Mike Tirico told me his secret. It wasn't talent. It wasn't luck. It was what he does on every flight home. A few years ago, I met him at a restaurant bar in Indianapolis during the Big Ten tournament. One of the biggest voices in sports. He didn't lead with his résumé. He introduced himself. He asked questions. He cared about every person in the room before anyone cared about him. Eventually, I asked him what made him great. He said after every game he calls, on the flight home, he pulls up the broadcast and watches it back. Listens to his own voice. Hunts for the misses. The dead air. The calls he wishes he could have over. Every game. Twenty-plus years in. He wasn't born world-class. He worked his way there one flight at a time. The best in any room are usually the ones still grading themselves the hardest. World-class isn't a personality. It's a habit.

34 saves. The goalie: “I felt nothing.” “My conscious brain is really bad at playing goalie.” That’s straight out of The Inner Game of Tennis, one of my favorite books. Self 1 talks. Self 2 plays. Performance = potential minus interference. Gallwey didn’t tell players to stop thinking. He gave the talking brain a small job. Cooley’s job is a rule: no smiling during TV timeouts.

Michigan won 8 games the year before Dusty May showed up. Two seasons later, they were national champions. Most people will credit the transfer portal. I think the more useful part happened in his first meeting with players. May told his guys this: “It won’t be a certain guy averaging 18 points… we’ll all eat and share together.” Think about that recruiting pitch. No promised shots. No promised touches. No promised minutes. May sold the role first and the stat line second. The players who last are almost never the ones chasing 18 a night. They’re the ones who know exactly why they’re on the floor. So if you ask players to value more than scoring, your feedback has to value more than scoring too. Name the job. Then praise the job. What gets praised gets repeated. Now in Dallas, what will stick with him? The clear role does. The roster edge doesn’t. Michigan was built through the portal, and the NBA has no portal. In Dallas his edge has to come from development and trust. What’s the most valuable thing you’ve done on a team that never showed up in a stat line?

10/10 no notes I can’t believe what I just watched

Sean McVay on what a coach is really building 👀 The ultimate goal of a coach isn't a team that follows your standards. It's a team that believes in them so deeply, they enforce them when you're not around. Standards you police fade. Standards the players own last.

Fake Confidence is a real thing The Empty Gym Lied to You You hit a bunch of shots in the empty gym Felt great and confident Friday night game, same shots, same spot. Can’t make a bucket Now you’re confused, then frustrated. You put in the time. You did the work. So why isn’t it showing up? The preparation you built wasn’t built for game day Here’s the catch: reps only transfer to the environment you took them in. Five hundred shots with no defender, no clock, no fatigue, and a passer who feeds you the same pocket every time teach your body one skill: how to shoot when everything is calm Repetition in comfort builds comfort. Comfort feels like confidence. It isn’t Games are the opposite of that gym. Bodies in your space. Tired legs. A bad pass. A coach yelling. Nothing predictable, nothing comfortable. That’s not a flaw in the game. That’s what basketball is In the video below, Tom Brady made the same point. Performing environments are hard, he said, because there’s a degree of being uncomfortable every day. Most NFL organizations want everyone happy and comfortable Monday through Saturday, then Sunday comes, and you get beat up. Belichick flipped it: every day was hard, so that Sunday, everyone won and everyone was happy Read that again. Be uncomfortable on the days that don’t count, so the day that counts feels familiar

Steve Forbes has kept an hourglass in his office since the day he got the head job at Wake Forest. A couple of weeks ago, he brought it to practice, flipped it over, and let his team watch the sand fall. “This is how quickly the next six months are going to go.” Most people shared the clip for the line “Be where your feet are.” But the scariest thing Forbes said was his biggest fear: a former player walking into his office in ten years and saying he’d have been better if you’d just coached me harder. That’s not a speech about time. It’s a speech about regret. When Cornell psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec asked people about their biggest regrets, the short-term answers split about evenly between things they did and things they didn’t. Over a lifetime, it flipped: in one study, 84% named something they didn’t do. Actions hurt right away. Inactions hurt later, and longer. The player in Forbes’ nightmare isn’t haunted by a bad game. He’s haunted by the effort he never found and the push he never got. One more thing: “harder” isn’t “harsher.” Players who wish they’d been pushed more almost never mean yelled at more. They mean held to more. Standards plus support.

