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Post by CanyonCoach on Jan 15, 2016 13:47:13 GMT -6
Just had a long visit with a person we will call the Drama Coach.
Three points she brought up. 1. How would you characterize the school culture? 2. Who determines the school culture and how do you gain that responsibility? 3. If you don't like it how do you change it?
I haven't been able to completely verbalize any of those answers but would be interested to hear your thoughts.
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Post by ogre5530 on Jan 15, 2016 13:59:00 GMT -6
We found this year that as we had a little bit more success the school culture and climate was much better in the Fall. I don't know if it necessarily continued, but a good football season set the tone for a better start to our school year than it did in the past when we struggled.
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Post by coachphillip on Jan 15, 2016 14:04:18 GMT -6
From "Above the Line": Leaders create culture. Culture drives behavior. Behavior produces results.
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Post by CanyonCoach on Jan 15, 2016 14:05:46 GMT -6
We had lots of excitement for our fall sports Football was in the play off hunt for the first time in 5 years. VB was a returning State Placers with 4 girls back XC- both boys and girls had a nice showing..couple of kids in each were top 15 Soccer- is brutal..basically the kids that are athletic but don't like to work hard play soccer instead of football
And by mid- November they were all done and the school has been in a funk since then..... Football missed play-offs by 1 game VB failed to qualify for state XC- see above Soccer- lost in regional play in game.
Lots of potential but just didn't get over the hump.
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Post by CanyonCoach on Jan 15, 2016 14:06:40 GMT -6
From "Above the Line": Leaders create culture. Culture drives behavior. Behavior produces results. This is what inspired our conversation....
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Post by Coach.A on Jan 15, 2016 15:25:18 GMT -6
From "Above the Line": Leaders create culture. Culture drives behavior. Behavior produces results. This is what inspired our conversation.... I would guess that the answer to your questions then would be -- develop strong leaders within your school. Easier said than done. I'm about a third of the way through "Above the Line" and I've already gained plenty of great ideas to assist with leadership development. I would recommend the book if you haven't already read it.
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Post by gibbs72 on Jan 16, 2016 9:40:17 GMT -6
From "Above the Line": Leaders create culture. Culture drives behavior. Behavior produces results. I REALLY like this quote
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Post by Chris Clement on Jan 16, 2016 16:38:43 GMT -6
If you're talking about the school culture overall I think you have to avoid taking the easiest path and looking to athletics. That hilarious kid who makes bawdy jokes while reading the meaning announcements (is that a thing outside of Canada) can do just as much good as your star basketball player.
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Post by keysersoze on Jan 16, 2016 23:57:42 GMT -6
I think Chris Clement makes a good point in that your ASB/Student Leadership can have a huge influence on the type of culture you have at your school. If you're administration is leading the way, teachers buy in and you can have similar expectations across the various athletic programs at your school, it's a powerful combination.
After reading Above the Line, I found a lot of similarities to what we're trying to do. As an athletic dept., we set "non-negotiables" for all of our programs with the ideas that there should be a core set of values/believes/expectations that were operating across the board. Next, very similar to the "OSU Culture Blueprint, we have programs identify what the "5 min." test should be, meaning, if someone were to watch you team practice/play for 5 min., what behaviors define who you are? Is it mental toughness, enthusiasm, hard work, etc? Meyer's book does a good job outlining how they do that with Relentless Effort, Extreme Competitiveness and Power of the Unit.
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Post by coachwilliams2 on Jan 17, 2016 6:14:34 GMT -6
1. Principal 2. AD 3. HFC 4. Head Custodian
Those 4 can impact the culture of the school faster than any.
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Post by fballcoachg on Jan 18, 2016 8:30:07 GMT -6
I can impact the culture of my team but the culture of my school is outside of my control. If I were in a different setting our athletic leaders may have more influence but not in our current set up...so I focus on our guys.
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Post by sweep26 on Jan 18, 2016 12:22:25 GMT -6
From "Above the Line": Leaders create culture. Culture drives behavior. Behavior produces results. Is this the Urban Meyer book?
