunch is that it's that. It's this idea that we have to prove ourselves through our success or our accolades. Well, I think the problem is so much the time, you know, we're right now, I mean, the words, it's an old term now, but helicopter parents was a great word. I never had parents coming out to a match or an insulate tournament as an example. Yeah. Now every parent, brother, sister in the world is every one of
00:36:49
Speaker
every major event there is. And that puts a lot of pressure on the kid because the parents used to just say, go play. We've gotten ourselves into a real bind where parents' revision becomes parent interference in a way. And, and, and you, your kid goes away. Joe, how old is your oldest child? He's nine. So, you know, if your kid is doing pretty well, like in tennis, an example, you would send me out of town to play a tournament. Maybe some, some mother, one of your other friends would take the
00:37:19
Speaker
Yeah. No, it would take the kids down to this tournament and they'd stay in private housing used to be that way. Yeah. I'd rather no tell and they'd stay there until I lost and the parent would bring them all home. Yeah. In the meantime, you'd ask your kid to call you each night. Right. Well, your kid would call home and let me tell you as a parent, can you talk to your kid for three or four minutes? And in that conversation, never ask them, did you win? You know, you try talking and just saying, was it hot down there today?
00:37:50
Speaker
Did you have fun? Yeah. Did you meet new friends? What'd you do when you weren't playing tennis? How's your housing? How's Johnny doing, your best friend? And never in that conversation asked them, did you win? Yeah. And that's really hard to do. And it's not, it's not typical of our society now. Do you think that's because parents, their own sense of ego is wrapped up in how successful their kids are? Uh, that can be a factor. Yes. Uh, I think, yes, I think that can be a factor. In other words,
00:38:20
Speaker
So many times we start picking Ivy league schools for our kids when the Ivy league or as to ever might be the worst thing for them. Yeah. Many great schools out there, you know, and you talk about mental health with kids now, and this is all related to the pressures they have. Yeah. Think of the pressure that this kind of view, if you don't talk about it, it's the presence of being in the air puts on a kid to be perfect or to meet the parent's desires. And that's just it.
00:38:49
Speaker
It's a really bad thing for a culture and the mental health for you. Yeah, right. I really agree. It's something that I worry about with my kids too.
00:39:05
Speaker
Right. So one of the things that came to my mind as I was listening to the book, I got notes all over my desk here, making notes as I went. I feel like you could have experienced a lot of pressure in terms of the expectation on you as teams improve and you got results. There's this expectation that it has to continue to keep happening and
00:39:26
Speaker
improve on the year before and all that stuff. How did you keep your own sense of who you were, your own ego, all those things in check so that it didn't become about you, about your accomplishments and your legacy or any anything like that. But it maintained on these core values that humility and respect. Yeah. I think, you know, don't be careful. You don't mix that with pride. But I think how you like we have throughout our facility, we have
00:39:55
Speaker
major achievements well pictured and documented. We don't have any conference championship trophies in our trophy room. We have only NCAA championships as an example, and only pictures of players in every room who have won an individual title in singles or doubles. So that pride is one thing, but it just reminds them that there is tradition and that a lot of people contributed to it and worked hard to get it. But on the other hand,
00:40:19
Speaker
I'm not coaching football where I have 100,000 people in the stadium and I'm not getting paid $5 million a year to produce a winner. I never, ever felt any pressure in my job by anyone other than my self pressure to put on myself to do better. And I was learning all the time. I think that's one thing that puts it in perspective, Joel, because
00:40:40
Speaker
Once you figure you know it all, you're dead. Yeah. Yeah. And I learned in a hurry. I didn't know it all. Believe me, I got put in my place so many times that I made in terms of coaching and so on. But I gradually, those decline, I got less and less those each time and got better and better in what I did. That's the humility side of it. I think where you could acknowledge that you made mistakes and you could learn from them. Sometimes that gets in the way, right? Where we can't. When I give a talk, I always talk about the section on trust.
