By Buck Roggeman, President of TCCC

It happened twice a week at 5:45 in the morning while I was growing up in Tucson, Ariz.

Without fail on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, my dad, a college football coach, would pop his head in my bedroom and ask me and my brother, Rock, if we wanted to lift weights.

And every week on those two days, we rubbed the sleep out of our eyes and lied to Dad, “Sure.”

Then we would plod out to the backyard and begin a power lifting regimen that would last about an hour.

Rock was in high school and I was in junior high when we had those pre-dawn workouts with Dad. It was hard to drag ourselves out of bed to lift in the dark with nothing but a flashlight to guide us.

As difficult as it was for us to get up, I never considered how hard it must have been for Dad. I’m 46 years old now and Dad was about the same age when the three of us were working out together.

The lesson I took from those years was that Dad never had to tell my brother and me to work hard because he showed us. He set a great example. He taught us how to attack a work out, driving ourselves to set a personal record. He was lifting on those same rusty weights, getting up just as early as we were, and pumping iron just as aggressively as the two of us.

And he was in his mid-40’s.

The best aspect of the whole experience was the occasional spontaneous conversation that we slipped into like a pair of comfortable slippers before the sun rose. I had no idea then, but the three of us were building a bond that lasted a lifetime in our shared effort to improve.

Later, my brother and I followed Dad’s lead and became football coaches – Rock at the college level, me at a high school. Like Dad, I joined my teams in the weight room and ran Monday goal posts with them for conditioning. Rock would take his turn on the blocking sled and match his players on the chin up bar.

If you are a coach who’s still in good physical condition, you can learn from Dad’s example. Work out with your team, and they will remember you forever.

You do not have to try to keep up with the athletes or exceed their efforts. Just the fact that you are in the weight room or on the track showing them how to work at a high level of intensity will make a difference. They will appreciate the sweat you are contributing to their conditioning.

You will also be modeling great behavior for them. If you are willing to work out when you do not have to, it shows the players that they can do it too.

So don’t be afraid to jump in the pool, punch the blocking sled, or grab a jump rope with your team.

Dad is 81 now, and I still remember him bench pressing 315 pounds three times.

The cool part is that he was 55-years-old when he did it.

How many of us will be able to say that?

By Buck Roggeman, President of TCCC

Very seldom do you hear the word “patience” listed as a characteristic of a great coach.

Nobody described Vince Lombardi or Bo Schembechler as patient.

Pat Riley and Phil Jackson have been described a number of ways, but not patient.

I think that this is because the public sees coaches at their most competitive, during games or at press conferences immediately following an intense contest which is about as far as you can get from the building stage of coaching.

Yet, talk to any coach and they will tell you that the journey is far more critical than the destination, and while every player wants to win, rare are the players or teams who want to WORK to win.

It is in this building process where you are crafting a blend of performance and team chemistry that you must exhibit patience.

Coaching does not produce linear results in a team. Much like the stock market, progress is made through gains and losses, but great coaches keep their teams trending in a positive direction over the long haul.

Great coaches have the wisdom to recognize that they will have to be patient with their athletes to improve over the course of the entire season.

We have all been caught in that coaching moment where we want to say to player, “I must have told you that 100 times?”

What we have to realize is that we might have to say it 100 more times and think of a dozen new ways to teach the skill before it becomes a habit that the player will feel comfortable enough to integrate into her play.

Staying patient with players does not mean you accept substandard effort or are satisfied with mediocre performance. Patience creates an atmosphere where you recognize that mistakes in practice are opportunities to improve in games.

By methodically teaching good habits, sound fundamentals, and good character traits, your team will improve over time. Many times coaching these foundational skills is not exciting, and it certainly does not match the thrill of game time, but a willingness to remain patient and commit to this aspect of leadership will set your team apart as elite.

But it won’t happen overnight.

You will have to be patient.

By Buck Roggeman, President of TCCC

One of the slides that generated some laughs when Joe Ehrmann conducted his seminar in Salinas, Calif., on April 20, was this list of 10 reasons why I swear:

1.   It pleases my mom so much

2.   It is a fine mark of my manliness or femininity

3.   It proves I have self control.

4.   It indicates how clearly my mind operates.

5.   It makes my conversation pleasing to everyone.

6.   It leaves no doubt to anyone about my upbringing.

7.   It impresses everyone with my level of education.

8.   It is an unmistakable sign of my culture and refinement.

9.   It makes me a very desirable person in respectable society and especially with children.

10. It is a good expression of my faith.

Our language is quite simply a verbal representation of our thoughts and our identity. If you are anything like me, it can be one of the hardest aspects  to control when passion rises in your coaching.

