1-on-1 with DP – 93.7 The Ticket KNTK - Time Managment for Student -Athletes is the greatest cause for failure: April 28th, 10:25am

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

Barry and DP's academic program that they used for their athletesThe coaching past of DP and Barry when they coached basketballAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

You're listening to One-on-One with D.P. Sponsored by Beatrice Bakery on 93-7 The Ticket and the Ticketfm.com. Welcome back to one-on-one. This hour, Barry Thompson, brought you by Ambition Electric. And thank the folks from Beatrice Bakery as well for sponsoring this hour as well. We're talking about mental health and the things that happen that can happen should happen within programs to help our young people get through. get through, grow through, get better, improve, mature, more stability, more boundary. Barry and I were talking about us being put in a situation where we had to coach a bunch of kids

with just the two of us. And then there is a thing that happens where, in this particular case, Barry approaches the idea that, hey, we're going to take care of some of the things that get in the way of being successful before they get in the way. Right. And one of those things that pops up in this situation and happens at the high school level, happens at the collegiate level is, and I say this all the time, young people, student athletes don't generally fail because they're not athletic enough. They fail because they do not manage their time. They do not have the first thing first. They do not focus on the priority, which for student athletes is student athletes.

And you and I sat in a room, and there were a couple of things that were said in that space, that we're going to take control, I'll have them take control of their 168 hours each week. We're going to get an academic program, and we're going to be accountable for it. You even went as far as said, listen, if you're waiting, to get better at a thing, you need to utilize as much time as possible. So what we want from you is, if you're waiting for your parents to pick up your waiting for a ride, books are open. Books were open, right?

Before practice, if you're waiting for us to get there and start coaching, books are open. All of these are things that just quite simply connect student athletes to something other than the game itself. Yeah, so let me pick up on that. It was our famous 168, and just for your listeners, it was 168 hours in a week. And so what we wanted players to do or what I had players do, At a certain time, they were to enumerate on a piece of paper,

and we didn't get much more instruction than that, how they spent their 168 hours, and they were to be brutally honest. And the sign it was we were going to get much time to bring it in, and when they brought it, it had to be signed by their parents. And I'll explain to you why that was important and probably more important than the 168. So we would get these papers back, And, you know, kids, depending on who they were, would do it all quite different.

And BP recognized, this is kind of like brain typing. We can see who's a creative thinker, who's a linear thinker, right? All those types of things. Some guys would make pie charts and some guys he could barely write. And it was a great identifier, right? But what they found out was that when they added up all the stuff that they had to do, during the week, that they were generally left with about 50 hours. And if we said the average 3.5 student would spend 15 to 20 hours studying,

let's take 15. Let's make it 60, make it 15GD math. They were left with nearly 45 hours in which they could do anything. But that was only possible if they were taking care of the education first. So we encourage them to say, hey, if education is truly first, in any moment you have, it's not on the phone, it's opening the book. And we start talking about waiting 20 minutes for your ride, you know, per day, taking 20 minutes to get home. That's 40 minutes, right? And if you're going to stay two hours a night, you know, that's knocked out a large part of it and getting them to understand.

It worked really well Kids would come to us being really honest I have one kid that turned in a piece of paper That said he spent 16 hours getting fresh Getting fresh And I didn't know you're kissing jokes So I brought him in the office and said You know what's this and he goes no I got a little good

So we have a different conversation And one kid that turned in a Tuesday He pulled it out He realized he literally is watching way too much TV And not studying enough Right. And so it was all this recognition. But, you know, the larger part, the more I reflect on,

especially in the life of this conversation, did say, is that for those young guys, we were doing a couple different things. Everybody in our life told them, hey, take care of your grades. There's no sports without your grade. Take care of your grades. You know, you've got a good grade. Big kids in the Ford.

But we were kind of coaching about how to do that. And, of course, we were. we went further, as we tended to do, which is we connected up with teachers. And I, you know, told teachers, my message to the teacher, I said, if you have one of my football players in your class and they miss a single assignment, I don't care if it's to bring a number two tons of women, and they bring in a number three, I need you to light an email on fire and turbocharged to me. And the reason I did that is because I know that no one who in tends to get an A starts their class by missing an assignment.

And so that little thing that gave us an opportunity to get on that now, right, rather than waiting toward these mid things that come out, the warning reports or whatever, and then trying to save the kid. And then now they knew. You know, you talk about, hey, can you see me? Yes, I could see you. And matter of fact, I know what you're doing in class. And so for me, what that did by having the parents sign this thing,

having the teachers communicate with us. For a young person, we kind of sewed up the adults in their lives because you and I had made the recognition that they could, in a very compartmental way, go to a class and understand that the teacher only cared about what they did in class. Go to football, and the football coach only cared about what they did at football. Go home, and mom and dad, they cared about it all, But, you know, teenagers tend to shut their parents off, and they're kind of now, because they shut off,

they don't really know what's going on in school. So this thing had a way of stitching it up so that everywhere that went, the kids understood that people were seeing them. And that to us, what they did outside of football really matters, right? And we weren't just talking about. We're coaching. So that 168 thing, I don't know. I probably got stuck by lightning, but it was a good idea. It's a great idea.

It was a great idea. And what it did as well, and there are a couple of things that happen when you become consistent with young people. They relax because they understand that you're there. They know that you care. You care enough because you're going to constantly check in. So this thing was done every Friday. And so every Friday, and we would advance it that every Friday, you know, I wanted to know

what they were learning in these classes. And then we asked them to be the fun. Let me speak that because that's something you did. Let me see. So that was the 168. what D.P. did is these kids were given these agendas, these little daytimeers,

and they were all issued, they had the school logo on it, and they were all blank. Every one of them blank. And when D.P. found that out, he started asking the kids, I need you to fill out what you're doing every day and once a week, and I believe it was Monday.

So I got a million basketball, it was Monday. I need you to fill this out. And what D.P. did is he did it by step-by-step process. He said, I need you to fill it out. And so they would bring it, they're boys. And so the thing would be, I went to math. I went to here. And then he was, okay, what did you do in math? What's not on here? And then next week it would come back in math. We did quadratic equations or whatever. Right? And then it would be like, well, do you have a quiz coming up in that? Yeah, I have one

next Friday. And do you people flip the pages and we go like Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, they're like, how are you reminding yourself every day that you have this quit? I want to put that in? Yeah, I mean, you've got to remind yourself every day you've got this quiz, so you don't forget it. So now it's come back with quadratic equations, you know, and the do-lis now on Tuesday, I got studied for the quiz on Friday, blah, blah, blah. And what that really led to is now you can start to have a conversation with him

about school, right? And I carried this over the center of, by the way, and so I'd get up in field, and I would have a player, and he says, I'd say, what are he studying, you know? And he says, well, we're studying empires. And I said, okay, what empires he studied? I don't know. I said, come on, you got to choose. He told me these bunch of empires.

And I said, did you have the Mayan empire or the Aztec Empire? He goes, yeah, they were on there. I said, why don't you choose one of them? The kid was, you know, parents are from Puerto Rico, mom's Palestinian, right? So they said, why do you choose the mine? You never heard of them? I said, man, that's a great empire. So we start talking about that in the Byzantine Empire.

and all of the whole, while I'm in Indiana with Guy at one of the combine, Guy Myers at one of the combines, National Scalding Combine, Combine, I get this text from this quarterback, and he goes, Coach, that's where I am. And he was in Mexico, and he was walking these mine ruins, right?

This little conversation that we have. So that's the type of stuff that comes about when you connect with these kids and do it. And to me, it's, you know, we're talking about this subject. There's two coaches I want to highlight. Coach Eddie Robinson, the coached at Gremlin for years. I think he retired with the most wins.

He used to say, and they called the coach Robb. He said, coach him like they're going to be your future son-in-law. Right? Coach these young people like they're going to be your future son-law. And the other guy was Bronco Mendenhall, you know, at UVA. And he said, my mission here is to build a better world through football. I mean, just think about that. Build a better world through football, which means that he's going to coach those men in a way,

expose them experiences, all while they're trying to win these football games. But they're going to do it in a way that when they're done, they're going to be able to launch themselves to be great husbands, great civic leaders and things like that. So I'm going to watch Broncos teams of those players that came from there because he did really race some men. it just seems to me there's there's room for that type of coaching and you can still win

I know you can do that I know you can lead people I know you can show that you care about people and still win and by the way back to the breakfast club you know who they universally said that because I was asking can you do you think you can coach that way and still went and universally said yeah with Dion's going down Jackson State yeah you have to care you have to care you have to have purpose that show up. You have to live a life. And there's a part that you have to live a life that your players want to aspire to.

Like that's a real thing. That you can't, players aren't going to move for you if they don't feel like what you're doing achieves a life that they want to live. Like that example is necessary. And we never got to choose who we coached. So we had to have a plan in place that no matter what level of tech. I'm in how many kids, no matter what the situational circumstance, that we could be productive in it.

And I'll tell the listeners this. Barry and I never talked about winning. We talked about the things that lead to winning, but we never talked about winning. We didn't coach for winning. But we won. And this is the funny thing. I want to do this here.