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Post by coachphillip on Jan 18, 2016 13:03:29 GMT -6
From "Above the Line": Leaders create culture. Culture drives behavior. Behavior produces results. Is this the Urban Meyer book? Yes. Love the book. It clearly and concisely articulates things we say on here in a hundred different ways.
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Post by racehorse on Jan 18, 2016 13:40:08 GMT -6
1. Our school culture is primarily academic. Little support for athletics. Football and boys basketball are the only sports that get anyone (except parents) in the stands, and they are only there to socialize. 2. Our school culture is determined by a select few parents who are "squeaky wheels" and thus get the grease. The community has a large number of upper class families, and they generally don't support athletics. 3. Find a cure for Affluenza.
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Post by fshamrock on Jan 19, 2016 13:55:40 GMT -6
Unpopular opinion but I think it's pretty silly every time I hear somebody talking about "changing the culture" of a football program somewhere. This seems to me to be the new way that coaches can try to get attention on twitter more than anything else. If you really want to "change the culture" of a place you could kick everybody out of the community and only let people back in who buy a house over a million dollars, or the flip-side you could just build up government housing projects...you would definitely see the culture change then. As far as changing the attitude of people and making football cool and getting people excited about it? Winning does that, and good players do the winning.
How many of you if you are being incredibly honest can look at one season where you were part of a program that turned around from bad to good, and honestly say that you were really just a player or two away from sucking? In my "turnaround" season we had a linebacker that we moved to running back his senior year, he went for like 2500 yards and we made the playoffs....we didn't know he was that good of a runningback...boy we really changed the culture.
I guess my point is that everybody has motivational quotes, everybody has themes, everybody has acronyms and stand for some inspiring stuff, there's nothing wrong with that stuff...but it doesn't win anything, not really. It just irks me when I see coaches trying to take credit for a team's success because they had the right "message" I'm sure Urban Meyer is a good dude and a great coach, but he can bring all of the ideas from that book to Prairie View A&M university and they are still going to get smashed by 35 every week.
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Post by CanyonCoach on Jan 19, 2016 14:49:18 GMT -6
I certainly would like to see a change in the #of wins we have in a season but winning isn't a culture to me. It is a standard of behavior that is not only expected but it is nourished and cultivated. You can lose games and have a winning culture...and you can win a championships but have a rancid culture.
I think of the high school teams I played on (baseball, football and basketball) and they all had a different sub culture. All of them were winning programs, all of them had tremendous coaches and parental support. The baseball coach moved on and the culture carried the program for a few years but as the coaching carousel continued for that program for the better part of 8 years eventually that program did not have a positive culture...and that negative culture started to carry over into the other sports. The positive nature of the people involved pushed kids to be better: better athletes: better students: better community members and that remained true during seasons when the win column wasn't as large as the loss column.
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Post by vanden48 on Jan 22, 2016 11:20:30 GMT -6
Unpopular opinion but I think it's pretty silly every time I hear somebody talking about "changing the culture" of a football program somewhere. This seems to me to be the new way that coaches can try to get attention on twitter more than anything else. If you really want to "change the culture" of a place you could kick everybody out of the community and only let people back in who buy a house over a million dollars, or the flip-side you could just build up government housing projects...you would definitely see the culture change then. As far as changing the attitude of people and making football cool and getting people excited about it? Winning does that, and good players do the winning. How many of you if you are being incredibly honest can look at one season where you were part of a program that turned around from bad to good, and honestly say that you were really just a player or two away from sucking? In my "turnaround" season we had a linebacker that we moved to running back his senior year, he went for like 2500 yards and we made the playoffs....we didn't know he was that good of a runningback...boy we really changed the culture. I guess my point is that everybody has motivational quotes, everybody has themes, everybody has acronyms and stand for some inspiring stuff, there's nothing wrong with that stuff...but it doesn't win anything, not really. It just irks me when I see coaches trying to take credit for a team's success because they had the right "message" I'm sure Urban Meyer is a good dude and a great coach, but he can bring all of the ideas from that book to Prairie View A&M university and they are still going to get smashed by 35 every week. I have to disagree with this. Urban Meyer will win wherever he goes. That is the type of coach he is. He will make programs great because that is his expectation of himself. Urban Meyer aside, I think you have to ask the question