Loyalty
Right out of college I was given the awesome responsibility of being a head football coach.
Before I left for the position I stopped by and spoke to one of the football coaches I respected the most on the staff at Chadron State College, Jerry Pitzer.
Jerry was a great guy. Hard worker, smart, fundamentally sound, a player’s coach. To me, a “player’s coach” is one who has a relationship with the players he is working with. He spoke the truth about the game and about life. I needed the truth about what to look for in an assistant coach.
Coach Pitzer told me, “Hire yourself, but make sure they are smarter than you.” We laughed, and he went on. “In coaching, you never want to be the smartest guy in the room. Each coach you work with should add something that you are missing. If you bring in people who are less intelligent, because your ego can’t handle being shown where you are wrong, you’re not going to win many games. But specific intelligence is the last of the three most important qualities you are looking for.”
“The second quality is work ethic. If you hire a lazy coach, you will be doing all the work. Coaching is all about sharing the load. You must find a group of people who are as passionate about the game and the players as you are. When this happens, no one is looking at the clock, no one is counting how much work you have done compared to them. The most important thing to this staff is getting the job done right. When you have a staff of smart hard-working people you have a chance.
I then asked if work ethic and specific intelligence were the second and third traits of hiring the coaches, what is the most important trait. Jerry sat back and smiled. “You don’t know because it comes naturally to you, but the most important quality is: LOYALTY. Loyalty is the single most important quality that you need to find in an assistant or when you are being hired, your head coach must be loyal to you.”
I was wrapping my mind around the knowledge that had just been dropped on me. I got the work ethic and the intelligence, but I needed to hear more about loyalty. Like Jerry had said, maybe I was too close to it to understand that not everyone in the world is loyal to those around them. I asked Coach, “Why is loyalty above the other two?” Jerry said that loyalty can’t be taught. You either are or you’re not. Loyalty is not a sometime thing, it is always there, when someone knows you are loyal you are dependable, and they never have to worry about things getting done the way that you want them done.
I asked him, “How can you tell if someone is loyal?” He leaned forward and said, “That’s the hard part, usually we get fooled because someone is smart and they do a good job but we never see their true self until the hard times come. When things get tough you will find out really quick who is loyal. The disloyal ones will be working the angles to save themselves. They will trade you for their personal gain. The disloyal will wait till you are struggling, and when you go to lean on them, they won’t be there.”
Look around you. Who do you count as being loyal in your life?
Ask yourself a question. If you were not in the position that you are right now, would these people remain your friends? Like Jerry said, loyalty comes easy to me so I don’t understand the concept so much, or at least I didn’t until my last change of course in my life. People I had spoken with on a daily basis, would not return a simple text. My wife went through the same experience with some of her “friends.” And we are grown-ups, we understand things evolve, and people move on. But usually not within weeks of leaving their proximity.
Through time I’ve come to learn what loyalty and true friendship is (Read my blog PALS and my discussion on the Al Capone quote – “I’d rather have four quarters than one-hundred pennies.”). I’ve come to understand who people truly are. And that is good. I have been able to trim my “Christmas Card List”. And when I don’t respond to your text or call, they’ll know why.
Hiring Staff
As an assistant I watched head coaches fill positions as coaches moved on through the system. I watched how staffs improved and I also witnessed how bringing in one person could adversely affect the entire chemistry on one side of the ball.
When I was able to hire my staffs at Dodge, Subiaco, USC, and Seattle I made sure that I found people that made us better. In my blog “Trust”, I spoke about hiring Tatyana Obukhova as an assistant in the weight room. Her education had nothing to do with her hiring. Tatyana was a triple jumper on USC’s track team. When she was working out as an athlete she was leaps and bounds ahead of other athletes in her technique and her focus. Through talking with her I found that she had been brought up through the old Soviet sports training system in Ukraine.
She was tough and fundamentally sound. She brought with her a plyometric background that I would have never gained, even in reading every book on jumping. I thought I was ahead of the curve in plyometrics because I was an early follower of Jimmy Radcliffe (High-Powered Plyometrics) from the University of Oregon. He was the cutting edge of plyometrics at one time. But when I added Taty’s knowledge and background with what I had learned from him, my program skyrocketed. And so did the athleticism of our athletes.
