Five summer training principles

This is the week that we really see what it takes to be the best in the country. The Junior and Cadet Nationals in Fargo are running full force now and you can see the power of summer wrestling. Almost every college coach in the country will be there and they will be taking notes looking at what prospects will meet their future needs.
If you ever want to wrestle in college this one tournament can get you a huge amount of exposure!
With that here are 5 important tips for summer training.
1. Do something - Running is better then just watching TV, running and lifting is even better, wrestling in local tournaments is better then not putting on your wrestling shoes for months. The key here is that you have to do something. You may not be able to go to Fargo but that doesn't mean you should do nothing.
2. Find the best coaching - Get into the rooms of the best wrestling coaches you can find. More then likely they are willing to help you so take advantage of it.
3. Camps are great but only if you bring what you learn back into your room and use it!
4. Don't just go through the motions - Be intense and work hard!
5. Hydrate - It is hot out there! Drink water to stay sharp.
OK Get out there and get at it!

I will update a few more times this week, now that we have a break from camp I will have some more free time!

Team Building

I had a great weekend in case any of you were wondering! I was very lucky to be able to be in one of my friends weddings. I flew out late Friday night and was in Columbus for less than 24 hours but I made the trip because as busy as things are here I know very well that he would do anything he could to be at my wedding and that is something that none of us should take for granted.
It was also an interesting event because I had the chance to spend some time catching up with some of my old teammates. These are guys that I spent hours and hours traveling around the country on a bus with and guys that I learned so much from. As a coach one of the things that I hope to achieve with our guys is that they are passionate about what we are doing. This passion means that they need to be passionate about the team and working with each other towards the team’s goals.
I know this is wrestling and you can never take a back seat to anyone and that is not what I am talking about. I want my guys to enjoy the wrestling experience so much that they find themselves coming into the wrestling room and hanging out.
I will be honest so much of what I have learned about wrestling comes from being a mat rat and just going to as many open mats as I could find. It was never easy to go alone or to call the coach and ask if I could come but having friends there always made it easier.
I really hope that over time I am helping the guys become better wrestlers but more importantly I hope they are becoming better men and building relationships that will serve them in the future.
So with that said... Here are five team building tips.

1. Set goals – The head coach is the one steering the team and almost always should be but letting the team have the chance to add or help shape the teams goals is a great way to get a buy in from many of your athletes.
If the head coach decides he wants the wrestlers to do 10 hours of community service as a team then letting the guys decide what charity to work with is a great way to allow them to express their interests and pick something that they will enjoy, not just go with the flow.

2. Goof off at the right time! - If you go over to the FlowCast site you can see a video of the Missouri wrestlers warming up. They are dancing and laughing and acting fairly goofy some coaches would not like this but if you ever are around the Mizzou guys they are very tight and being free to be themselves around each other is part of that. As soon as warm ups are over the guys are ready for business and get after it.

3. Include everyone – You are always going to have a number of personality types. Some will be extraverted, some introverted, and some will be different every five minutes. Don’t let your team develop outcasts. As a coach watch and when you see someone who is withdrawn find a way for the entire team to reach out to them. They may be doing a move particularly well or they may be great at something that you notice that no one else has. Whatever it is… Make sure they are sharing it.

4. Encourage Communications – This is a big one and good or bad communications can make or break a team. Make sure your guys have the ability to communicate with each other and you. Make sure they are not afraid to come and talk to you. If you put yourself up on such a pedestal that you cannot be reached then how will you know that one of your wrestlers is falling behind in school as his parents go through a divorce? If you are there to reach out to him and the team is there to support him you can be a steadying force in turbulence. But, you have to be able to communicate.

5. Encourage support – You should use your wrestlers as a resource off the mat. If one of your wrestlers is struggling in class and another is doing well in the same subject hook them up together and let them work together. This will foster mentorship and also keep grades up. I am a big fan of killing two birds with one stone.

Five Leadership Tips for Coaches

1. Don’t just train your wrestlers. Train your assistants - Some coaches may not think about this, some may not want to teach someone all their secrets but if you don’t train your assistants you will never be on the same page. If you are not all pulling in the same direction you will not get to your goals as quickly or you may have some dissention in the ranks.

You also are not helping the sport or your assistants grow. So many coaches guard their secrets tightly but in the end that is not helping share the knowledge that helps people achieve their dreams. Let go of the ego and train your assistants to be able to be a head coach.

As Tom Ryan says in elite wrestling “If something happens to me they may need to step in at a moments notice” You may not be able to have each assistant have his hand into everything you do but if you have three you could have one assistant helping with administration, one with practice, and one with academics or however you want to delegate it.

