What an incredible story about hope and coaches truly understanding what it means to be a coach of people, and not just football or athletes.
Guest Post: Teamwork by Otis Henderson
We are very excited to have our first guest post here on Build Lives. Coach Otis Henderson has written a great post on teamwork. After the post you can see his bio. Enjoy!!!
“I can do things you cannot. You can do things I cannot. Together WE can do great things.” ~Mother Teresa
The above quote encapsulated my philosophy regarding teamwork! It is a collaboration — people working TOGETHER to achieve the vision & goals of the team. In the quote, Mother Teresa acknowledges that individuals exist (the “I’s”) initially. But then, a key phrase comes into play: “together WE can do great things,”
Together. The “I’s” come together to become WE! This is the amazing dynamic that has me addicted to teamwork – that “I” can become “We” & “We can become Team”! I don’t know about you, but that is incredible to me.
I have a myriad of thoughts and philosophies regarding teamwork and I hope one day to write a book. But, for now, I will briefly share my thoughts regarding the foundational “bricks” of teamwork:
- Great teams have great leaders: as John C Maxwell states,“Everything rises and falls on leadership.” I truly don’t believe you can have a great team without first having a great leader. A great leader builds relationships. He or she knows that “people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” This builds trust and the team follows the leader – the person, based on relationship. Finally, a great leader is a lifelong leader. They know that the more they learn about becoming better leaders, the better the TEAM becomes!
- Great teams have a shared vision: the above mentioned leader presents a clearly articulated vision for the team, with a challenging, but realistic plan for achieving the vision. Because trust has been built, and the team believes in the leader; the team then buys in and shares the team vision. Together, they decide to put the team (we) before ME, and this begins the process of real teamwork…
- Great teams hold each other accountable: teams are made up of people and people come in all shapes, sizes, personalities AND personal agendas! Once the team decides to commit to the shared vision, they must hold each other accountable to being true to the vision. No complaining, gossip, sedition or rebellion is accepted on great teams!
- Great teams have positive attitudes: during the ebb and flow of a team’s season, there will be adversity. Wins, losses! Locker room brawls! (yes, I’ve had a few lol) Dissension. We cannot always control these things because we are dealing with people. However, great teams know they can control their response. In his book, The Energy Bus, Jon Gordon describes a formula for remaining positive regardless of the situation: E + P = O. E vents plus our P erception (of the events) = O utcomes. In other words, no matter what happens, great teams perceive an opportunity in every event, positive or negative, and CHOOSE to be positive! Cool formula, huh? Great teams have this mindset & won’t allow negativity to derail them.
- Great teams seek continual improvement: I am the athletic director at Christian Cultural Center (CCC), the largest church in NYC. One of our church’s timeless fundamentals is that we are on “a relentless drive for progress”. We are never satisfied. This drives me everyday to seek new ways to do what we do. This concept is the life blood of great teams. The Japanese use the work Kaizen: continuous improvement. Great teams always look for ways to get better at that they do & do it in excellence. Vince Lombardi said it best, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
Well, that is all for now. I just don’t believe you can talk teamwork without first setting the foundation for it. Great teams cannot survive without first having a great leader who builds relationships & trust, a shared vision, a positive attitude, accountability & a desire for continuous improvement.
I hope you read something that will help you as you continue to build your teams!
- Coach Otis Henderson
Bio:
Coach Otis Henderson, Jr.
“Changing the culture of sports, one relationship at a time.”
Coach Otis Henderson, “affectionately known as Coach O”, has been working with NYC youth & sports for over 25 years. He is presently the Athletic Director at Christian Cultural Center (CCC), the largest church in NYC, located in Brooklyn NY. He also started and directs “Synergies For Success”, the academic tutoring program at CCC.
He has conducted coaches clinics with guest speakers: NBA coach Steve Clifford, former Gators Asst. Coach Tim Maloney (now at Baylor MBB), and Jay Wright, present Villanova head coach, to name a few.
Coach O believes that through the “relationship building nature of sports, we can impact the lives of student-athletes today for positive change.”
Coach Henderson lives in Brooklyn, with his wife, Joy. They have 3 children.
Contact info:
Email: coach@coachotis.org
Twitter: @NYC_CoachO
Website: coachotis.org
Mixing Concrete
This post is for you coaches who coach young athletes in particular.
Have you ever mixed concrete? Have you poured concrete? If you have ever used quikrete then you know you pour the bag into a wheelbarrow, add water and stir. This is no easy task. It’s dirty, it can be hard and it can take a while just to mix it depending on how much you have to mix. More specifically, have you ever mixed concrete to lay a foundation? It takes a lot of concrete. You can mix a lot of bags, pour it and realize it only fills up a very small portion of that foundation.