Another big hire was getting Aaron Ausmus to come to USC and with me. Aaron was an all-American shot putter at the University of Tennessee. I “worked” with him as the track strength coach. But Aaron already had his system that had helped him develop from a walk-on to an all-American. Hs knowledge of progressions in the strength and Olympic lift movements was more than I had, even working with the staff at UT.
As an athlete, and a graduate assistant at UT, Aaron had done all the experimenting on himself on what would and wouldn’t work in the weight room. When I had a chance to bring him to USC with me, I pulled him away from being a used car salesman, it was a huge hire. AA brought continuity with parts of the program that I wanted to run that were similar to what John Stucky, my mentor at the University of Tennessee, had developed.
Another big hire happened when I got to Seattle. I hired Mondray Gee as soon as I got the job. I met Mondray when he took the initiative to travel from Green Bay Packers out to visit our workouts at USC, on his own dime. I found an intelligent hard-working young man who turned out to be one of my best friends in all of coaching. Mondray had all three areas of coaching. He also taught me to stop and take a breath before going over and kicking someone’s door down. He probably added several years to my coaching life.
I didn’t hire all of the people I worked with. This happened three times when I found gold in retaining Ken Ippenson and Gordy Pillmore and Jamie Yanchar in some of my stops. These guys were all about doing whatever it took to turn the program around. This doesn’t happen all of the time. Too many times when you pick up old staff members, they are tied to their old ways and aren’t willing to work to the level you want. Because they became comfortable in the old system, they are unwilling to change what they had been doing. These three were defiantly the exception to the rule.
Strong Enough
I was fortunate to have Char Gahagan and his background in powerlifting help me understand the concept of “strong enough”. Gary Uribe was a solid coach who was hungry for knowledge. Bryan Bailey was definitely the smartest training guy I had ever worked with. Leslie Cordova was working for a junior college when I met her. She was sharp and was a tremendous coach of fundamentals. One of the best ever. Jeff Davis was the best “jack of all trades” coach I hired. If I needed help on defense, he could call the defense, he could coach the special teams, except the snappers, they were my guys. Or if I needed a squat rack welded or the ice machine fixed … he was the guy. He is the definition of living off the grid. He may never read this … but he knows how I feel about him!
If you know about my background. I am a social science grad from Chadron, Nebraska with a master’s degree in History from the University of Arkansas. But I rose to the top of the Strength and Conditioning (S&C) Profession without ever taking a class in the sports sciences.
I have found that too many of the “educated” strength coaches are stuck in the box their professors, who have never left the classroom, have put them in. As they get their degrees in physiology and kinesiology, they don’t have the ability to expand outside the parameters of what they were taught. If they are too “loyal” to the books, then how can they think outside of the box as they watch what they were told couldn’t happen … happening in front of their eyes. So, I have a fondness for those who can do what I needed them to do naturally, using years and years of experience on the field, not hours and hours in a library.
I found some of my best coaches had no background in S&C but because of their training and people skills they were some of my best hires. Tatyana, Aaron, and the most energetic of all of the people I ever hired Gary Hyman fit the first two of the areas, Loyalty and Work Ethic … I could teach them how to work with people in a weight room setting. And I was so blessed to have these three.
And yes, I did hire some people that were “bad hires” and I took over programs that had some dead wood attached to them. If I made a bad hire, I would cut my losses and move on. I would not live with someone who didn’t fit what I was needing to get done.
Jerry summed up the Big 3: “Loyalty – Work Ethic – Knowledge … you can’t teach the first two and you don’t want to be the smartest person in the room.” Because of this wisdom, I was able to surround myself with some great people. In return, I have helped them all to move on their path to accomplish their dreams. This profession and this world are too big to do it on your own. Surround yourself with the best people. And make sure you continue to show them how you want the work to be done by your Loyalty – demonstrating your Work Ethic daily and by sharing your knowledge and cultivating their knowledge to make your team or business better.
Have a TREMENDOUS day!!!