2.) Realize that it all begins and ends with the coach -. You are the leader and the guys look to you to lead. If you win chances are you wont get as much credit as you feel you deserve, if you lose you will think you are getting more blame then you deserve, No matter what the situation is it is your job to figure out how to improve there.

This is not to say that institutional and other factors cannot affect your win / lose record. Some D1 teams have 9.9 scholarships, some have only 2. I would never expect a 2 scholarship team to be able to do what Minnesota does but if you are working hard and bringing in good people your team will improve and your guys will be better people for being on the team. As the famous sign on Harry Truman’s desk said “The Buck Stops Here”.

3.) Be available and visible – In some circles this is called management by walking around. What this means to a coach is a great deal different then to a CEO. An executive can hide behind his office walls but as a leader a coach needs to get out of the gym. He needs to build relationships with people outside of the athletic complex and he needs to be involved in the campus community on the other side of that you need to be visible to your athletes. Standing in a corner and yelling at a wrestler for something in practice is not as effective of taking the time to work with him and break down what is going on. If you yell in practice at a kid for not focusing it could be for hundreds of reasons. Find out why, maybe he is dealing with something like the death of a family member, maybe he is sick, and maybe he just needs pushed.

4.) Hold yourself to a high standard of conduct - Always remember you are in a position of trust. Parents, administrators, the community and others are trusting you with their children. There will be times when you will in effect act as the athlete’s guardian, advisor, and mentor. This is a very heavy responsibility, it does not mean that coaching is all business or fun but it does mean that you will need to hold yourself to a higher level of accountability.

5.) Don’t ask your wrestlers to do something you haven’t done or wouldn’t do. Over time you will not be able to do everything in practice that the athletes do. We all slow down a step. I painfully coming to this reality as training is harder for me now than it was 10 years ago. Small injuries that took no time to heal before are taking more time and there are times that I need to watch practice not participate. That is the reality of it but I have done it and I will roll with the guys as much as I can.

Woody Hayes has said that one of the greatest lessons he learned from his mother was that you don’t tell people to go somewhere, you meet them there. If you have study tables, move mats, anything along those lines a coach needs to be part of this. He may not have to stay all the time but he needs to “meet the athletes there” If you have a space where you can work on recruiting while you supervise I have found this is a great tool. If you are struggling for what to talk to the recruit about you have part of your program to talk about in front of you. You can talk about the guy’s majors, the work they are doing, the exciting things going on in the program. The key is if you want them to take things seriously and be there then you need to take them seriously and be there as well.

Summer Eating

Stack Magazine has a great article up at the moment on summer eating. It is put together by James Harris, the sports nutrition coordinator for the University of Nebraska - Lincoln. Food is so important because that is how we get the fuel to keep us going.
I recently had the pleasure to work coach McGovern's camp at Dubuque and when getting interviewed by FloWrestling he retold a story of how he learned to eat so he could make weight.
The story was that he and Tom Ryan were cutting weight for a tournament and were 11 pounds up. He wanted to just workout and not eat but Tom Ryan on the other hand went and had breakfast so that he would have the energy to make weight.
There is no doubt about it making weight is not fun. The new rules are helping to control this but as a coach what I see being more important than anything is that you feel good when you compete (or at least the best you can). Putting energy in so you can take the weight off is much more important than having to work twice as hard because you are running on empty.

One tip from the article relates to pre and post workout eating. I went through a period were I got up and the first thing I did every morning was run. On hot days in the Florida summer I would never make it all the way through my five miles. About mile 3 I would be done and have to walk for a while before I could start again.

I talked to a friend about this and I told him I thought I was getting to dehydrated and he told me that would only be part of a problem. The larger issue being that my body was having to try and burn stored fat, which meant it had to start converting the fat and go through a huge process. The heat didn't help but he told me to start eating a power bar before I went to run. Eating these 30 minutes before I left made things a lot easier on me.
Yes, as wrestlers there are times that we have to get ourselves close to the breaking point just so we know how to do it but, in the summer, when I am running to keep my conditioning up and to stay healthy is not the time to break yourself. Save that for the practice room.

"Thirty to 45 minutes before you hit the weight room, grab a 300-calorie pre-workout snack to give your muscles extra energy to burn. To aid recovery, within 20 minutes of training, nosh on a post-workout snack that’s a moderate combo of protein and carbs. Besides replenishing lost energy, it will prepare your body for the next workout."

Check out the article here.
http://www.stackmag.com/TheIssue/ArticleDraw/4423

For more on diet check out that section on CarrWrestling.com

Recruiting Literature Made Easy

Recruiting Material Made Easy

and easily….

I know most coaches are always looking for materials to share with recruits and promte their teams and schools. They complain that a media guide, a few cards, and an admissions brochure are not enough.