There's a point where the high school that we were at was a basketball powerhouse. But they had limitations because there were holes. in the things off the floor. And I said the way to fix this is to implement character at the beginning of their initiation into the program so that when things got difficult later on, they would have a plan in place and it would already be memory. It would be part of their muscle memory,

a part of their mental memory, emotional memory, to go, to be proud of themselves, to be good at what they were doing, to feel comfortable in it, and to be proud in what they were doing so they could share it with others. And coaching basketball, and Barry was not a basketball coach. But I said to Barry, first of all, I need you on my bench.

Come sit on my bench. I said, you handle the offense. I'll handle the defense. That way you'll get what I'm getting. I'll get what you're getting. We'll do. And then the next year, the JV job is open. And everybody says, well, DP will just move to JV.

And Barry will take freshman. and I said, no. What I want to do is build a foundation. I want Barry to set the walls and the roof and the ceiling. So. And Barry's looking at me like I have four heads, right? He's like, bro, what are you doing? Yeah.

Yeah. But how'd that go, Barry? Hold on. Let me interrupt you, and I'll do the Paul Harvey and the rest of the story. I looked at D.P. like he was crazy too. I'm like, why would you do that? And he says, no, I want you to coach. them and I looked at them and I said okay I'll coach them if you picked the team so I want to go

in the tryouts and you know we kind of understood who most of the kids were but the crucial part of a lot of what we're talking about I was about to make some big mistakes on the back end of that roster and DP said no no no no this this guy so that guy and so that those choices really made a huge difference in that team. And, you know, to what we're saying and talking, you know, tied all into the grade. After I selected that team, I think I've told the story before. You know, you and I used to rush down the registrar and kind of figure out what the grades were. I know I snuck a look.

And those grades helped me understand how I was going to coach this team. And there was one glaring thing that popped out. The biggest physical specimen we had on the team had the absolute worst grades. Now, the way the basketball calendar runs is you could say, hey, you need to get those grades up and blah, blah, blah. And then you hope by the back third of the basketball season, just as you're getting into the final games, that he's got everything straight and he don't lose them. Well, that wasn't our approach. My approach, our approach was like, we got to nip this in the bud. So I got the permission from his mom and from the varsity coach.

So I'm not going to have this kid. practice until these grades are strict. We had a conversation, honest one, about why the grades were where they were and what it would take to move them up. And so we went by kind of reward system. I said, okay, when this gets, you'll come to practice with your books. When this grade moves to that spot, I'll give you like five minutes of individual time, a rest of time will be with your books. The point being is that it made no sense for me to have this kid dribbling a basketball around the school. if he wasn't taking care of the main reason that he was in school for, which was a kid in education. And his mom was an educator.

His mom was an educator. Yeah, and his mom was an educator. And it can happen to anybody, right? And so he, thankfully, because of our honest conversation, right, he was true to his word about how these things would move up, but something was missing here and just laziness. But he finally got it. I think as we turned the corner,

we were finally a full 15. And it happened to be the exact right thing for that group of players because it turned out that as much success as they had and as they were going to have in the future, that group of kids somehow they got more enjoyment out of everybody having success. And to give me an example, this is a team that was 10 and 0 and then run through everybody. And we just win this 10th game.

it's kind of like a nothing game, but they win it, and they come down the hallway with their hair on fire, and I'm like, what's going on? And the reason they were excited is because they had looked at the scorebook and everybody scored. Like, that was that team's mentality. So getting him to be involved, right, and getting the whole team whole really meant a lot to that squad. And then at the very end of the season, just a very rewarding last game experience with some players who would kind of naturally resist each other, finally melding together. And that core went on to win a state championship.

But yeah, it's just real rewarding. A Virginia 6A state championship from this crew, led in part by a coach who had never coached the game, but he coached the people. And he coached the situation. And they went 15 and 1. Barry won't brag. 15 to 1.

And tell me how many of those kids, not only were 3.5 student athletes, but they were scholar athletes. How many of your 15 were scholar athletes out here? I think all except one. I mean, the one kid didn't make it. But he went from like a 1-8 to it to a 3.1. He took a jump. Right?

Like it was there. So like I said, through the value. And again, the things that work well have peripheral benefit. And we figured out that these kids loved each other, they loved themselves, because we gave them on a task, we walked them through it, we didn't leave them barren and by themselves in it. And then the successes that we were hoping for happened because we fixed the things that were required.

It wasn't in-game mission. It was day-to-day, do something good for you, something good for yourself, something good for your community, something good for your teammates, your school, and otherwise, and then good things will happen. And I say this because if you can do that at that level, you can do it at any level if the focus and the intention is right. So we'll throw it to break. We'll come back. You know what's up. We'll find out what Barry's cooking or eating when we get back. Watch live on Facebook, YouTube, or Twitch. You're listening to one-on-one with DP on 937, The Ticket and the Ticketfm.com.