I was an intern at a church here in Southern California for 2 years. I worked in the Junior High Ministry. My boss, Kurt Johnston, is the person who used this analogy. He was referring to youth ministry, but this works for coaches as well.
Coaching younger athletes can feel like mixing concrete. You can work super hard, you can coach your butt off, and you can do it for more than 40 hours per week. You keep doing this day in and day out and you may feel like you’re not getting anywhere. You may not hear a, “Thanks coach”. As a junior high or pop warner or YMCA basketball coach you probably won’t see the fruits of your labor until years down the road. Think about mixing concrete for the foundation of a house. If that’s your only job it can be hard and it could be a year or so until the house is complete, but it all starts with that foundation.
If you coach athletes junior high age and younger just know that you are the ones who build the foundation. You are the ones who can steer these young athletes in the right direction.
Continue mixing that concrete and continue building into the lives of these young athletes. You are making a huge impact. You may not be acknowledged for it, but we here at Build Lives know.
If you are a coach we would love to hear your thoughts on this. Please share your advice on what it looks like for you to mix the concrete.
If you coach older athletes what advice do you have for those who coach younger ones?
Don’t Feed the Fire
I, John, worked in youth ministry for about 7 years. Junior High Ministry to be exact. Anytime I tell someone that their response is always something like, “bless your heart”, or “wow, you’re brave”, or my favorite, “You’re going to have a lot of jewels on your crown in heaven”.
I might not word this in the best way possible, but I’m going to try. We all know that the junior high years are hard. If you are older than 14 then you know exactly what I’m talking about. I use to get offended when I would hear those lines above. I did junior high ministry because that’s where I felt called. I also did it because I know that those years are really hard. I don’t like those phrases because it does nothing to help build the lives of youth. If a student sees that or hears that what do you think their reaction will be? Junior high athletes and students don’t need us to tell them that they are terrors and that they are all trouble makers. I can’t name one person, and I bet you can’t either, who didn’t cause a little trouble during their JH years. We all did. We have all been there.
Let’s please stop feeding this fire. Instead let’s lift these students up when they do something positive and come along side them when they do something that might be questionable. The better you build relationships with students the less disciplining you will have to do and the more discipling you can do. Yes, those are two different words.
So, let’s all try to be positive about working with young athletes. Believe it or not we can all learn from people younger than us. We need to think about what to say to students and athletes even if it’s a tough conversation. There is always a way to make it positive. It might not be easy, but in the long run it will pay off.
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Do you agree? Do you have anything to add to this?
How are you turning tough conversations into positive learning situations?
Here Goes Nothing…
… or here goes everything.
We are officially launching our website today. It’s now or never right? College football kicks off tonight, some high school kicks off this weekend and the NFL starts next week.
As you look at our site you will notice that is has a very simple look. This is on purpose. We want the content on here to outshine any design work we could do on it. It’s simple for a reason.
We hope to post everyday, Monday through Friday. We aren’t sure exactly what each day will look like, but we will be working on that over the next few weeks. This site will most likely evolve over time. This is a soft launch that could also be called beta. There are probably a few kinks we need to work out and some things we need to fine tune, but we believe the site is at a point that it can go live.
Please let us know if you see any mistakes on here or any broken links. You can let us know by going to the the “contact” page. Fill out the info and we will look at it. The contact page is also for you to let us know who you are, and to let us know if you would be interested in writing a post for our site.
We hope you will check out our “about” page. We will keep this page updated as things change over time.
We want you to know that you don’t have to come to our page to stay updated. You can subscribe to our blog by either email or through an RSS reader. You can check out our subscription page here.
Building the lives of young athletes is something we are very passionate about and I’m guessing that if you are here visiting our site you are also passionate about this. We know you can’t do it alone and that’s part of what this site is for.
We will have many posts on here that will hopefully relate to coaches all across the country. Of course coaching on the field and on the court is a huge part of coaching, but we hope this site helps when it comes to teaching your athletes about life in general. We hope you are trying to teach your athletes how to lead off the field as well.
Building Lives is so important for our young athletes. How you speak to them, how you treat them and how you discipline them. I believe that relationships are better than discipline. There are a lot of ways to communicate with student athletes and we hope you will share those with us.
Please let us know if you have any ideas for post or if there is something you would like to see on here. We know that this will take time to evolve and we know that this will be a marathon and not a sprint.
Thanks for joining this journey with us. We are so excited to meet all of you coaches out there who are making a difference in the lives of young people. We are also excited to partner with you. We may be the creators and the managers of this site, but this site is truly for you to add your insights and to gain knowledge form other coaches just like you who are looking for this kind of thing.
We hope you enjoy it and we hope to connect with you.