00:41:10
Speaker
in a section on ego. They kind of relate in a way. And because both those came across a lot and clear. And you have to have, to be a great leader, you have to have a belief in yourself, a core belief in yourself. Doesn't mean you believe you're the best because you're always getting better than you are. But you have to believe in what you're doing. And fortunately, the style of play I had was working really, really well. And it was enough
00:41:39
Speaker
It's hard to describe in non-tennis terms, but it was based on being proactive rather than a reactive, rather than waiting for the opponent to miss the ball by out rallying them to get to the net, to do something that forced him to come up or her to come up with a shot to beat you. In the meantime, you watch a lot of balls go by you because you didn't hit it quite right. You misjudged where you hit the ball, where you should have hit the ball when you approached the position and things you can't do anything about. But that puts a little fear in your opponent.
00:42:09
Speaker
gives you a little confidence and it works when I play and you have to have a certain level of technique and net play and so on and confidence in that so that you can do it under pressure. And most of these kids don't, aren't physically strong enough or big enough to do it when they're 16 years old, 15 years old. But most of them have to be taught that from start. So you're teaching them something new, a skill, and then having them incorporated in their game and doing it under pressure. And the players saw it working as I saw it working.
00:42:35
Speaker
became more accomplished than what I was doing. And the players saw how to work with other players and other teams, and they became less resistant to it. And it became our mantra, our trademark. I call it aggressive with margin. My players still laugh at that. You call it what, sorry? Aggressive with margin. Okay. Give yourself a chance to get the ball in the way of the line, but you got to hit it and you got to do something with it. Yeah. And that served us really, really well. But
00:43:03
Speaker
I think the thing on ego is really important in my players. He goes on the team itself and believing that they have to be great in something by believing in themselves, but not narcissistic and not in terms of putting someone else down to make themselves seem better. Yes. And so when they learn to work together and by together they get better individually, if they're stronger together, I think that was maybe the biggest takeaway in the whole book for me was
00:43:33
Speaker
the players were able to leave their ego, individual egos behind. You have to have an ego and believe yourself, you're going to be a champion in individual sports especially. And these guys all had big egos and I did two in a way, but how you deal with that and how you manifest that are two different things. So one guy said that, uh, who had a big ego, he said, uh, uh, you couldn't push, he had nothing to push back with when he disagreed with me because I had no ego.
00:44:00
Speaker
You had said in the book, the Alliance, not uncommon for players to minimize, minimize others to maximize their own importance. And that's in life in general thinking, well, you're writing papers off or doing work on research. And, and these guys all are depending on these grants. So they're all being secret about the doing and not sharing much of their work unless it's going to help them directly. Right. And, uh, it's a very, very competitive world out there. And there's not much collaboration and in a company.
00:44:27
Speaker
You're trying to get the raise. You're trying to get promotion. There's a lot of competition within a company and within a business and how that manifests itself. It can, it can lead to greatest competition internally. It can lead to greatness.
00:44:38
Speaker
but it can also destroy a company or a group or a team of some, any kind. Yeah, it can kind of poison things. And that's what I thought was really cool about, you know, your, your sort of view of coaching. You said it's bringing out the best in someone. And what I loved about it is it's not about tricking someone to believe in himself in a different way. Well, if you do that once and it's discovered, your credibility goes away right away. It has to be,
00:45:05
Speaker
day in and day out, you have to be yourself and you can't try to be someone you're not and put on a fake face because you can't lead by being other than yourself and being true to yourself. Right. And also, I think too, you really did see in your players the best versions of themselves. I think, I, yeah, I, yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, we all can be better, right? Yeah. My job is to enable you to give you the tools we better, whether it may be an adjustment of your grip, might be a toss in your surf.
00:45:35
Speaker
It might be your style of play. It might be your relationship with other people, what you do off the court. It could be any one of a multitude of things. But that's my job, is to facilitate you getting better. But it's up to you to take advantage of that. And I can't tell you to do it. I can say, why don't you think about doing this? Or let's try this. We can sit down and talk about it. And I oftentimes would call the players, they all have private coaches from home.
