“What allows you to perform at your peak in the season?” mental performance coach Julian Coffman asked a room full of America’s top developmental skiers last summer. “Confidence,” one of the athletes offers. “And where does that confidence come from?” Julian counters. “From trusting in your preparation and in your summer training,” the athlete replies. Read more
After several months of looking at training methods and exercises, for the March theme we focused instead on culture. The role of culture in training cannot be denied, but while we acknowledge its importance, we rarely look at the topic in much depth. We hoped to change that this month by bringing together new input from John Pryor, Chris Gallagher, Vern Gambetta, Jonathan Marcus, Steve Myrland, Nick Hill, Craig Pickering, Nick Garcia, Clay Erro and more top coaches. Links to all the new resources, as well as some greatest hits on the topic from our archives, are included below. In reviewing all the new material again last weekend, I also pulled together a few key points from a month of discussing culture. Read more
If you want to learn about team culture you can look at examples from some of the most successful professional teams in the world. Or you can walk down to you local high school. Clay Erro is on example of that. You likely don’t know his name, but in nearly 40 years as a football and track coach in northern California he accumulated one of the top winning percentages of all time. And he did it through team culture. Read more
Culture has been a buzz word among coaches that has gained a lot of traction over the past year, but most discussions often just stick to slick slogans and anecdotes. That’s why we’ve chosen culture as the theme this month on HMMR Media. We’re going to present some new perspectives on the topic by bringing together in-depth discussions on what a strong culture can look like and how it is developed. We’ll have contributes coming up this month a half dozen coaches on the topic. But to set the tone for the month I wanted to help get rid of the idea that culture is one thing. Culture is not some formula that can be applied on your team to automatically improve results. Like all of training, it has to be tailored to the athletes and the environment. Read more
We might think of coaching as being different than leadership, but the simple fact is that good coaches are good leaders. Being a good leader allows coaches to get the most out of their athletes and makes their whole team more than a sum of its parts. On this episode of the podcast we what makes a good leader, discuss our latest readings on leadership, and share examples of good and bad leadership from our own experiences. Read more
For decades, Clay Erro led one of California’s most successful high school football teams. Behind the success and the strong culture was not a set of rules, but strong relationships. Cooperative endeavors require relationships to flourish, not rules. In this episode of the GAINcast, Erro explains his instruction manual for building a relationship-based team culture and how he put it into practice. Read more
Clay Erro is the former football coach at Enterprise High School in Redding California. He is the winningest football coach in Northern California history. We have been privileged to have Clay as a GAIN faculty member. More important than his success was his ability to teach young men to be responsible adults and citizens. His approach was unconventional with premium on relationships and teaching. Read more
You don’t build a team, your grow a team. It is not a mechanistic process, it is organic like growing a garden. Read more
Modern sports have a team of coaches behind each athlete. The support staff can add value to a team, but they can also detract from the team if not properly integrated. Physiologist Steve Ingham has served in a variety of senior national roles in the UK. Throughout a career of assisting world-class athletes he has learned how to build a performance team and how support coaches can best support athletes. On this week’s episode we discuss some lessons Ingham has learned in this area. Read more
Growing up just outside of Chicago in the 90’s meant professional “sports” and “team” were synonymous. We had the Bulls, Cubs, Bears and Blackhawks. The Bulls had one of, if not the, most iconic athlete of a generation in Michael Jordan. But what cemented Jordan as the greatest of all-time was not only the individual accolades, it was the six team championships he helped the Chicago Bulls win. Read more
