Good Teams

Food for thought:

Good teams have the following building blocks:

1. Planning

2. Goals

3. Coordination

4. Diversity and Cohesion

Planning:

- Planning is inversely related to production time

- Leaders pay a bigger price for poor planning

Goals:

- Teams that set specific stretch goals outperform others

- Need to understand people's commitments and motives up front

and

- Leaders must lead with a vision/outcome in mind

- Effective goals have metrics

- You can design your roles with goals in mind

- Use backward induction (i.e. start planning with the last required step instead of the first step)

Coordination:

- Best teams have a connector who understands how the pieces should fit

- Best teams divide labor but individuals know the big picture and have a deep knowledge of relevant connection points

Diversity and Cohesion:
- Diversity of thought is good
- Cohesion is also good
- Diversity and Cohesion are typically at-odds, so
- Have a pre-defined mechanism for conflict resolution and inter-team discussion
such as
- Teach everyone to constructively criticize each other
- This process should include: a defined structure, norms, be focused on a task, be oriented towards shared goals and towards developing trust

Misc:

- Best teams are constantly learning and growing

- Best teams focus on process

Anything missing on your team?

Negotiating Coaching

This week we talked about Negotiating.  Negotiations as they were described essentially don't happen in coaching college ultimate.  But, a lot of smaller negotiations do happen!  So I'll try to pick and choose what's relevant.

Here are some examples of negotiations that occur when coaching ultimate:
1. Which tournaments to attend and why
2. What fitness plan to engage in and why
3. What offense system to use and why
4. What defensive system to use and why
5. What adjustments to make and how to present them to the team at halftime

All of these scenarios are considered "integrative negotiations", which is cooperative and the objective is to get into a win/win scenario.  This self-evident because you aren't negotiating with opponents, you are negotiating within your other coaches and captains.  So you shouldn't be getting into a lot of situations with competitive negotiating scenarios, I wouldn't think.

With the season planning items (1-4 above), I think the most important part is to properly prepare for your negotiations by doing background research and clearly explaining the purpose behind each decision.  The biggest hurdle to decisions like this are information, given how college teams systemically lose the upperclassmen who have done this research every year.  Once the information is present, being able to use the context of the competition (i.e. regional-based strategies/weather) feels like another obvious place to start, and you can even get into specific roster strengths you feel the team is more oriented towards.

I think 5 might be the most interesting.  It's sort of a negotiation and sort of not, but you have a lot of factors that make this situation hard.  For instance, you have about 2 minutes to talk to your co-coaches and/or captains to get a sense of what everyone is seeing, and from this information you need to select the most important thing and then cohesively find a way to communicate it to the team.  So you have a time constraint, you have a lot of things going on that are trying to pull your attention away, you have a lot of different perspectives, all of whom are seeing the game through different lenses and noticing different things.  And, if you end up with more than one action item, you can forget about your team being able to remember it and actually change anything on the field in the second half.  So, what do you do?

I think the most valuable thing here is to "create a script", or to create a focused way to share info and quickly arrive at the most important thing.  Another option could be to agree before the tourney that topics discussed in the huddle will be ideas mentioned in practice previously, or will be directly related to the explicit tourney goals, in order to keep the focus on-task.

Influence

"Influence" is a word that has been getting thrown around a lot in these leadership classes and training sessions.  Mostly it has been presented something like, "the role of a leader is to influence", and "how can you influence people to do what you want", and so on.

I was not a fan of this idea when I first heard it.  I felt like word "influence" had a negative connotation when used to describe one individual influencing another.  Basically an implication of someone taking "agency" (the ability to make ones' own decisions) away from someone else.  Essentially manipulating someone for personal gain.  I also felt (and still somewhat feel) that the word influence has a transactional flavor to it - i.e. a leader thinking "what can I gain from this person and how should I gain it".

Influence: The capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something, or the effect itself.

The definition of "influence" does not seem to carry the negative connotations that I felt at first. In fact, upon reading the definition it is immediately obvious how much influence coaches have and should have.  After all, what could be more important to coaching than what is listed in this definition?

In class, we talked a lot about different aspects of influence.  Some of it felt too political for my tastes, but there were plenty of things I think would relate well to coaching.  Here are a few:

As a coach, it is extremely important to be credible.  

Some aspects of credibility include: 

Trustworthiness and Authenticity - Are you genuine?  Can players count on you?

Competence - Do you know what you're talking about? 

Warmth - Do you care about the players as individuals?

One idea was that influence emanates from both who you are and how you deliver your message.  So one good example of this might be: if you are a coach but you behave immaturely, it will be impossible for players to take you seriously.

