Last week, I attended the “Title IX at 40” Conference at the University of Michigan, hosted by the SHARP Center and the Women’s Sports Foundation. The conference program was packed with amazing speakers from academic scholars and researchers to gold medal Olympic winners, all of whom were focused on the continued advocacy and promotion of equitable and quality opportunities for all girls and women in sport and physical activity settings. However, one of the conference speakers really resonated with me; Judy Sweet. While I have heard Judy speak several times, something about her talk at this particular conference “stuck.” There is...

source If you’re like me, you’re always on the lookout for ways to understand team development.  Jeff Janssen does a good job explaining the stages in his Championship Team Building book and I enjoyed the S-Curve Trend of Team Development from a team building blog called, Create Learning. I believe that winning and losing hinge on team development, which makes it a critical piece to any coach’s season planning.  Team development is as much art as it is science and I’m sure we’re all looking for fresh ideas to tackle an on-going issue. The four stages that teams go through Infancy.  This is...

It is crazy how fast a season ends and how quickly you are already looking to the next season to prepare for what might be the next obstacle. While looking to my season ahead, I began to think about some of the areas I need to fine tune. As one group of seniors leaves, you have another group of young athletes joining your crew. It is always welcoming to start fresh with a new group of athletes and see how the team dynamic will develop throughout the length of a season. However, in today’s society of athletes not only are...

source Writing a post about how kids shouldn’t specialize in a particular sport when they’re too young may seem a bit disingenuous for me.  After all, as a college coach, I directly benefit from our culture’s obsession with organized youth sports.  In my opinion, most kids in youth sports aren’t playing because they have a deep and lasting love of their particular sport, but because their friends play and their parents make them go. Sport should be fun for even the most highly skilled young athletes. Beyond fun, parents and coaches should encourage youth athletes to play all sorts of sports so...

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...

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!     Share this articleTweetFacebookLinkedInTumblrStumbleDiggDelicious

source Did you know that there are twenty leadership qualities common to most organizations?  Neither did I, that’s probably why I found this article very interesting.  As we think of coaches we admire or players we’ve coached that have inspired us…it’s sometimes hard to put their leadership traits into words.  This list is designed to give us words for what we know intuitively about great leaders. 20 leadership traits common to virtually all groups ____ Ambitious:  Having a strong desire and determination to succeed. ____ Broad-minded: Open-minded to and tolerant of differing opinions and suggestions. ____ Caring: Compassionate and concerned with maintaining quality relationships. ____ Competent:...

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...

photo source 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...

source It could be a losing season.  Or an injury to your star player.  Or the death/sickness of a player or someone close to the team.  Or a player with an eating disorder.  Whatever the adversity your team is facing, we’ve got to know how to get ourselves, as well as our teams, through it with minimal damage. 11 ways to stay awesome when things don’t go according to plan Ask for advice.  Hopefully we can find someone who has gone through what we’re going through and they can tell us how they handled their adversity.  Hearing other folks talk about a similar...

source I’m sure we’ve all heard those crazy stories about what stars demand for appearances.  Here’s a few of them: Apparently singer Barbara Streisand asks for peach colored toilet paper because it matches her skin; Mariah Carey asks for a new toilet seat to be installed in all of her hotel rooms; I guess Beyonce asks for her room to be exactly seventy eight degrees. There are lots more on this site and I certainly don’t know if they’re true or not, but that’s not the point.  The point is demanding attention to detail from the people around us…most importantly our teams.  I always...

source   Cultivating leaders has been on my mind lately.  I’m trying to make sure that I do my best to create the best and most amazing leaders that I possibly can…I want my athletes to be rock stars! What does an awesome leader look like?  According to this post, great leaders follow their values, are confident in crisis, and are well connected on the team. During the course of a normal season, with its ups and downs, every team requires a leader who can handle crisis.  Check out the different ways leaders can help or hurt when your team is going through a...