I agree that those are certainly not enough but the truth is that colleges are producing tons of recruiting information daily. Most have a staff of marketing, public relations, and graphic design pros. These guys are constantly turning out materials for admissions, advancement, fundraising, student life, athletics and other departments. You as a coach have to know what is happening on your campus and you need to have a relationship with these people. Talk to them, invite them to meets, let them know you are interested in their work, and you would be interested in seeing anything that you could easily adapt to help you promote the school and team.

Why? Because the materials they are producing can easily be tailored to fit your needs in recruiting.. Sometimes they are fillers, in magazines and sometimes they are full pamphlets but they all contain little pieces of information that you can use.

I am going to share some examples of what we have used this year.

I first want to say that as I wrote in the post on recruiting letters (link here) at the start of the recruiting relationship you have to always have a reason or purpose for a communication. These materials can be a reason.

At Central we have a large exercise science program, because of this we have a great deal of alumni working in sports. Exercise science is also a popular major among athletes! I think this is a huge competitive advantage for the team as we look at recruiting. There are other schools in the state with lower tuition, better wrestling teams (we will get that changed), and more students. None of those schools have 100% placement into graduate programs. CENTRAL DOES! I’m not going to put down other schools but Central has a faculty in exercise science that has dedicated itself to being. Because of this we have an amazing alumni base that is involved in athletics at all levels.

We have an alum that has become a trainer for the Green Bay Packers. He got that job because of an internship arranged through the faculty at Central. Our alumni publications featured him in an article and it generated a lot of interest from the student athletes who saw it. The problem is that not as many saw that article as we would have liked. I got in touch with our publications department and asked them if they could make a PDF of the two page spread. (See it here)

With some minor adaptations such as changing the font and changing some graphics to a smaller resolution we got a great piece of material. Now, if I talk to a recruit that expresses an interest in athletic training I can either print the article or e-mail it to him with a note in the margin or email as a follow up. If I email it I try to make sure I include some bullet points to reinforce the articles ideas.

This also gives me a reason to call them later on and see if they have any questions for me about the program or the college. I was not sure if kids would actually read it but as it turns out, they usually skim it, and almost always read the bullet points. I have called kids and had them ask me to wait for a minute as they find the article because they have written questions on the paper.

• Speaking of bullet points!

I don’t know how your all campus e-mail system works but I am constantly bombarded with e-mail congratulating people on retiring, announcing events, and promoting on campus events. We also have a web site that highlights these events and other things going on. You can always pull from these sights and publications. I would suggest that you start a running document on your computer that you cut and paste facts into. This will give you taking points and in time you can create your own fact sheets. Using some information from admissions we created this facts sheet that we can show recruits on their visits to highlight our strengths.

If you are sending out hand written notes you can drop some of these in there as reinforcing points or make sure to reference them in phone conversations. I have found these to be valuable with recruits but even more so with parents.

You can check out our latest edition here.

The point is that colleges are always producing promotional material. Coaches need to have a relationship with the department doing the work and keep an eye open. With a little computer work you can tailor it to your needs and use it to promote your team.

As J. Robinson would say, “If you are not responsible for the promotion of your team, who is”?

The points

· Keep an eye on the publications your school is producing. Athletes have a life outside of competition and if you miss the good things they are doing off the mat, you are missing a chance to reward them for great achievements and to promote your program and school.

o If you have an athlete get a DUI you are going to hear about it from the press on the other side of that the world should hear about it when one of your student athletes does something positive. For every DUI arrest happening in college athletics there are at least one hundred great things. Check out this article on Central Baseball player Adam Durfield. We made 2 versions. The first is just a copy from an alumni magazine and we put on wrestling letterhead. ( 1 )( 2) He may not be a wrestler but, any student at Central has the opportunity to do what he has. Every college has similar events occurring. Keep an eye out for them.

· Faculty, student, and alumni spotlight sections can allow you to illustrate how people from your school are achieving great things and a prospect could follow in their footsteps.

· Use bullet points and facts and figures. People almost always scan something first and then turn around and read the article in full if they are interested.

· Make sure you are patient and friendly with promotional and marketing staff. A lot of times they work behind the scenes so if you show up making demands and don’t say thank you they may resist helping you more than they have to. You may have to start out with just a photo copy but I have never had anyone say no to a request to help with this stuff.

· Learn some basic computer skills so you can quickly adapt these to your needs. For some projects you may need the help of a pro but anyone that can use Microsoft word can easily create documents to highlight their programs.

See also

· Making a PDF with PDF creator

· On recruiting letters

· Using E-mail in recruiting

· Media Guide 101