We talked about cognitive load, about the interaction between listening and actually absorbing information.  Basically, the idea was that in long lectures, about 90% of what is said is forgotten.  So obviously the lesson here is coaches need to be concise and specific.

We also talked about a lot of political tactics for the workplace.  While I found those to be sort of interesting in a general sense, and I like being aware of them so I can recognize others who utilize them, I do not feel they are relevant for the coaching environment.

Common Cognitive Errors

I sat through a pretty interesting class last week on collective decision-making and some common mistakes and misconceptions that are made in that process.  We talked about how collective decision-making influenced the launch of the Challenger and some of the steps leading up to the catastrophic gasket failure.  The lesson there was obvious, to say the least.

In this post I'm going to attempt to contextualize a few common decision-making errors and try to relate them to Northwestern Ultimate.

Seven biases that limit effective decision making:
1. Escalation of Commitment (i.e. Sunk Costs)
2. Loss Aversion
3. Confirmation Bias
4. Illusion of Transparency
5. Overconfidence Bias
6. Anchoring
7. Sampling on the Dependent Variable

1. Escalation of Commitment
Essentially, decisions should be forward looking and not oriented on the past.  So a good example of this for Northwestern Ultimate might be a coach or captain being hesitant to change our offensive strategy, perhaps considering that in the previous year we spent a lot of time and built a lot of team knowledge of a certain system.  And so perhaps the leadership doubles down on what was not an ideal offense, using a lot of practice time resources on it and ending up in largely the same non-ideal position.

2. Loss Aversion
This is a status-quo preference.  So for Northwestern Ultimate, perhaps a captain or coach is concerned about making a big change because this could result in a rankings drop or a lower end-of-season finish in the series.  Basically the idea is centered around worry related to "What do we stand to lose".  Two re-framing solutions were offered to this, both of which I totally loved: A. Re-frame it as "What do you stand to gain?", or B. Re-frame it as "What do we stand to lose if we don't seek change?"

3. Confirmation Bias
The idea here is that we seek out information that confirms what we know.  So for example, at a strategic level, if I think "side stack is the best offense", I will seek out examples that show great side stack offense to justify my position.  At a player level, when I see a good player make a good play, I might think that confirms my belief that they are good.  But if I see someone who I think is a good player make a bad play, I am naturally quicker to dismiss it as a rare mistake.  This is certainly on display in the tryout phase for Northwestern Ultimate, and is very difficult to address.

4. Illusion of Transparency
This one is a "tendency to overestimate the degree to which our mental state is known by others".  I think this is basically a fundamental underlying tenet of team chemistry and has very broad applicability.  It seems to me like this comes into play in basically every interpersonal interaction within the team, and the better your team is equipped to navigate it, the better your team chemistry will be.  Things like team retreats seem to be good ways of helping to build a base from which to navigate this.  Also formalizing feedback mechanisms and check-ins with players feels vital for this.

5. Overconfidence Bias
This means that people tend to be more certain about things with a little information, i.e. "A Little Knowledge is a Dangerous Thing".  An obvious one here is when players put too much value on power rankings or what they've heard about a team, without having seen them play.  In the past years, going into a game, players have expressed remarkable confidence that they are outmatched or are going to lose, before the game has even begun.  Obviously thinking this is not how to set your squad up for success.

6. Anchoring/Insufficient Adjustment
Essentially this is saying that we overvalue our initial reference points of things, even if those initial references are irrelevant later on.  And also, we don't adjust as dramatically as we need to.  A good example of this is on an individual player level on defense.  For example, maybe we're playing a matchup scheme and player X gets toasted deep.  One option is I can try to coach them to adjust and build in a bigger buffer, but if I'm not explicit in the magnitude of that buffer (or if we haven't really practiced this kind of adjustment), the change that is made is often not as big as it should be.

7. Sampling on the Dependent Variable
This is sample selection bias.  The example that was provided in class was "books on management that just look at the strategies of successful companies".  The idea here is that without a full set of data, (i.e. strategies of both successful and unsuccessful companies) we aren't able to gain very much insight into what really works and what doesn't.  So for Northwestern Ultimate, this means that only looking at what frequent nationals-qualifying teams do can only go so far, it really be best to understand the key differences between those teams and teams that do not make the big show, in order to draw more functional links between behaviors.

----

One thing I forgot to mention last week was on my mind this week, so I want to put it here as food for thought:

Top Down Change Often Leads to Poor Implementation

Simply mandating that people do something and enforcing it with:
- Mandatory training
- Complaint Systems
- Tests
Does not result in successful implementation.

What works better:
- Voluntary (Opt-in) Training
- Self-managed teams (i.e. Ownership)
- Cross-Training (i.e. Breadth)
- Mentoring and Peer Mentoring
- Task Forces (i.e. Empowerment)

Leadership Frameworks

One of the things I still struggle with is a proper definition for "Leadership".  To me, leadership means a lot of things and is an extremely large umbrella term that captures all of them.  Within a coaching context, there are tons of books that compete to describe the ideal characteristics of a good leader.  Anyway, I'm taking a class on Leadership, so I want to assess a few of the ideas as they come up and possibly relate them to ultimate.

The following definition for leadership is proposed:

"Leadership consist of the tools and resources you use to mobilize people to collaborate together to create something of social value."

To support this definition, there is some specificity around what is meant by "collaboration":

Collaboration: collective action among interdependent parties working towards shared goals.

There was also a good amount of discussion that since leadership consists of tools and resources, it is something that is trainable and improvable.

Overall, I think this is a pretty good definition.  It's vague enough to capture a lot of things but also has enough structure to be actionable.  I think collaboration as used here is still a bit vague, but it's basically proposed as the key to getting teams to achieve things "greater than the sum of their parts", and so I think it makes sense.  One small gripe I have with this definiation is it feels a bit transactional in nature, as it seems like you provide input x and then this team of other people can now collaborate, which seems to assume a basic hierarchy.  I don't know if this is a real issue or not, but this a blog, not a research paper.  Final note, I definitely am all about the growth mindset stuff in here.  Big fan of that part.

One other note I felt was pretty good was a discussion of what good leadership outcomes look like.  Basically it was presented like this:

Good leadership results in:

Decisions: Facilitates effective group decision-making

Influence: Influence others to adopt those decisions

Implementation & Motivation: Design structures to implement those decisions and motivate people to do it effectively

I think the best part of this for me was the last part, I found it interesting to think about leadership actions in terms of structures that maintain buy-in.  I think that has tons of obvious carry-over to coaching or captaining a team.

What It Takes

"You just have to have the players."
- Geoff S., 2013

What does it take to qualify for college nationals?

You need them all, in order of importance:
Desire - This is the most important thing.  Everything flows from this.  This is at the center of your team's motivation and drive.  Are a critical mass of players willing to invest enough of themselves into this goal?  If not, how can you cultivate and grow the seeds of this desire?
Culture - Your culture is the strongest tool you have, since it impacts everything you do.  But especially, your culture serves to direct, cultivate, and share the motivation your players have.  Specifically, a strong culture means things like having seniors that support and welcome freshmen, having players who train hard and encourage their teammates to do so as well, and players that are invested in supporting each other.  A strong culture is also a necessity if you want to have good recruitment, no one wants to be on a team that is too cliquey, too aggro, or constantly disrespectful to each other.  Your culture also plays a big role in governing your team's response to adversity.  And if you want to qualify for college nationals, you are guaranteed to face strong adversity.
Talent - You need players who can compete individually at a national level.  This means players who can get open well, defend well, and throw very well.  Teams like Carleton, Pitt, and UNC have coaches down to the youth level who are individually personally recruiting most of the players ready to contribute immediately.  Occasionally a player like this will show up at your door, but if you are not explicitly recruiting those players, you need to cast a wide net and invest hard in everyone.  It's by no means a requirement, but attracting athletes (and particularly former captains) of other team sports (especially football and soccer) can help a lot since those players may be athletically ready to contribute and may understand how to succeed in a very competitive team sports environment.
Another way to look at this is by considering the "contribution above replacement" of your best 14 players or so.  So basically this means, when to compared to a rough "average player" on a nationals level team, how much can each of your players contribute?  Since the objective is to create a team that plays "competitive" games with other teams at a national level (for reference: games typically within 2-3 with a real chance to win = "competitive"), you need to have an adequate total amount of contribution above replacement from your top players.  You can get this from 2-4 star players, or you can get this from 7-14 really strong role players.  I'm not going to put an exact value on what is needed, but in general you need to have some critical mass of players with strengths that you can leverage over other nationally competitive teams.  If your team is having trouble identifying this level of contribution in players, then you likely need to double down on your development and investment so that you have a plan to eventually get there.
Investment - Great teams are spending 15+ hours a week in practice, lifting, throwing, film review, etc.  If the team is not willing to put in that kind of work, you'll be at a huge disadvantage from the start.  If a team is putting in 10 hrs a week and is supremely talented AND is in a weak region, they may have an outside shot.  If the team is putting in 5 or fewer hours, there is essentially zero chance of qualifying.
Development (physical, skills, leadership, ownership) - You need to grow the talent you have and get them invested in themselves.  You need to work hard in the gym and on the track to develop athletically.  You need to be invested in throwing and constantly improving people as throwers.  The team needs to understand the ownership they have over the success of the team, and be given the tools to grow as leaders.  You need to share and teach leadership techniques and encourage younger team members to take on roles within the team.  As soon as a new player shows up, they are on the eligibility clock, so the sooner you can help them buy in, the more rewarding their experience will be and the more they will be able to contribute to the team.
Strategy - You need to understand your likely opponents, the likely weather conditions for regionals, and have some idea how your systems will work in those conditions against them.  You should prioritize a system that teaches good basic skills, but you should make defensive choices and add wrinkles based on what you expect your relative team strengths to be compared to your likely opponents.  There are regional differences between offense and defense as well, i.e. vert stack is common in the South Central for Men's.  Things like this should factor into your calculations when you're picking systems.

