1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - Barry talks about what makes a great coach: May 19th, 10:25am

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

2 things that aren't talked about enoughAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Back to one-on-one with DP. Presented by Beatrice Bakeray on 93-7 The Ticket and the Ticketfm.com. Welcome back to one-on-one. Again, this hour brought you by Ambition Electric from Thank Joe Davis and his crew for their support in what we try to do here. Different sports conversations across the way. We're talking to Barry Thompson, football coach. And again, Barry's having a great week. One of his guys, Guy Myers, makes it.

to the roster of the New Jersey Generals. And it's the journey, because this is a guy with every detour, roadblock obstacle in the way, and he's found a way to do it, which tells me there's a way for Nebraska quarterbacks to be able to do this. If a guy from the college of Charleston can find his way into the professional leagues as a quarterback, there's a way for Nebraska quarterbacks. to make their way into these spaces.

And a lot of this is coaching. A lot of it is coaching. Because it's the ability to motivate people to move them into that space and then have that information to them. But we were talking about what makes a great coach. And there are two things that I don't think are talked about enough. I generally can tell if somebody's going to be a great coach by their curiosity.

if a coach is willing to expand himself, to open himself up and to be curious about what other people are doing have done or about what he can do, he or she can do better. Barry, how important is it this curiosity thing in coaching? It's everything. I'm going to mention the name that you and I kind of feel some kind of way about.

But early in my coaching career, I went to a Nike coach's, clinic and in the area that we were in there was a name that was associated with passing the football and um so i go to his presentation and to this day it was one of the most organized kind of logical understandable clear presentations that i saw of how he did his coach and i was really impressed. And I thought at that point, like, gosh, that's, he's nailed it, right? As far as how he does it and he can communicate to a bunch of strangers. This is how I do it. And this is why it makes perfect sense. And then after his presentation was over, there were people that went up to talk to him. And he talked to him

briefly, but they rearranged those big sliding things for the, you know, the next speaker. And so I looked at, and I went into sitting in the next room. And when I got there, the guy who present it was already there. And I went over to him and I said, coach, that was the best, I actually said, that was one the best presentations that I saw, what are you doing in here? And he says, I'm trying to learn. And in my coaching career, like little things like that are concentrate. And I said, that guy is right, doing what he did, presenting what he did.

And he's sitting over here from some guy he didn't even know. I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to sit here and take some notes too. But, yeah, that was a successful coach who did things a little bit differently, had some success. But there he was, and it was just the greatest example of what you're talking about. And he had a million things he could have been done, but he wanted to go right to the next, wanted to hear another guy talk about quarterback. And I thought he had covered everything about quarterbacking.

And he was sitting there learning to it. It is huge. It is huge because it's just, it just, hopefully a coach is at the, a good coach is at the point of his life where he realizes he doesn't know what he doesn't know. And then you, that, that, that alone, that, that, that understanding of yourself is really, for me, which kind of compels you or impels you or propels you, propels you, to, to go and look for, more. How can I do this better? How can this be done? Right? There's a little sticky situation there. I didn't think I handled it the best I could.

Right? The little self-evaluation. I could do that better. Here we were at these things. I do it on a constant basis. I, you know, I am unlike a lot of coaches in that I do coach every day. It's what I do for a living. And so when I find that

players having trouble taking an auditory command from me. I know the player's trying, right? I know he wants to be good if he's out there. So then I have to look at myself, like, what is it that is not getting across? How am I communicating? Or should I do that in a different order? Can I talk less, show more, those types of things?

I think it's a crucial part of being a good coach. I think a thing that you said also resonates heavily with me, and I know that it is actually how you operate is the organized part of it. The organized part of coaching gets lost. It gets lost, man. Yeah, it does. And it's funny.

We had some new receivers. And so when I come to the field each day, like this morning, I'm never quite sure how many receivers. I'm going to have, and I'm never quite sure about, well, the quarterbacks I'm more certain of. So today, for example, we had four quarterbacks. One was a new guy I hadn't worked with before, and we had a volume of receivers. So every day I come to the field, I got to be ready. Because the guys that are there, even though I may not know exactly what I got, I better have some things in my hand and in my head ready to make this work. Like I can't get on that field and stumble, though.

The guy's going Utah State's not coming back. The kid from Villanosa's not coming back. The guy's going to Maryland. He's not coming back, right? So it is the organization of what we do on the field with those guys that keeps bringing them back. The other day, I had a kid, guy, just one of the, he's like the second time he came around. He goes, you ever thought about coaching in college? And I knew what he met, right?

Yep. And he met that, hey, this is organized and this, this and that. it kind of feels like structure. The organization piece is everything. And in this coaching thing, when you talk about managing, when I talk about great manager of people, that's managing the organization as well. And the organization of that provides the structure

in which everybody's supposed to operate. And if he is a good leader, he will achieve what I call alignment, that everybody within that organization is pulling on the same rope at the same time in the same direction. From the equipment manager to the guy that empties the trash baskets at night, to the secretaries or the assistants that's sitting at the desk, that they're all pulling, they're all part of that vision. And that comes, right, part of that managing is that structure that you put down.

Those, we all often say, boundaries. right that you establish these boundaries you establishes standards and then one characteristic i do want to add is this coach better be great at identifying people who care you know you can recruit any way you want but you better recruit people who care about who they are how they represent themselves and and what they want to achieve right and you keep pulling those type of people into your orbit and all of a sudden things take off in the right direction. Barry, how important is it to find coaches and players who commit and care at the same level, the same way?