On our high school football teams, we used to make everyone on the field drop and do 20 push-ups if anyone on the field swore – players or coaches.

The message being sent to the team was that no matter what happened we would always be in control of ourselves. If we could watch our language, then we had the will power to control just about anything.

After attending Ehrmann’s Seminar, Watsonville High School head coach John Montante is instituting a new policy for his players and coaches.

If someone on the field swears, the team will do five push-ups for every letter in the off-color comment.

He is also taking it a step further.

The guilty party also will have to explain what they were thinking and feeling when they swore.

What a stroke of genius. Instead of perpetuating the stereotype of athletes who use foul language, Coach Montante will encourage his team to define their emotions and build a vocabulary to explain their feelings.

These kinds of lessons will resonate with Montante’s players and coaches long after the season ends.

Remember, sports don’t build character. Rather, character is built by coaches who make an intentional effort to teach it.

Every word that comes out of our mouths is conveying those lessons to our athletes.

By Buck Roggeman, President of TCCC

One of the most important building blocks in the foundation of a great team is trust.

The first definition listed at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trust  is “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.”

Pause and read that definition again.

“Assured reliance” comes from proving repeatedly that others can count on you.

Of the four adjectives in the definition, the most important are character and truth.

Players must trust the character and truth of each other, and they must trust the character and truth in coaches.

Coaches? We need to build the character and truth in our players so that they can learn to depend on each other and us.

So how do you get there?

The first step is a simple but important one: You have to show up – all the time.

As mentioned in a previous blog, one of the greatest gifts we have to give any other human being is our time. By showing up every single time to every individual practice, work out, or meeting, you are communicating to your team that they are important.

In fact, you are telling them that they are the most important entity in your life at that moment because you are choosing to spend it with your team.

Coaches can help their players recognize this fact too, for it is critical that they understand the importance of being there. During practices, work outs, and meetings, coaches must teach their players that reliance is only built by showing up all the time.

In fact, if a coach favors a player who has neglected practices and workouts, those who have been devoted to the team will take notice and feel a sense of injustice.

The next element to building trust with your team is to have your actions match your words.

Players will learn that they can rely on you if your words match your actions.

A coach who says that every player on the team is valuable, proves it by coaching every player with the same level of effort regardless if the player is a starter or substitute.

When coaches focus only on the best players on a team, it sends a clear message to the other teammates that they are not as valuable to the team regardless of what the coach said about all players being critical to the group.

A trustworthy person cannot be a hypocrite.

There will be times, however, when even the best coach will not be able to live up to the standard of having his words match his actions. When it occurs, players will continue to trust you if you own up to your shortcomings, apologize to the team, and make an effort to change.

Building trust with your team will be critical to establishing team chemistry.

By showing up and having your words match your actions, you will be well on your way to earning the trust of your team.

By Buck Roggeman, President of TCCC

Great captains are not born they are built.

One of our great responsibilities as coaches is to teach our older players how to be good role models for the younger ones. Whether your veteran players know it or not, the younger athletes are watching every move they make.

As their coach, you might be telling the younger players what it means to be an athlete in your program, but it is your older players who are actually showing them – and if years of coaching have proven anything to us, it’s that actions speak much louder than words.

Here are some tips for building great captains.

Make them aware they are role models – Until they are adults, most athletes of any age have no idea that younger people look up to them.

However, if you take a high school athlete back to her freshman year in high school, she will be able to remember her first days on campus. She will recall how intimidating high school felt and how she looked at the older kids for how to dress, where to hang out, what jokes were funny – basically, how to be a high school student.

Once they remember this feeling, they will understand what it means to be a role model.

What they say must match what they do – All leaders understand the importance of not simply talking the talk, but walking the walk. A player cannot be an effective leader if his actions do not match his words.

The coaches then have to model this trait for their captains. Coaches whose actions match their words are excellent examples for the players to follow. Your team will begin to imitate you, so make sure that you are the person you want the players to be.

