Do your players need a performance coach?

Becky Burleigh and Brett Ledbetter have started a revolution! And I have to admit I'm all in!

What they have done is identify the future of the coaching profession. Brett's book What Drives Winning along with WhatDrivesWinning.com provide coaches with great insight about how we can have fulfilling careers.

I've been thinking about this alot...

This past season was not our most successful. It wasn't a bad year. Finishing second at the CCAA Championships is nothing to be disappointed about especially considering the tremendous effort we gave in the final match and throughout the season. But we were coming off an Elite 8 appearance and being a penalty kick away from the Final 4.

My whole thought process going into the season was about Final 4. National Championship!

While we didn't reach those goals, this season was by far the most rewarding I've had as a coach. Helping our team through the challenges of this fall really made me think about my purpose as a coach.

Enter the What Drives Winning revolution!

It's amazing how things come into your life at the perfect time. I can't say enough about the book, the web page and what Becky and Brett are doing for coaching.

But this blog post isn't a book review. It is about how our school, Stanislaus State, is taking a unique approach to performance coaching.

Our women's basketball coach, Wayman Strickland, is the person that turned me on to What Drives Winning. I had just finished reading Mindset by Carol Dweck and he suggested What Drives Winning. In fact he was nice enought to buy me a copy.

We started talking to our volleyball coach Mallori Gibson about the book. Then our softball coach Jessica Ventoza. This is how a real revolution spreads!

One dynamic that really intrigued us was that of the "performance coach." Of course we have always been performance coaches for our players. But if I'm being honest I was a little jealous of the resources at a place like Florida where they can hire a performance coach to guide their players and coaches. There is a lot of value in our student-athletes being able to work with someone neutral. Unfortunately we just don't have the budget to hire someone.

But like most D2 coaches we certainly aren't going to let a lack of budget or resources get in our way. That's just not in our nature. So we have come up with a way to solve the problem. We are going to take on more work (typical D2 mentality) and be each other's performance coaches.

Our performance coach pilot program kicked off this week. In addition to being the head women's soccer coach at Stan State I'm also now the softball performance coach!

I can't wait to get started!