It's everything. Otherwise, that's what I'm saying, that your organizational structure will set the boundaries. Then it's up to the coach set the standards. and then what will happen is if you have people inside those boundaries that want to bang against the wall or want to step to your standards, what I found out is that they're going to be very uncomfortable. They're going to be very uncomfortable because they're going to feel alone. They won't have, you know, three or four people that they can go commiserate with, right? Because everybody else is about this business.

So that structure. the standards, and then being able to identify people who care, right? And so you can't control, for example. Let's say Nebraska was starting to be scratched, all right, and there was no players at all, right? So what are you going to do? Right. You got the facilities that's already taken care of. So how are you going to staff, right?

What type of people are you going to bring in to do everything that's required to run this program? That part you can control. right so that starts a momentum of its own now you bring in a recruit all their meeting is the same person the same person who's excited and say this is this is where we're going glad you can be a part of us you know hope you can get here you know that type of welcoming thing and then those people they're really good at identifying the other say hey that that doesn't look like coach what you were talking about All of a sudden the coach gets smarter because he's got all these people that understand what he wants and they want to do it. Right?

They want to do it. And you can, they'll weed themselves out. You know, we talked a long time ago. You put somebody in a situation and they don't love it like you do. Those additional requirements start to seem like chores and they start to eliminate themselves. Yeah. Right? They just do it on their own.

You know, Tony W. talks about the five, what was the Herb Brooks when he had the miracle on ice. He said if you give only 100%, you'll make my job easy. Yep. You know? Yep. Right. So that structure, any structure, it will make the people that aren't about it. It will make them extremely uncomfortable.

And they will start to eliminate themselves. Barry, we have this from the text line. Joe asked, do the five things change based on an age group? No, no. You guys are stuck on five. I'm still stuck on the vision, right? I'm stuck on a great manager of people, and I'm stuck on, you know, identifying people who care.

You take those three things, those three, right? And you can put that on a five-year-old soccer team, you know. Right, right. Because the manager of people on the five-year-old soccer team, you know, or it's right, because the manager of people on a five-year-old soccer team are the parents. Right? You got to manage them. If you don't manage them, you don't explain to the parents that this is what we're

doing, this is what we're about. Here's I expect you to behave, right? You know, here's lines of communications. Here's, you know, you need to let me coach the children. Here's why you need to, you know, you explain all that stuff, and then there'll be some parents to go away second. You know, and they'll go away. They really do.

They will go away. And all of a sudden, you've got this thing that people are really happy about and they enjoy it. And I can tell you from personal experience, it does lead the winning, but it doesn't win right away sometimes. Well, that right away, that urgency has different levels at different spaces. Right, right. But the guys that are good at it, they talk about the correct. They get more efficient at doing it. Oh, yeah.

So I'm going to brag about my brother now. Okay. My brother goes to Georgetown in the COVID year. He didn't even get to see his team because of the strict campus restrictions. Right. They don't have a field on campus. They have to travel, you know, 30, 40 minutes in the Bethesda and traffic to go play. Feels not in the best shape.

Great name, Shirley Povas. It feels not in the best shape. Right. And they won six games last year. So he says, I got to do better at that. So he started looking at different venues around D.C. and started connecting up with the community and so forth.

And they are fighting for the fourth place in the Big East this year. And they've set a lot of different records, home runs. They haven't had a winning season since 1985 and all that stuff. right to here's a guy who came in and had a vision and you know how this would work he assessed the people from that that losing year that weren't going to be with them and what he did was i'll tell a little story on him he told the guys at the end of the year not in the mean way he says what we did right here is not good enough this isn't georgetown baseball while i'm here he says, I'm bringing in 50 guys. For baseball teams, baseball people, they know that's a huge number. And the first day, I can't do the math.

I should have him explain it to you. But what he did is he had that line of 50 people, and he kept doing math to segregate, so there were four different groups. And at the very front, there were nine. And behind the nine, there were another, was it 15 or 16? And then behind that and so forth. And he said, he pointed to the first group.

He says, we play nine. We travel 26 or 27, whatever the number is. And so he talked to the other group, you know, he said to everybody, you have to decide what group you're going to be in. Now, when a coach does something like that, there are a lot of people from the jump that get real uncomfortable from the season before. Right? But he's saying, this is how it's going to be.

You tell me where you want to be. I'm not telling you. You tell me where you want to be. and very quickly, guys were gone. He still had more to do. Within the team, he was realizing that even though the team was better, there were still people that weren't really about it. He divided them into what he called givers and takers.

And so what he did is the takers, increasingly, they were outside the dugout. They were doing other things, foul balls, charting things, a part of the team. But they were takers. And I asked them, I said, that's good. I said, did any of your takers become givers during the season? And he said, yeah, he had a few guys that were takers. They kind of got the message, and they became givers. And so that idea of identifying people who care, right, he just did it by setting the rules and then watching action. Right? Other people have an intuitive sense

of talking to somebody and they can pick it up. But that's how he did it. And wait a minute. They won six games last year. year. How many of they won this year? Yeah. The 29. They're going into the final series of the season. They're going to be playing UCon, which is number one seed. And they're in a race with Villanova who's playing the number two seats in the conference. And they're both tied, but they own the tiebreaker against Villanova because they'd be in the season.

So it's really a race. And one of them, you know, win a game against these top tier teams. they do, they'll be in the conference tournament. Barry, it's the point that I've been trying to make all morning. If you care, there is a way. Yes. There is a way for coaches to change programs without all the bells and whistles. You simply have to coach.

It works. There are coaches out there. They may not be in front of you, but there is a way if you're willing to pay attention to those. And that's why we want to have these discussions. With a word of break, we'll come back. We'll close out this hour with Barry Thompson. So we'll find out what are we eating.

We'll do that next. Watch live on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitch. You're listening to One-on-One with DP on 937 The Ticket and The Ticketfm.com.