00:46:02
Speaker
I'll oftentimes when they first come to Stanford, call the coach before they ever set foot on campus and say, what are you working on with Johnny? What, what seems to work best? How, how are you working with him on it? And that saves me a lot of time in trying to get to know a kid. And if as long as I agree with what he's doing and gives me a headstart there, but you can always learn from other people. I learned from other coaches. I watch how they coach their players when I'm playing against them, being against them. I watch other players, how they interact with their coaches.
00:46:31
Speaker
I watched the other players interact with themselves or my players interact with themselves. I never really had team captains. We had a captain each year, but rather than have the players vote on a captain start of the year, so many things can happen during the course of that year. The player goes sour, he gets mad at someone on the team or tanks a match or something like that when things aren't right. Voice named and voted for an honorary captain at the end of the year. I wanted to be able to
00:47:00
Speaker
the player to be able to come to me if he had a problem, not to go to a teammate if he had a problem. I wanted him to tell me right to my face and feel free to do that. And that meant I could never admonish him in public. I hated procrastination. I hated alibis, rationalization. I couldn't stand them. But as long as a guy was making an honest effort to get him better, when he walked on the gate of the court, then he was in a different world. Everything else goes out by that time.
00:47:29
Speaker
For two hours. Yeah. Yeah. And for that time, he's trying to get better in tennis. Yeah. One of the stories that hit me right in the chest was because it really relates to some, an experience I had as a kid in sports is the story that, um, KJ Hibbins seal is my saying his name, right? Yeah. Um, in 2002 he said, you know, just talking about how you believed in.
00:47:54
Speaker
in your players at times when they didn't even believe in themselves, where he said he was feeling particularly uncomfortable about a match and not feeling like he was, you know, going to be able to get the job done. And you call them up to the net anyways and put them into play. That's a great point. He's a doctor, not a well-read hospital, by the way. But, uh, that's an interesting point. And that, that came out a lot of times in the style of play part, uh, and, and confidence.
00:48:23
Speaker
When they're learning a new style of play, it's fine in practice. They can do it really well. But when it gets in a match, which is what Katie was talking about, really crunch time in a big match. Yes. UCLA and Blaze, whatever. You know, I have more comps than what they can do. I've seen them do it in practice, but they're going to revert right back to what they've been doing the last 15 years. They've been playing 10 years, been playing tennis when pressure comes because they're used to it. They're coupled with it. But I have to think that with what I'm doing is really worthwhile.
00:48:51
Speaker
and working on that, if I think they can do it under pressure, then I have to get them to do it under pressure. And the tennis has the advantage because I can talk to my guys, college tennis, at any time during the match, as long as I don't interrupt the flow of prey. I can tell them where to serve, what kind of serve to hit, bounce it up high, swing it out wide, serve it in the body, come in serve volley, serve volley behind the players, serve volley. We practice all these things time and again in practice.
00:49:19
Speaker
and actually practice every situation I expect them to do. But if I think they can do under pressure, I think it may cause their opponent to have an adverse reaction to that kind of pressure. I'm going to ask my guys to do it, and I expect them to do it. And that's what Keiji was saying. And as we had success doing this, the players figured, hey, it worked 10 years before me and five years before that, and it must work for me too, so I'll do it. Yeah. Well, then also you bear the responsibility if it doesn't work.
00:49:47
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. It's my fault, not theirs. Exactly right. It takes the pressure up them for doing something and they're just doing what they're told to do. Yeah. I mean, I was in a situation and playing volleyball in a club team, like in my high school years. And I had a major crisis of confidence. I started off the season feeling so confident. I wanted every ball to come to me. I just, I was so hungry to play.
00:50:12
Speaker
And by the end of the season, I did not want to play even, I did not want to go in. And the impact that that's had on me as a person, not just like way, way beyond volleyball and my volleyball career or lack thereof, it has had an impact on me as a person for years to come in ways that come up, you know, in when I'm working my day.
00:50:32
Speaker
job or when I'm a parent with my kids or all these kinds of things. So to read that story of you, you know, saying no to your athlete, I believe that you can do this and I'm going to put you in and I'm going to, you know, I'm going to follow with my belief in you. Joel, that's so important what you say. And I think that, uh, I think that, you know, if you had a coach right there at the time and said, Joel, you want that ball, that's okay. That's okay. The next one, the next one.
00:50:59
Speaker
And the coach has got to be there to reinforce any little thing you do in that situation that might be better than you've done it before, that you did well. Any little things, not even a matter of winning the, hitting the ball wins the point. It's a matter of getting the shot to win the point or getting in position, the right position or finding something to keep. That's where you need the confidence that a coach can place in you by
00:51:25
Speaker
it doesn't have to be something you executed well, it can be something that a part of something you did right. I remember one time I practiced Mackinac was playing, John Mackinac was playing four courts away from me. And he ran over and hit a ball and went in the bottom of the net and they were playing, he was playing a setup against a teammate. And I said, that's what I want, John, all across four court. And John looked at me, he put his hands on the hips and he said that famous
00:51:49
Speaker
Coach, you cannot be serious. That ball went in the bottom of the net and it was a big point. I said, you know, John, but you got the racket back so well, you had to turn for that shot exactly the way you've been talking about. That kind of thing is really, really important. And so there's got to be something you do that's right. It might not be the end result.
00:52:08
Speaker
But as a part of the whole, you can emphasize. Yeah. And I think that kind of thing is really, really critical. And that, to me, again, just kind of goes back to understanding kind of how how humans function. Yes. Yes. And remember that with your own kids. Yeah. There's always something like this little gal I was teaching you what her pants on the fourth lesson. Yeah. Because she got excited about what she did. I could always find something that she did. That's how you get your racket back. That doesn't involve hitting the ball or their end result.
00:52:38
Speaker
That's how I step in the ball. Or that's how you watch the ball. These parts, you could make that part being decided whether or not the end result was what you were working for, toward or not. I love your shoes today. Or, gosh, you look nice. And what'd you do this fun today? One time I walked down the court, I think it was Roscoe Tanner when my guys mentioned this in the book. And I walked down the court to talk to Roscoe and he was really struggling. And I said something like,
00:53:07
Speaker
Oscar, what'd you have for lunch today? Just to get his mind off all the things he'd done wrong, or that had happened to him that weren't going right. And he looked at me like I was crazy, and then he just started laughing. And they went back and played well, loosened him up. To get their mind out of the negative, and then do something more positive.
00:53:24
Speaker
Do you think, have you learned, because as a coach, I would imagine that you encountered some of that just for yourself too. Did you learn any practices or ways to get yourself out of the negative when you found yourself in those? Yeah, I don't think I really got in the negative very much unless it was with a behavior issue.
00:53:46
Speaker
I don't know how far along in the book you were, but you know, if someone is having a bad day in school or their girlfriend woke up with them, they flunk the test and they come out to practice, they're in a bad mood. And the first sign of something going wrong in practice, they throw a racket. Well, that's like a cancer because two minutes later, another guy will throw a racket. Then someone else will throw it against the fence or against the net. And for example, throwing rackets. So one day I walked them all out in the track, the grass field right next to the courts.
00:54:13
Speaker
And I said, bring your rackets with you. We went out there and we got on the 10 yard line stripe and I said, okay guys, you can run five steps or five yards and throw your rack as far as you can. It's going to land on the grass. I'm not going to hurt it. And they did that. And I said, go down there, pick it up and wait. They went down, picked it up, I had them line up again, throw it back again. They went back and forth, throwing their rackets five or six times and realized this absurdity, what they're doing. All rackets stop being thrown for a week. Yeah.