The goal of all of these tactics is simple - to play great ultimate and to be a great team.  We can't predict the level of our specific regional opponents in any given year, but at a macro scale we can estimate the level of play that it takes to be a top 10 team.  In my opinion, this should be the level of play a program should aim for in the long term.

Other circumstances:
Bids:
If you are in a region with a team considerably better than you, you need to do all of the above and also sub hard enough and play well enough during the season to earn a bid.  This puts more pressure (mental and especially physical) on your top players, but a few teams are able to successfully navigate this each year.  Earning a bid is never a guarantee that you will take that bid, but you will dramatically improve your chances of success if you do so.
If you are a top 10 team:
You can't ever take qualifying for granted, you need to do what it takes to impress the importance of taking qualification seriously.  Top teams don't falter the majority of the time, but every year there are a few that do.
Specific Regions:
"But coach, the great lakes is a weak region.  Why would this work in other regions?"
It's the same recipe in any region, it's just the baseline level that needs to be achieved is higher or lower depending on the region.

IYU 2018

A bit after college regionals, Andy asked me if I was interested in coaching the IYU U20 boys at YCC with him.  After talking with Zubair about it, we both eventually decided to give it a shot this season as assistant coaches.

I didn't really know what to expect going into it, but I was pretty sure that talking about ultimate with Andy & Zubair for 8 weeks was going to be a good time no matter what happened.  

These were my goals going into the season, in no particular order:

- Watch and learn as much as possible from Andy

- Watch and learn as much as possible from Zubair

- Work with a new group of players with a unique set of backgrounds and abilities

- Make a positive impact on the team in terms of culture, level of play, etc.

- Be a positive role model for developing young men & players

- Understand some of the differences in how the game is played and taught at the high school level

These were my concerns:

- Whether I would be able to develop productive on-field relationships with new players in just 8 weeks

- The level of impact I would have in a smaller role

As expected, the 8 weeks of tryouts and practices flew by incredibly quickly.  Practices were typically very hot, the playing surface was either a dried-out rock hard surface or a slightly grassy mud patch, attendance was a challenge with people going on family trips, and traffic on the way to practice was a real issue for a good amount of players.

Tryouts were a huge challenge for me, trying to learn the names of all the players and have productive discussion with my co-coaches after a few short hours of drills and games was very difficult.  I have never gone into a tryout situation as a decision-maker with so little background information and so little time to assess players.  In other contexts with club and college you either have way more information or way more time to make your assessments, and therefore the outcome is much more accurate.  In this situation I had no choice to defer to the other coaches on a lot of players, providing input as best I could with what I had seen.

Practices were typically attended by between 12 and 16 players.  We had a core of about 8 players who came to everything, then a rotating cast of 4-10 guys who came to things as much as they could between summer plans.  This was not great for the development of the team, and I think probably lowered the performance ceiling of the team by about 15%.  I don't have a good solution to this problem, travel distance and other priorities are going to remain a big challenge for a tourney team like this in the current format.  I think if we had known about the level of attendance people would have prior to roster selection, I would have potentially advocated for some different players.

The practice structure was fairly basic.  We would warm up, circle throw, do 4 lines, then basically alternate focused drills and short scrimmages.  With only 6-7 weeks of actual practice time to work with, we spent a bit of time on a lot of different topics.  I think this approach was really good for the players who came to everything, because it meant we were able to address a lot of different aspects of the game and improve a lot.  For the players who attended fewer practices, this approach meant that they were missing a lot of critical structural information offensively and defensively, and they were clearly left behind.  As a result, I felt like the players on the team were at really different levels by the end of the season in terms of ability to execute any kind of structure on the field.  In part because of this, I think our offense was only about 40% implemented and our defensive systems were only about 25% complete.

