Hank Haney was a master of inversion. When tasked with working with the best golfer in the world in his prime, his swing strategy was not flashy.
One would think when given the opportunity to coach a talent like Tiger Woods, you would get, “in the lab” and really break everything down. Dissecting the swing with all this tech and cameras. Shoot for those “1% gains” that everyone is obsessed with.
Hank said to hell with all that shit.
His major goal for Tiger?
Create a swing that avoids the “Big Miss”. Inversion gets you to understand what the “disaster” looks like, and then avoid it.
In hockey, I’ve committed the big miss. And I’m not alone.
I posted something that started a conversation with Jack Han. He got me thinking about some of the same mistakes I made when coaching the junior team.
I think we can all read my tweet and think of a personal experience with this. You think about a problem you’re having with the team, try one of the possible solutions, and then don’t follow through with continuing that new adjustment to the system or process of how the team runs. Why do we do this? Jack has a spot-on assessment:
The current groupthink in coaching is that everything is urgent/important. But when everything is important, nothing is important.
Example
Let’s say you’re discussing something that truly matters like a post-game breakdown of your team which will help you plan the following week of practice.
Your assistant coach is in the middle of saying something that will create a positive impact on the training for next week when… Your phone rings. It’s a team sponsor. You even say to your staff, “excuse me for a minute, I HAVE to take this, this is IMPORTANT.”
The question before you answer that phone needs to be, “is it more important than this?”
The second question then becomes, am I choosing to interrupt something that compounds?
The Big Miss in Leadership
Coaches are interrupting their compounding daily with their “everything is important” speak(watch this BS video as an example):
Making everything that you do matter… Is our Big Miss. It is what Hank Haney would want coaches to avoid. Instead of pandering to the media or telling your players things that aren’t true, why don’t you begin to practice what we discuss next. Let’s go back to the coaching office scenario.
You have to create priorities. Things that will compound are priorities:
listening to your assistant coach(compounding trust)
jamming as a staff on how we can focus on this element of the game in practice next week(compounding relationships and team improvement)
having better on-ice success(compounding improvement of play)
Things that compound must take a front-seat to a one-off phone call from a sponsor. Or other bullshit that pulls you away from what truly matters.
Remember:
If everything is important, nothing is important.
If the goal is to avoid big misses, focus on the things that matter in the moments they matter. Have priorities.
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
-Stephen Covey
We were chatting on the sharks on Thursday about this ad the biggest challenge for those who are not coaching high-level elite teams is player bandwidth and lack of attention capability. There’s a couple different apps that can be used to communicate with players and parents but I have found over the last several years from the high school coaching all the way down to you 15 girls is that many of them don’t read the things you send them. That’s why it’s so important to maximize the time you spend with them at the rink.
Like the Charlie Munger quote-
As the stakes (money) increases so does the urgency to win, now. Coaches looking to high tech solutions and the Xs and 0S often forget about the 1-20. When it becomes about the 1-20 everything changes, for the better- and outcomes inevitably will change for the better.