00:54:41
Speaker
Another time they were swearing swear words same thing whatever and yeah, and one time so I pulled them all to court I took them over to the Back of a building where no one was around and I just said, okay guys You got two minutes. I want you to yell every swear word the violence worst word You can think of as loud as you can and just keep going for two minutes. Yeah. Well in 15 seconds. Everyone's done They can't think of any more words. It gets quiet all of a sudden
00:55:10
Speaker
And they kind of realized how stupid they are. Another time we went in on a bad practice, guys were complaining and bitching and moaning, which is fair. Not everyone's going to have a good day. And sometimes the actual one guy can bring down everyone else. In that case, usually he's told the guy to go home and come back tomorrow. I'm a big deal. But in this case, everyone was getting into this snit. They were, the team got into a snit and I said, okay, come with me guys. We walked into the public bathroom and there are urinals and bath toilets and stuff that get by urinal toilet. We're talking 10 guys.
00:55:41
Speaker
And I said, when I say flush, I want you to push the handle flush. Okay, guys. Good. You got it system. Let's go back to the courts. You know, and that kind of makes a little humor of it puts it into perspective.
00:55:55
Speaker
You know, there's just different kinds of things that for me at that situation seemed to work a little bit, you know, temporarily, but it worked a little bit. That story in the book reminded me of, have you watched Ted Lasso at all? I've heard that, yeah. Yeah, the way he kind of approaches coaching. I'm curious for you, Dick, as you coached, was there an insecurity in yourself that plagued you as you were a coach? Like what was your greatest struggle as a coach in terms of your own
00:56:24
Speaker
Well, first of all, I didn't, I didn't really know what I was doing. I thought I did, but, uh, having all these kids were national champions at some point and have them all on the same team. And a lot of them have histories against each other, playing each other, calling each other cheats and stuff like that. 14 years old and that doesn't go away, you know? And, uh, so dealing with the egos and that kind of thing where we're always, uh, something I try to get better at and improve out over the years.
00:56:51
Speaker
Know one way to deal with all people in that situation the same way you can't it depends on the people a lot I as a player we get in a situation where I'd be playing and The last part of my college career and get in a position to have a really big win be way ahead and couldn't put it away I choke it because my mind was off what I was doing right then and there and Then when I started coaching I had always big aspirations and my first year we were 16 in the country
00:57:18
Speaker
And I and we'd never been on the top 10 since World War II. I'm all the time my coach coached. My next year, we're 33rd in the country. I didn't know that any teams even had even had college teams, college teams. And and and then finally, my last year, freshmen could not play in our conference, but they could play in all other conferences and in the NCAA championships. So I took all freshmen to the NCAA. They never played a college match. They counted before.
00:57:48
Speaker
And we took, I think we took eighth or something like that. So then by that time we're on our move, but all along I said, and I'd have a recruit all ready to sign up and he'd decide the last minute to go somewhere else. And all these things, you know, they basically adopt yourself a little bit, but you just keep at it and keep at it and keep at it. And gradually things can work out. And I think that's a big lesson for my players to learn and a big lesson for all of us and whatever we're doing to learn.
00:58:18
Speaker
you know, things don't have to stay bad and you can't give up on what you believe. You may have to adjust what you expect a little bit and be sure your own hopes and desires are, or as they should be. Sometimes you get off misguided and you think winning is all important and it's not. Winning a tennis match is not the most, or a championship by far not the most important thing in this earth.
00:58:40
Speaker
Yeah. And, uh, you know, coming home and my family will much more important all over time. Sometimes you might misjudge that a little bit. You know, these are things you learn and how you deal with these kinds of things. I think when my dad passed, I don't think a guy on my team knew the day he passed because I was dead practice trying to be focused and do my job with, you know? So I think, uh, all these things are important. You lead by example. That's the key. You talk about how do you lead?