As a head coach, Andy does a really good job talking about purpose and mentality in huddles.  Most of his talk is focused on building "team-ness", through things like recognizing the positives in teammates, understanding the power of team effort and energy, and appreciating the time the team has together.  I really like how Andy is able to use his tone of voice to add energy and conviction to huddles, and I think these efforts had a tremendously positive effect on the character of the team.  Andy draws a lot of good ideas about spaces from soccer, and uses these concepts fairly directly when he talks about offensive cutting, decision making as a thrower, zone offense, and zone defense.  Andy is also a strong "player's coach", and makes an effort to maintain and develop positive relationships with all players.  He encourages players to have deeper conversations with each other, think critically, and addresses things directly when inappropriate comments are made.

Me, Andy, and Zubair obviously did not agree on everything.  We all have strong personalities and opinions about how the game should be taught and how practices should be ran.  If I had been the head coach of this team, our practices would have had more drills that were simpler & shorter, more stationary throwing, and more mini-games.  I would have done less generic scrimmaging and fewer long drills.  I would have spent more attention on making sure that players were getting enough throwing/catching and running in to improve in those areas over the 7 weeks.  I would have spent more time on teaching offense and less time on defense and zone, since I think we would have seen a bigger benefit if we had gotten our offense up to 65% rather than improving our zone look.

That said, this is really making a mountain out of a molehill if the attendance issue doesn't get addressed.  That's probably the biggest limiting factor, and changing practice structure probably isn't going to change that much.

The biggest barrier to development that I came across on this team was dealing with deeply ingrained bad habits.  Many of the players on the team had been playing ultimate for 4+ years, but had been doing so in systems where concepts like spacing and timing were not explicitly taught.  Each high school seemed to have it's own totally random set of cutting patterns and shapes, based on whatever the cutter is feeling at that particular moment.  It was really common to see incuts straight at the disc from 15 yards directly in front of the thrower.  Technical reset cutting was seemingly non-existent for many players, they would just do whatever was needed to get open with no regard for teammates or the thrower or attacking subsequently.

We had a scrimmage against Machine at the last practice of the season, which was a really fun thing Andy organized.  Going in I expected us to score fewer than 3 points in a game to 15, that's how badly I felt we were playing.  I was pleasantly surprised, as we ended up playing an 8-6 half against a pickup squad of machiners who were kind of trying.  I remember being impressed with how fast we were, how well we were able to get open, and our patience working through machine's junk sets.  I saw a skinny 16 year old sky Sam Kanner too, so that was a highlight I guess.

The tournament itself was a whirlwind.  Our team was inconsistent, mostly due to offensive issues.  When we were executing well and running hard, we played like a semifinalist.  We turned in a number of really strong halves of games like this.  We gave Atlanta a valiant effort in our pre-quarter match, showing a ton of heart and gritty defense, but at the end of the day our offensive inconsistency kept us out of quarters.  There were a ton of parents who made the trip to Minnesota to watch and support the team, which was really awesome.  Also, as much as KB doesn't like the organizational hassle, it is really cool to be able to have YCC in the same location as the U.S. Open.  Being able to watch the club semifinal games live in the stadium with the whole IYU team was an amazing experience.

As an assistant coach, I felt that the time I brought the most to the table was with watching & discussing in-game adjustments with the other coaches, providing useful feedback to lines in-game, providing offensive play calls, and identifying defensive matchups.  During the games on Saturday and Sunday, I felt like I was able to quickly identify large role offensive players on opposing teams and assign good matchups along with a few words of specific goals to those defenders.  I think this had a big impact on how we were able to apply better pressure in 2nd halves of games.  I also felt like I was able to communicate clearly and effectively with the offensive unit, and as a result we were able to use our small book of options in a more effective way.  In practices, my role as an assistant coach was fairly small.  I lead warm-ups for the first few weeks, ran a few drills here or there, provided individual advice, watched what our team was struggling at, and was available to run a practice when Andy was out of town.  That said, if I hadn't know our players as well, my ability to help put players in positions to succeed on offense and defense would have been much worse, so maybe there's plenty of value in that alone.

P.S.

None of the team name suggestions that I brainstormed for this team resonated with Andy and Zubair.  Which was lame.  I came up with some really good ones - I'm going to solidly lay blame on them for our lack of an interesting name, I did my best.  I finally started to make some progress by day 2 of YCCs with Zubair with "Land of Lincoln", hopefully that one sticks around.