We are going to start with a tweet you’ve seen before:
I told you the thought per tweet ratio was high on this one…
You can’t own what isn’t yours. Be it a house, a car, or your player’s career. Trying to will drive you nuts.
A coach’s job is to create an environment and cultivate it in such a way that players take ownership.
Your Garden, Wrong People
This is the essence of recruiting. Finding your people.
If I would have stuck around with the junior team I started my coaching career with, this is what I would have optimized for in Year 6.
You want everyone you get to be meant for your garden.
In Year 1 of an expansion franchise, you aren’t getting this. In hindsight, this is where my ‘struggle’ stemmed from. A lack of control of this. Which led to a lack of control everywhere.
In Year 1, you recruit players that are meant for your garden. And you ‘miss’ on them because they go to established brands at your level of hockey. What you are left with is 1 or 2 players meant for your garden and 18-20 who aren’t meant to live and thrive in your garden.
This is also why Premier League managers like Jessie Marsch shouldn’t be fired after 3 months. A lot of those players aren’t meant to thrive in the new coach’s garden.
This also reminds me of another story about Ryan Hardy.
Too Early? Wrong People? Both?
When you’re “early” on some coaching ideas, you end up “fighting” with your players. Instead of working together on what’s best for them… You have to spend time educating them as they openly disagree with you and think you’re an idiot.
Ryan Hardy coached the Springfield Jr. Blues for a time period the kids would call, ‘a minute’.
Forget Jessie Marsch’s lengthy 3-month stint, we are talking in terms of weeks.
His vision in Springfield was to run it as he would eventually implement in the USHL with the Chicago Steel. An early doors preview of ‘The Machine’. Ryan was designing an authentic and beautiful garden, but the current players didn’t appreciate said garden. They would have preferred one with less ‘work’ required. Maybe some looser standards too. The player group wasn’t ready to ‘own’ all that. And Ryan knew the first principle of ownership within teams. It can only be taken by the players. A coach cannot give it.
This gap creates headaches, unless you do this…
After catching wind that he would be fired because some of his own players tipped him off, he confronted upper management and resigned instead.
You can put your head down and fight your own players on your ‘crazy’ ideas for 2 years like I did, or you can do that. And before you say, “quitter” or “he took the easy way out”… Don’t say any of that.
Having the wrong plants in your garden for 2 years and staying is objectively the stupider play, but I don’t need your pity or to be told I’m a brave warrior for doing it…
He could have just been early… Too early for others to be accepting and ready for his ideas.
Sometimes you’re Webvan…
Sometimes early is even deadly when people don’t want to own your ideas.
Hill, Socrates and the Guy that Proposed the Earth Spun
Spoiler Alert: The guy that proposed the earth spun was burned at the stake. The immediate feedback for his crazy idea was fiery death.
Socrates got death too for his ‘ideas’ and ‘thinking’.
And then there was Napolean Hill. This dude writes a book around the time of the Great Depression that would be incredibly illuminating to read now. His wife was so convinced he was 100 years ahead of his time and that the world wasn’t ready for his ideas. She insisted he not put the book out. The manuscript sat around long after his death and was only recently released in 2011 by his foundation. Talk about being early…
Sometimes the world is not ready to own your new ideas.
Maybe you needed this perspective illuminated. I know I did 4 years too late. Remind yourself of this when starting a new team or taking over a team where you don’t recruit in your first season.
It’s not that the players don’t want to own ‘a culture’ they just might not want to own ‘your culture’.
This doesn’t make you a bad coach.
Hardy Podcast Rabbit Holes:
P.S. My first book in the leadership series is now 2.99 for a limited time in the ebook format. Get it here: