The Shillingford
Jen Shillingford and Katie Merrill, courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Athletics
On January 30, 2011, one of our writers, Ellen Staurowsky, wrote an entry entitled Leading With Personality: Notes from the Centennial Conference Snell-Shillingford Symposium
The symposium took place at Haverford College this past winter and was co-directed by Bryn Mawr’s senior woman administrator and head lacrosse coach. A couple of Bryn Mawr student-athletes attended the symposium where they networked with female coach mentors and learned about Title IX, careers in coaching, etc. Katie Merrill, a volleyball player who graduated from Bryn Mawr this past Saturday, wrote about her experience in an article on the athletics website:
“Prior to attending the Symposium I had already thought of coaching as something I would enjoy doing, but after the symposium, I felt much more informed as to how I can make coaching a part of my life. Most if not all of the stories I heard that weekend gave me the chance to learn about the experiences of other coaches and what they had to do to get where they are and provided great advice for what I can do to one day be in their shoes.”
On Tuesday, May 1st, I attended the annual Bryn Mawr College Athletics’ banquet where team awards and various other accolades are given to the student-athletes and teams. One of the largest awards is given in honor of Jenepher Shillingford, former Director of Athletics and head field hockey coach at Bryn Mawr. “The Shillingford is presented to a member of the senior class who has demonstrated, throughout her four years: athletic excellence, sportsmanship and leadership.” The award was presented to Katie Merrill by Jen Shillingford herself! Katie’s well-rounded skills and achievements not only embody “The Shillingford,” they are also conducive to coaching. In fact, she is entering a graduate-assistantship position to become a volleyball coach. I don’t know her personally (and only learned these details at the athletics banquet), yet I can’t help but imagine how influential the Snell-Shillingford Symposium must have been in her decision to pursue a career in coaching. I was certainly pleased to hear this news as she was presented the award, and I look forward to seeing how many more coaches the symposium – and those like it – will foster.
The Real Women of Coaching – Episode #3 – Cindy Griffin
Take a few minutes to view the final episode highlighting Cindy Griffin at St. Joseph’s University. Today she shares with us her views on mentorship and its role in developing women as coaches.
Please pass this link along and share view Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, or wherever you share with other coaches!
Looking forward to new technology
I’ve been waiting for the news that I received this week for over a year. You see, a year ago the school where I teach launched our iPad Pilot Program. This program gave participating teachers and students iPads to use in their classrooms to see if teaching with this technology could change the way in which students and teachers learn and approach various aspects of education. After watching others all year use their iPads for both teaching applications and everyday tasks such as e-mailing and taking photos, I found out that my iPad 3 has now arrived and will be in my hands next week.
Immediately after I heard this news I began to think of all the benefits having an iPad 3 will bring to me in my athletic responsibilities. No longer will I need to walk to a computer to send an e-mail while I’m out lining a field; no longer will I have to depend on having a clipboard to carry documents to games; no longer will I need a printer to distribute plays to my athletes; no longer will I need to worry about keeping up with papers listing uniform and warm-up numbers, game day checklists, etc. Besides being freed from laptops, printers, and paper, the iPad will help me to be a better coach. For instance, I can video my athletes’ tennis serves to help demonstrate what they are doing right and what is going wrong. I’ve found that showing an athlete a picture or a video can make a huge difference in modifying or correcting a technique. Additionally, I am excited that I will be able to draw plays for basketball and field hockey using an app that will be easier for my athletes to understand, and I can immediately e-mail them to my team to review and ask questions. Lastly, I am excited about the challenges that having an iPad will bring to me as a coach. It will push me to find ways in which I can use this new technology daily in practice. It will also allow me to find videos and other materials online to share with my athletes to better them in areas such as technique, focus/concentration, mental toughness, etc.
As you can see these are only a few of my initial thoughts, and I’m sure that once I get the iPad in my hands and spend some time with it many more benefits will be discovered. While I’m sure I will miss my good old clipboard and playbook, I am excited to see what I can do with this new technology. I also look forward to seeing how my athletes respond to using iPads as well. Many of them currently use them in their academic classes and have seen great success, so I’m looking forward to seeing this trend continue in athletics as well. So, to all of you out there, if you have any experience using an iPad or other tablet in coaching please let me know. I’d love to hear how you use this technology in coaching, and if you are interested I’ll be happy to share my experiences as I learn to use it as well!
Good Is The Enemy Of Great: How Perfectionism Is Killing Your Team
It’s amazing that people admit to being perfectionists. To me, it’s a disorder, not unlike obsessive-compulsive disorder. And like obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism messes you up. It also messes up the people around you, because perfectionists lose perspective as they get more and more mired in details. –bnet.com
Most sports don’t require perfection from their participants, so where does this idea of being perfect come from and how can we get rid of it? I was over at bnet.com reading a great article titled, “Perfectionism Is A Disease. Here’s How To Beat It”, when it hit me that many times our athletes are saddled with this problem and need to be freed of it. So let’s look at how we can help our teams understand that continual improvement, not perfection, is the goal.
**Three ways to combat perfectionism on our teams**
We learn through our mistakes. “If we don’t want anyone to know we make mistakes, which is how perfectionists tend to behave, we are actually hiding our true selves.” As coaches, we’ve got to be sure to create a practice environment conducive to making mistakes. After all, if they can’t make mistakes in practice, where can they make them? If they’re going to get better, they’re going to have to test their limits and that will involve making mistakes. I talk about this very thing in my post, 3 Reasons Why Making Mistakes Is Vital To Your Team’s Success. I wonder if this is what happens to those “potential” players who never seem to be as good as advertised…
Set your sights on being a hard worker, not perfect. “A lot of times perfectionism is a way to avoid focusing on goals.” In my post, So You Want To Be An Excellent Coach?, I talk about the theory that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to gain expertise in a field. What that means for our athletes is that they just need to put in the time and be committed to being good. It means that when they’re willing to work on the skill that is lacking, time and elbow grease will reap rewards. This perspective takes every excuse away. There’s no more, “well, Susie is just a better athlete than me”, but rather, “Susie was just willing to work harder than me.” And that’s not an excuse, that’s just sad.
Create a super teamy team. “Teams do better work when everyone on the team likes everyone else.” Getting along goes a long way to helping people to accept their team roles, creating great team chemistry, and smoothing out the rough edges of a season. The cornerstones of John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success are hard work and enthusiasm and the other three blocks that make up the base are: friendship, loyalty, and cooperation. The whole idea of the Pyramid is that the things that helped Wooden’s teams win ten national championships in twelve years are represented on the Pyramid…with the most essential items at the bottom to make up the foundation. I wrote about it in my post, How Watching Toy Story 3 Can Teach The Essentials Of Teamwork.
Let’s all agree to battle the perfection infestation by creating coaching philosophies and environments that help our athletes get better and challenge themselves.
You can check out more of my writing at www.coachdawnwrites.com. You can follow me on Twitter @CoachDawnWrites and Facebook so that we can connect and talk coaching.
Junior Seau’s Tragedy–How Ice Hockey Can Learn From This–Concussion Alert!
Chris Nowinski Former Harvard Football Player and WWF Entertainer
Junior Seau’s tragedy put an exclamation point on what I was already thinking as I reflected upon the presentation at the recent American Hockey Coaches Convention. I am speaking about the buzz word in sport right now–CONCUSSIONS.
The Concussion Presentation by Chris Nowinski of the Sports Legacy Institute was informative, interesting, and from a personal perspective it really hit home for me. My daughter was diagnosed this year with post concussion syndrome. She is a junior on the Nobles Girls Hockey team; after being diagnosed she could not return to school and had to take a year off to rest her brain and recover from her injury.
Sports Illustratred Title IX Anniversary Edition
Hot off the presses, the May 2012 edition of Sports Illustrated highlights the 40th anniversary of Title IX. I received my copy in the mail yesterday and was excited to see that Title IX was featured on the cover, the center-fold, and had several articles and picture displays throughout this month’s issue (23 pages of coverage to be exact). I was a little concerned when I first saw the cover, because sometimes magazines can be notorious for leaving their cover story on the cover and devoting very little space on the inside for the actual article contents–but it looks as though the magnitude of Title IX didn’t allow that to happen this time around. It’s not only in print, as the online material is just as extensive and all articles are showcased in full, although I would highly recommend picking up a hard-copy (maybe it will be worth something when the 100th anniversary rolls around). SI’s Title IX at 40 coverage has acknowledged that there is still a struggle for gender equity. In order to touch upon this angle, but also recognize how far Title IX has come and the path it has forged to be where it is today, the stories and graphics in this edition thread a theme of focusing on the past, the present, and looking into the future.
What Women Leaders are Better at Than Men
I will never forget the pin I bought when I was in fourth grade at a fair by my house. It was light blue with big black lettering and read: “Anything Boys Can Do, Girls Can Do Better.” I couldn’t get the 50 cents out of my pocket quick enough to buy the pin that I swore was made just for me and I proudly stuck it front and center on my denim-washed jean jacket so that everyone would be able to read it and know that I was one of those girls who wasn’t going to be intimidated by boys. I’ve kept that pin over the years to remind myself that I – a women – can do anything a man can do…and do it better!
Of course today I don’t truly believe that we as women do everything better than men, but I do believe in that spirited mentality a young girl who knew her unique worth as a female. We as women are different in ways that make us better at some things than others and it’s important we take the time to recognize and celebrate these differences that make us better – especially when it comes to leadership and coaching. Far too often I hear women mention the things that actually make us better leaders as weakness or limitations. We don’t always fully appreciate what we as women can bring to the table, and instead of celebrating and exploiting these differences, we downplay or ignore them.
I recently came across a post by Dan Rockwell, a.k.a The Leadership Freak (http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/), that focused on “Where Women Leaders are Better than Men”. The post was an interesting compilation of input to a question he threw out there to his Facebook followers. The Leadership Freak asked the “Freaks” (as he calls them) that follow his Facebook page, “What are women leaders better at than men?”
Incidentally, over the past couple months, I have been asking myself that very same question. As I watched NCAA Tournament for both women’s and men’s basketball this past winter, I found myself paying less attention to the actual game and more attention to the coaches and their ability to lead – especially when the going got tough! At times, there were noticeable and distinct differences at how the women coaches responded to certain situations (before, during, in-between and after games) when compared to the men. It’s not to say one way was right and one was wrong, or one way was successful and another unsuccessful, just that while they were alike in some aspects, they were also noticeably different in others. Maybe it was that little fourth grader inside of me who thought she could do anything better than the boys, but I started to think about women and their innate differences and what makes them great leaders which in turn lead me to think about what qualities women possess that make them better leaders than men (and vice versa). I reflected back to myself as a young girl so confident that what made her a girl made her better. I thought to myself, now all these years later as a woman have I continued to fully embrace my innate differences that make me a strong leader?
I think it’s important to note here that in doing this comparison I by no means am trying to stereotype one gender or another, I’m just simply attempting to point out the unique and valuable differences that women possess which make them fantastic leaders and in turn successful coaches. The Leadership Freak hinted to this notion well in his post by saying: “Generalities and stereotypes that lock people in restrictive boxes belittle everyone. On the other hand, celebrating difference honors individuals and enhances organizations.” Well said.
So what exactly did those Facebook followers come up with in response to his question? Below is a list of answers:
- Knowing when there is no value in fighting.
- Understanding when someone just has a crummy day.
- Understanding the pressures that other women leaders face.
- Organization and multitasking.
- Compassion.
- *Empathy.
- Tenderness.
- Building consensus, supporting staff, sharing credit, and leading from the middle.
- Networking.
- Emotional Intelligence.
- *Listening
- *Smiling through the pain.
- Focusing on details.
- Mission focus and *tolerance.
- Transparency.
- Simplicity.
- Valuing people for who they are not just what they do.
- Building relationships that last.
- Creating an environment where mistakes are not just tolerated but seen as essential to growth.
Note: Items are listed in the order they were posted on Facebook. An asterisk indicates that item was mentioned more than once.
The Leadership Freak used spot #20 on the list in his post to ask his readers: “What can you add, amplify, or illustrate?” I’d like to ask the same of all the Women in Coaching readers… use the comments section below to add to the list and share your thoughts with us!
Since I like to end each of my posts with a quote, I can’t help but share the slogan I saw on the t-shirt of a young lacrosse player recently during my recruiting travels. She reminded me of myself at that age with my treasured blue pin I bought at the fair. Her t-shirt read “Some girls chase boys, I pass them”. Something tells me that young girl will grow up to be a successful woman leader.
Jennifer Valore, Assistant Women’s Lacrosse Coach, University of Michigan, valore@umich.edu. Follow me on Twitter: jvalore