what is the "Culture" and how do they want it changed? I just took over a small town football program that had gone through a period of poor coaching and lacked recent success. The previous 7 years saw no winning record and declining program participation numbers. When I interviewed for the job the Superintendent, Principal, and AD all said they needed a change to help change the school "Culture". What they meant by this is they wanted stronger community involvement with the football program. They wanted high participation numbers. And they wanted larger crowds at the home football games. This is a basketball school in a small town. They had 22 members of the basketball program in grades 9-12 last year and only 20 members of the football program in grades 9-12 before this last year. To change this culture I had to attack these problems 1st. I also am living 50 miles away from the school, and was not receiving a paycheck. Thankfully my wife makes twice as much as I do. Advice to high school football coaches, marry a dentist. What the program was lacking that was causing a bad "culture" was effort and organization. Nobody wants to be part of something where the leader displays little effort and there is no structure. The previous leadership's involvement with the program ended in November when the season was done, actually in October as they never made the play-offs, and started back up again in August when the next season was starting. No weight training schedule, no team meetings, no summer program, ...nothing. So the 1st thing I did was announce that there would be weight training after school in May when I was hired. They had never had weight training, and the school had very little equipment, so I called tractor supply and got two truck loads of very large Tractor tires donated. I had the school purchase a bunch of sledge hammers, and we went to work. I also decided that I wanted to be visible, this is a small town and every one drives by the school at some point in the day, so we had all of our workouts outside. And to help make this fun I set up a 2000 watt PA to blast music. 1st week had 5 players, which in a couple of days turned to 10, and by the end of school we had on average 30 players showing up every day. We put up motivational quotes and decorated the locker room up with positive things that focused on winning and doing the right thing. We got signed up for a few summer 7 on 7 leagues and tournaments. To get the linemen involved I brought all of them and had all of the practice snapping. Gave the players and the parents a calendar, basic and simple I know but something they never had before. Season started and we had two practices a day. This was like committing murder in a farming town, but it also made the parents understand the commitment level that was required. We held a couple of fundraisers that helped purchase some new equipment and some new homecoming uniforms with the players names on them. This got more kids to come out. We had a roster size of 32 now, up from the previous year of 20. That is a 60% increase in participation for the math teachers. Then I tried something that they had never done here before, team dinners before the games. I told the parents they were going to cook and serve the food, and the players and coaches were going to eat it. We did it at the school, showed a highlight film, and I brought in a different guest speaker each week, who happened to be different commanders from the near by Air Force Base. Parents would no fight to be the ones who got to prepare the meals and be there for these events. We handed out weekly awards for achievement in the games, rocks that were painted in the opponent's team colors with the score and date of the game on it. We painted the field with hash marks, numbers, endzone and midfield decorations. This had never been done before, ever, at the school. It became a community event with parents and students helping out. We brought out the PA on game days to have pre-game music, for the 1st time ever at this school. We won twice as many games as they did in the previous staff's best year and made the playoffs for the first time in 7 years. Large crowds at the home games. Now the culture is changed. What was the secret? Everything that we did this year almost all successful coaches have done in some form or another at a program. To change a culture you need to put in the time and work and be organized. People need to see the fruits of your labor. You need to find ways for the parents to get involved, don't expect them to know how to do this. All parents want to be involved in their kid's lives, but very few understand how the can help out a football program because most don't understand football outside of what they see on TV. Organize them and tell them what to do. Most "Cultures" need to be changed because of a previous coach who did not put in the time, work, or organization to cultivate the growth of a "winning Culture". Athletes will come and go, along with wins and losses. If you have developed a good "Culture" your program will overcome these temporary setbacks and it won't change one thing.
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Post by fshamrock on Jan 22, 2016 13:42:58 GMT -6
that's awesome man good for you and good luck to your team
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Post by coachwoodall on Jan 22, 2016 21:08:32 GMT -6
- Off season lifting, Friday is a day off - Summer work outs, come as you may - Football begins in August - Lifting groups, everyone does the same weight - Skip reps on lifts - Whine about lifts - Find excuses to miss practice - Thursday practice is optional
That is the culture where we took over. That what we have worked to change.
That is a change in culture.
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