00:59:11
Speaker
you lead by example that's the most effective leader that i can imagine one being yeah did that did that ever feel like pressure or did that not really i mean you have to be the first thing you learn is you have to be yourself you know i think that's such a i'm still trying to understand like that makes so much sense to me because i can see how that
00:59:31
Speaker
When you're being yourself and you're not trying to be somebody else, you're not spending energy. Yes. That doesn't mean you can't better yourself. That doesn't mean there can't be a better version of you. With you being the judge of what that version should be, you can always be a little better and be more empathetic and more caring.
00:59:56
Speaker
and less ego centered or self centered. And it's really funny. I had a really nice email from a guy I don't know who read the first couple of chapters of the book and about caring about stuff. He says, you changed my whole life. I haven't finished your book. I read the first hundred pages. It's changed my life and how I look at things. And to me, that was one of the greatest comments I've ever had. Yeah. Yeah. That's really, that's really cool.
01:00:22
Speaker
How did you stay hungry over the, like once you, once you achieved winning and you had kind of achieved what you had set out to do, that you're going to take Stanford tennis to number one in the country, you know, how did you stay hungry over the course of your long career to keep doing it? You know, you hear the phrase, be the best you can be. Well, Joel, you can't be the best parent you can be and have a job. Right. And you can't be the best in your job.
01:00:50
Speaker
and still be the best parent. You wouldn't have a job or spouse or whatever it might be. You be the best you can be commensurate with the amount of time and energy you're willing to put into something. So you have to learn how to prioritize and parcel out what you're doing at a specific time. And then you can be the best you can be in that situation. Yeah, that makes sense. And that was hard for me to get that balance right.
01:01:20
Speaker
And it was a very important lesson to learn that, uh, be the best you can be with them out of time. You can put into something. And that made sure my players, I mean, they're, they're at school to be a lot more than a tennis player. And so when they walk on that court, though, I want them to be the best tennis player they can be. When they come to practice, everything else is left outside that gate. And then, and it's not going to be, but on the other hand,
01:01:43
Speaker
That's not going to be the case. It's not going to happen that way. It's easy to say. It's not easy to do. But it's my job to try to get the focus of someone just can't handle it a day. No negative thing about it. Just send them home, relax. Just tell them to go to the beach or something, you know, and just take the day off. And it's not going to hurt the team. It's not going to hurt the kid.
01:01:59
Speaker
Right. And you'll come back the next day better off yet. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So looking back on all this, you know, you've had this incredible opportunity to get this feedback at this point in your life, looking back on your career with all that perspective that you gained through the process of writing this book. What gives you the most satisfaction looking back on your career? Well, I think that the biggest thing for me, Joel, is really that
01:02:28
Speaker
I really enjoyed working with this age group of kids. I mean, you're away from the home, most of these kids for the first time, you think you know everything, but you really don't know that much. They're going through all kinds of experimentations with friendships and personalities, even who they are. And it's an exciting time in their life and to be a part of it at that time, where really they're not looking to an authoritarian figure, if you wish.
01:02:57
Speaker
It's an exciting time to spend with them. And I think it's a chance to buy example, maybe illustrate some things that are important, some lifelong lessons that can be learned, not tell them about them, but to live them so they can see them. And I think those things are really important. If you never talked about it, about employment, if Facebook didn't have Google, Facebook wouldn't be as big as it is. Apple wouldn't be as big as it is, you know? Competition makes one better.
01:03:28
Speaker
If it's taken the right light, why hate us USC or hate Cal Berkeley? I mean, if it weren't for them, they're the ones that make us better by being there compete by being good that we can compete against them. So that's, that's, those lessons are important. Well, Dick, thanks so much for your time. It's been a really great, almost two hours for me. I've loved, well, Joe, my pleasure. I just, uh, you know, I, I am who my players are. I am what they have taught me more than what I have taught them. And so.