Allow them to do some coaching – When I was coaching line play in football, we spent plenty of practice time hitting the five-man sled. By the time the players were seniors, they had heard my instructions enough times, that they were ingrained in their memories – keep a wide base, take short steps, strike with elbows in thumbs up, etc.

Eventually, I learned the value of using the players as coaches for each other. Instead of me concentrating on one or two players’ technique, we could have five players watching five other players and coaching them.

This gave the player coaches a feeling of expertise and a sense of responsibility for the performance of the younger players. The younger players felt validated by the seniors and suddenly we were building camaraderie while pounding the five-man sled.

Bring them to Captains Day – Transformational Coaches Central Coast will hold three Captains Day trainings this year. We feed the players lunch at noon and teach them what it means to be a leader during practice, during games, around school and around town.

The high school athletes – boys and girls – get a chance to talk with each other before they will compete with each other, effectively dismantling some of the walls that divide our local communities.

The fall sports Captains Day will be Saturday, Aug. 24, at Salinas High School.

We hope you will help take this opportunity to build quality captains in your program.

The Value of Time

By Buck Roggeman, President of TCCC

If you coach any sport for a while, you eventually discover that you learn more from your players than you could ever teach to them.

One of my greatest teachers was a player named Riley Eagle McDowell.

Riley was a starting corner back and shared time at running back on the varsity football team when he was a junior. I could always count on Riley to know his assignment and play his heart out. You can’t ask any more from a player than his very best, and Riley gave it to his team on the football field.

During the final regular season game of his junior year, Riley played through a sore hip and scored what proved to be the decisive touchdown in a 28-27 victory over our rivals.

The season ended and like a lot players at that time of year, Riley started to feel sick. The only difference was that Riley could not seem to shake the run down feeling and the pain in his hip.

It dragged on for a couple of weeks when the doctor ordered a blood test.

The results returned, and at the age of 18, Riley discovered that his body was riddled with malignant tumors. The pain in his hip was symptomatic of numerous growths. The cat scan revealed spots along his spine and in his ribs. They even reached into his skull.

I was his English teacher, his physical education teacher, and his coach, but in the two years that followed, Riley taught me more about cancer than I ever wanted to know.

There were extended absences from school for savage rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. I saw him endure the loss of his hair, loss of his body mass, loss of his taste, and still he battled.

When Riley’s senior football season arrived, he drove 90 minutes to Stanford Hospital where the chemo dripped into a permanent port in his chest because it would have been too hard on his arteries to keep sticking new holes in his arms.

The team, the school, the community rallied around Riley throughout his fight. His parents welcomed Riley’s friends into the house every Saturday where the boys watched college football from noon until night.

I showed Riley how to break down an opponent’s video tape, and he began studying our rival, charting all of their plays. When we met in the season finale, Riley made wrist bands for our defense with reminders of their tendencies, and we put forth one of our greatest efforts of the season.  The whole time, Riley cheered them on, wearing a scarlet beanie to keep his hairless head warm, yelling until he lost his voice, every bit the warrior we knew him to be.

As Spring rolled around, Riley’s scans showed his body to be tumor free. He prepared to enroll at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He went to the doctor for one last clearance a week before he was scheduled to leave.

And it was back.

This time, the treatment would only be able to slow the inevitable, which remained unspeakable to those of us who had grown to love him. The timeline read four to six months.

None of us truly know what we would do if given a finite amount of time to live until we are placed in that situation.

Riley faced that limit, and here’s what he chose to do.

After taking a couple of days to deal with the news, Riley walked into my classroom and asked if he could help coach the defensive backs on our team. Time was the most precious of commodities in Riley’s life, and he decided to spend much of that time with our team.

He did not go through the motions of being a coach. Riley coached.

He worked on footwork, reads, and ball skills with his players every day that he was able to be on the field. The high point of the season – and the greatest memory that I have as a coach – came when Riley took over my role as head coach. He gave the pregame speech and made every call as our defensive coordinator.

We won the game and Riley finished his head coaching career a perfect 1-0.

The greatest lesson that Riley Eagle McDowell taught me and everyone associated with our community that year is that the most important gift we have to give other human beings is the gift of our time.

