Who better to distill the virtue and culture of sport than three phenomenally successful sportspersons, all under the banner of the Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA)? Last week, I attended PCA’s annual “Coffee With Coaches.” At last year’s event I was honored to speak as a panelist and, likely due to my excitement being on stage, don’t recall a thing except for St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa’s sage-like wisdom, “Three strikes and you’re not out.”1
This year, though, I sat in the audience, relaxed, with pen in hand writing as fervently as I could given the insights flying off the podium. This year’s event featured an outstanding panel:
- Steve Young: 2-time NFL MVP and 3-time Super Bowl Champion
- David Shaw: 3rd-year football coach at Stanford University, 2-time Pac-12 champions and 2-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year
- Lindsay Gottlieb: 2nd-year women’s basketball coach at UC Berkeley, won Cal’s first Pac-12 Championship and earned their first trip to the NCAA Final-Four.
They each began with a few thoughtful and humorous personal anecdotes before getting into the meat of the program.
Gottlieb shared her 3rd grade Little League experience in which an opposing coach always intentionally walked her so she never had the chance to hit. After the coach did this with the bases loaded, her own coach—her father—ran over to the coach in a fit of anger but was intercepted by a parent of the opposing team who delivered this bit of PCA-style advice: “We all want to hit him, but you just can’t.”
Steve Young helped us to better frame our relationship with umpires (and, also, with our own inner-competitor) as he described watching his son’s recent Little League games. The league’s umpires are all kids. Young recounted watching an umpire, smaller than the young child at bat, with gear drooping off his body, calling strikes nowhere near the strike zone and balls right down the middle. Yet, because of the umpire’s age, we let the game play on and it’s considerably more civilized because of it.
The real focus of the event repeatedly reverted to something conveyed by PCA founder, Jim Thompson, in his opening remarks. Thompson recalled starting PCA sixteen years ago based on a previous experience working in schools with under-privileged, struggling youth. One of the school’s main pedagogical tenets involved what he called, “relentless positivity,” and the results, he shared, were astounding. He wanted to create this same culture in youth sport, as he had come to notice the prevalent negativity as his own son began to play sports.
All three panelists echoed, in their own way, this sentiment: when a team encounters adversity—and in competitive sport they consistently do—it’s not the playbook or skill-set that gets them through it, but the character and culture of the team that perseveres. Shaw commented, half-jokingly, that when Stanford’s football team is in a high-stakes, high-pressure situation, his role as a head coach diminishes to the point that he’s “not even there”—what’s left is the culture of the team, and he just happens to have “the best seat.”
Both college coaches reflected on the importance of character and culture in their recruiting process. Shaw explained the important role that the team’s players have when a top recruit visits: regardless of that recruit’s physical prowess and football resume, if the players hosting him don’t consider the recruit a good fit—as someone who can integrate into the team-oriented nature of the team’s culture—then they cease pursuing that player.
Young and Shaw both espoused the greatness of long-time Hall of Fame coach Bill Walsh and how he created a team-based culture which played an instrumental roll in the success of his football teams. Walsh “integrated” the players on the team: at the training table, he disbanded the “quarterback table” and instead had a quarterback eat with someone he rarely encounters such as a defensive lineman. Just this seemingly minor shift created a culture in which every player felt connected, and each trusted that he could truly give of himself for the other player—for the group as a whole.
And here is where it gets philosophically interesting: when it becomes not just praiseworthy to act selflessly on behalf of a group but becomes the cultural norm. That a basketball player, for example, will set a pick, drawing the defender off the ball, allowing her teammate a better opportunity to make a pass for an easy layup. One teammate is credited with an assist, another with two points, yet it was the teammate who receives no credit who made it all possible. When a team’s culture celebrates this and honors that sort of selflessness, then the team achieves something much greater than it ever could otherwise. This is just the messaging that we want for our youth—and it’s no surprise teams of great character are often those of great success.
So it makes sense for Gottlieb to talk about the character of All-Pac-12 junior Reshanda Gray, explaining her background growing up in an impoverished neighborhood in Los Angeles yet willing to give anything she has to a teammate or coach or even opposing player, as she’ll often reach out to help them up after a fall. This is why it makes sense, when asked how the 49ers will be next season, Young comments, “We have a really good locker room demeanor.” And it makes sense that Shaw would highlight a quote from Coach Walsh which just went up in his office: “The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand.”2
In a proper discussion of youth sport, one cannot avoid a focus on virtue. And in just an hour, these three experts and PCA’s founder gave a seminar in virtue, though they likely didn’t intend to. Selflessness, restraint, teamwork, character: all embedded in the culture of a well-coached team. And, on a grander more idealistic scale, all embedded in the culture of youth sport.
1LaRussa credited Army General Hal Moore with this aphoristic tidbit. Even after striking out, a good teammate will immediately focus on how he can best help his team, recognizing that a failure like striking out doesn’t preclude one from then creating an immediate positive impact on his team.
2Interestingly, one of Shaw’s highlighted quotes from last year paraphrased Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”