01:03:57
Speaker
I've learned a ton from them as well. And I think that's kind of the point. We want to keep trying to learn and get a little better each day and whatever we do, including our relationship with other people. And I think my players help me do that. Well, and that's the thing. I think one of the themes I'm taking away from our conversation and from your book is that something I would like to apply to my own life is I often
01:04:18
Speaker
When I encounter something in life where I don't measure up or I need to learn something, I often internal. Many times like that. Yeah. I think I, I often internalize it as there's something wrong with me. What I love about your perspective is it's you're, you're not internalizing it as there's something wrong with you. You're, you're actually excited to learn and grow. Yeah. That's critical. I think that is so critical. The other big lessons I learned in this thing was something I heard once I was at Stanford and just after we'd won our first championship.
01:04:47
Speaker
and Al Davis, the former head coach, and at that time, the general manager and owner of the Oakland Raiders, they just won this Google the year before. And it was the start of the fall season of the next year. And a reporter asked him at his first press conference of the year, he said, Al, your team won it last year. Can you win it again this year? And he said, somebody really stuck with me. He said, I'm going to quote you from Alice in Wonderland. The Red Queen told Alice, you have to run as fast as you can to get somewhere.
01:05:17
Speaker
But once you get there, you have to run twice as fast to stay there. And that stuck with me a lot. And so I tried every four or five years to do something a little bit different, whether it's in our facility or putting on an event or something that had never been done before, at least do something considerably, majorly better than it had ever been done before. As I coach longer and longer, so no one could ever say, well, he's sitting on the job now, he's just waiting till I retire. Because I really loved what I did. Every year is different. I don't have the, you asked how do I do it so long?
01:05:46
Speaker
One player leaves one team and graduates or turns pro. And that changes the whole character of a 10 or 12 person team. Yeah, you get to do it all over again. It's a whole new team you're dealing with. It's not the same guys day after day after day for 30 years, you know. Yeah. So for me, it's the advantage of my occupation and coaching that changes their old time.
01:06:05
Speaker
The, the one other thing I wanted to say quick because I think, you know, what's really cool about that year after year thing that where it starts, it starts over, but it's fresh is that yes, it's that relational approach that you take where you're really invest. You're really getting to know and investing in these. Well, you know, I'm probably around these kids more than their parents around Joel. Think about it. When you were a senior in high school, you get home about six o'clock and have dinner maybe with your family, then you go study. Yeah.
01:06:35
Speaker
You know, and, uh, I mean, you wouldn't spend more than a couple hours a day with your parents. Probably. Right. You have all your activities after school and so on. At least that's what I see now with the kids. And, and, uh, and I'm with these kids under, you know, six days a week, uh, probably a good three hours a day and in all kinds of precious situations, relationships, schoolwork, tennis, uh, buddy competition. Yeah. And it's, it's, uh, it's a really,
01:07:04
Speaker
interesting time. So I'm very lucky in that regard. Yeah, that's really great. Well, Dick, I'm just one more huge fan of you and I love what you're doing. And yeah, thanks so much for spending this time with me today. Well, gosh, it's great talking to you. Good luck with the family and your wife does a great time with the young young people she's going to be working with and with school. Yeah. And she'll never know at all. But it's fun learning how to use what you do know.
01:07:33
Speaker
and learn from that from what works and what doesn't work for different people. She's picked a great occupation. Yeah, she definitely has a special skill and ability in this and I'm excited to see what she does for sure. Good luck with the book and congrats on the book and with everything, Dick, and we'll be in touch. I look forward to it, Joel. Thanks, and really nice talking with you. Thanks, Dick. Yeah, you too. All my best, my friend.
01:08:04
Speaker
You can find Dick's book anatomy of a champion at Amazon. As I read it, I found myself thinking back to my years as a volleyball player over and over and over again. And it actually helped me process some of those experiences from back then that are still impacting me now long after. And there are so many takeaways that applied to me today as a filmmaker, a coworker, a husband, a father, and as just a really worthwhile read. So I highly recommend it. And you can pick it up just in time for Christmas.
01:08:33
Speaker
There is a link to the book in the episode description. There's also a link to the Teach Aids website if you're interested in learning more about that organization. Okay, that's it for this week. Again, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to what's coming next. And I'll see you right here next week.