How we choose to spend our time reflects who or what we love. That one act of volition – how will I spend my time? – says more about what we value in life than anything else.

It’s a lesson I’ll take with me for the rest of my life and try my best to impart to as many people as I possibly can.

By Buck Roggeman, President of TCCC

Nothing makes a stronger case for the powerful impact of sports than our memories of when we played.

They are encoded in our minds and their staying power is forever.

Without the help of a Google search, I can’t remember who won the Super Bowl in 2010 or the World Series four years ago, but I sure remember my first baseball coach.

It was Mr. Nichols.

I played on a team called the A’s in second grade, and I am not sure I’ll ever recreate the thrill I felt when I was handed my first uniform.

The guy who gave it to me – Mr. Nichols.

He had wavy brown hair, a soft voice and the patience to manage a ball club full of Indiana bred 8-year-old boys of varying ability.

We played at a field built by the West Lafayette Fraternal Order of Police – the older kids called the field “Fop,” so we did too.  There was a dedicated retired cop who groomed the field, lights you could see from blocks away and bugs thick as a picnic blanket on a summer night.

Although many of us are devoted to following our favorite teams or players, no fantasy league will ever approach the power of the memories generated from our own experience in sports.  The industrial professional sports machine will continue to churn out merchandise, highlights and a litany of statistics to distract us from our lives, but what lasts forever are those visions engraved in our souls on fields from our youth – guided by guys like Mr. Nichols.

The next time you watch a team celebrate a professional sports championship realize that you are watching the greatest team on the planet at that moment. Then pause to recognize that their accomplishment will disappear into oblivion for most people.

It’s the relationships that are forged in sports that are enduring. They obtain their permanence through the full body nature of sports. The effort involves all of our senses. We feel the strain of our muscles, smell the field on game day, taste a mouthful of dirt on a head first slide, hear the zip of fastball popping to a stop in a catcher’s mitt, and squint our eyes into the glare of the sun.

It is the perfect classroom for teaching lessons about life by instructors whose curriculum echoes into tomorrow.

And the people who are at the front of this perfect classroom are coaches like you and me and, of course, Mr. Nichols.

By Buck Roggeman

You have heard about being a transformational coach either through a speech or something you read.

You recognize that you want to serve your athletes to help them develop into better people.

The only problem is you are not sure how to begin.

Here are six steps to help you.

1.       Start now.  The best time to begin serving your players rather than having them serve you is right now. Once you change your mindset and begin seeing every practice, every interaction with a member of your team as an opportunity to make a lasting impression, you will be conscious of the power of your platform to impact lives as a coach. This awareness alone will make a big difference.

2.      Read the Book. If you have not done so already, read InSideOut Coacing: How Sports can Transform Lives by Joe Ehrmann. The book is an ideal prescription for running a sports program that can change the world for good. The message is applicable to all sports, at all levels for men’s and women’s teams.

3.      Answer the Five Questions. Ehrmann emphasizes five questions that you should answer as part of an introspective journey to prepare for coaching. Why do I coach? Why do I coach the way that I do? What does it feel like to be coached by me? Is my coaching worth imitating? What do I want to accomplish by coaching? Once you have contemplated these questions and arrived at clear answers, you will define your purpose for coaching and everything you do will be rooted in that purpose.

4.      Get a partner. Just like it is easier to work out with a partner, it is easier to be a transformational coach if you do not feel like you are alone. Begin spreading the word to coaches around you and bouncing ideas off of each other. The beauty about the techniques that comprise transformational coaching is that they have nothing to do with strategy, so you do not have to be protective of your best ideas. You can share these with your colleagues and use their ideas to improve the sports experience for athletes throughout your region.

5.      Get your leadership on board. Talk to the leadership of your school or sports league about transformational coaching and encourage them to read InSideOut Coaching. Very few leaders will read about the program and decide that it is not the way to go. Most will be grateful that you brought it to them. More importantly, they will be able to assist you in implementing a transformational approach for your team and the other teams associated with your league.

6.      Use the available resources. There are other coaches already taking this approach to leading athletes in your region. On the Central Coast, you can always contact us at tcmc100@gmail.com . You can also find outstanding codes of conduct for players, parents and coaches and many other resources at Ehrmann’s website http://www.coachforamerica.com/free-downloads .

7.      Attend our events. Transformational Coaches Central Coast holds numerous events throughout the year. Stay in contact with us, so you know about them. Our next event will be Captains Day on Saturday, Aug. 24, at Salinas High School from noon-2 p.m. We invite local high school coaches to bring their team leaders from fall sports to learn what it means to be a good leader during practice, during games, around school, and around town. The players love it and we reinforce many of the messages you send to players every day. You will also meet a number of other coaches who realize the importance of building quality men and women through sports.

The most important point is to begin right now. You will best learn how to be a transformational coach by actually being one.

By Buck Roggeman

Love.

The word is a difficult one for many men to say, but it has never been that hard for me.

I had pretty good training after all. From the time I was a baby until I left my home for college, my parents, Tom and Florence, always told me they loved me before I went to bed.

Always. Without exception.

Even Dad with his cannon ball biceps and drill sergeant voice gave all five of us kids a kiss and said, “I love you,” before we called it a night.

So why was it so hard for me to tell our players that I loved them?

We were spending hours together in practice and in meetings watching game tape.

We cheered on our teammates from the sidelines during games. I watched with pride when they were digging deep on a final set of sprints, whispering encouragement to each other through desperate gasps of air.

We were loyal to each other, promising to stay by each other’s side no matter how bleak a game became and no matter what people said to tear us apart.

Time, support, sacrifice, and loyalty – many couples would envy these characteristics in a marriage.

Yet I still never told a team I loved them.

That’s why it made such an impression when I read a passage from Season of Life by Jeffrey Marx. In the book, he describes how Joe Ehrmann broke a football huddle at Gilman Prep by calling out to the players, “What’s our job?” The players responded, “To love us.”

Ehrmann called out again, “What’s your job?”

“To love each other,” the players responded.

Love is a pretty heavy word and here it was being tossed around on the football field with the same frequency that most teams used other less attractive four-letter words.

In fact, the word love can be so heavy that I reserved it only for use with my family. Somehow, I had the misconception that its meaning would be cheapened the more I used it.

Boy, was I wrong.

Reading about Ehrmann’s coaching philosophy freed me up to tell our players something I already knew in my heart and in my soul – I loved them. And it was all right to tell them.

Soon, it became easier to share those words with our players, and strangely enough, they began telling me that they loved me too.

Most importantly, it helped identify why I was coaching. I was helping these young men, and myself, learn what it meant to love another person through our actions and in our words. We recognized that it was safe for us to dedicate ourselves to each other because our attachment was built with love. Our time together would forever be defined this way.

My only regret is that I didn’t say it sooner.

By Buck Roggeman

Do not underestimate the power in the room.

More than 100 coaches gathered at the Boys & Girls Club in Salinas to study how they can affect change in our society by using athletic venues as a classroom to teach some of the most important lessons in life.

The impact could be felt from the heart of Salinas to the coastline of the Monterey Peninsula, up to Gilroy and back out to Aptos.

The power to change the world through transformational coaching rests in our hearts and in our minds. What remains to be determined is if we have the will to use it.

For the second time in less than 12 months Joe Ehrmann clearly defined the difference between transactional coaches and transformational coaches for residents of the Central Coast. He explained that transactional coaches work with players because they want something out of it for themselves. The players are there to fulfill the coach’s needs. The coach pays attention to the athletes, so they will win and make him look good or make him feel good.

Transformational coaches, on the other hand, coach to fulfill the needs of their players. They guide their players along the harrowing path of adolescence ascending into adulthood helping the player to make sense of all of the hazards presented along the way.

Simply put, transactional coaches want their players to serve them, while transformational coaches serve their players. Transactional coaches coach the player, transformational coaches coach the person.

TCCC will be here to inspire and support transformational coaches in their effort to build a better society by using sports as a co-curricular classroom to teach lessons that last a lifetime.

All of us remember moments from our youth that revolved around sports in vivid detail. Any activity that leaves such a powerful imprint on our psyche has the potential to impart knowledge that lasts forever.

Joe Ehrmann showed us how to ensure that the experiences our athletes take from sports lead to relationships built on love and a focus on serving those around us.

We are teachers bearing the most important lessons in the most powerful classroom in the world.

Let’s use the power wisely.

Let’s realize that we hold in our trust the power to change the world for good.

Don’t you dare underestimate the power in that room.