How can we raise the bar @USABYouth ? From what I understand, the Gold License is earned through online slides and a quiz. Can we add an in-person step where coaches get real feedback from evaluators?

A player makes 100 shots in practice. Then the game starts, and those shots disappear. What if the problem isn't confidence, but the way we practice? There's a coaching concept called "repetition without repetition": repeat the skill, but don't repeat the exact situation. A player can make the same shot 100 times from the same spot and feel great. But a game rarely gives you the same shot twice. The pass, the defender, the angle, the decision - something changes. Practice in comfort can leave you uncomfortable in games. Practice with the right amount of discomfort can help you adapt. Keep the shooting reps. Change the problem: • Catch and shoot. • Catch a low pass, then a high one. • Move the catch a foot in either direction. • Have a defender close out high, low, or from a different angle. • If the defender gets too close, read it and take a dribble. The player is still working on shooting, footwork, balance, and decision-making. But Rep 1 ≠ Rep 2 ≠ Rep 3 ≠ Rep 4. They have to see what's happening and find a solution, not just reproduce a movement pattern. Fair warning: this may look messier than 100 identical makes. That's not automatically a bad thing, but it isn't proof of learning either. Research on varied practice and game transfer is mixed in sport settings; the right level of challenge depends on the player. Nikolai Bernstein's idea gives us a simple way to think about it: Traditional repetition: "Do it again." Repetition without repetition: "Solve the same problem again, but in a slightly different way."

Yes, opens the door. And walks people through it. Two words from improv, delivered by Ted Lasso, with a Sun Tzu joke attached. Sun Tzu, Chapter 7: “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” He doesn’t win by blocking. He wins by shaping where the movement goes. That’s the coaching version of yes, and. A player brings you an idea. You say no. The idea dies and so does the next one, because they’ve learned there’s no point in bringing it. But yes alone isn’t coaching. Yes alone is abdication. “Can I take that shot?” No ends the conversation and costs you the player. Yes gives them nothing. Yes, and… “Yes. And make three in a row from that spot before the game gives it to you.” You’re not agreeing. You’re not blocking. You’re redirecting momentum that already exists, and the momentum was free. The other half of the scene matters too: it’s still okay to say no. A coach who only says yes isn’t collaborating, they’re avoiding. The yes is what keeps them coming back. The and is where the coaching lives. That’s the same move as section three. You don’t block the shot request and you don’t block the rep, you change what’s around it.

Western Michigan lost to Michigan on a second that arguably never existed. Their coach refused to blame anyone. WMU led 12-6 with 7 seconds left. Michigan threw a Hail Mary. Knocked down. Clock hit 0:00. Upset complete. Then officials reviewed it and put 1 second back on the clock. Michigan threw another Hail Mary. Touchdown. Michigan wins 13-12. The internet exploded. Coach Lance Taylor didn’t: “We could deflect and say that this was somebody else’s fault, the refs got it wrong... but that’s a victim’s mentality.” “It’s not what happens to you, it’s how you respond that ultimately determines success or failure.” That’s leadership. The players who make it aren’t the ones who never get a bad call. They’re the ones already on to the next play. You can be right about the call and still lose the lesson. Taylor took the lesson.

I spent 40+ miles off the grid, solo backpacking the Timberline Trail around Mt. Hood, OR. Every year I do one thing hard enough that I'm not sure I'll finish it. Not a bucket list — because bucket lists are things you're pretty confident you can pull off. There's a word for this: MISOGI. An ancient Japanese ritual. One physical or mental challenge a year, built with a real chance of failure, designed to test your limits and reshape your life. No service. No communication with anyone. All I used my phone for was taking pictures. When you put yourself in an environment like this, the disconnect happens fast. No texts, no emails, no social media. And as the days went on, I realized a lot of it just doesn't matter. Doing hard things is a blessing. This is where true growth happens. When was the last time you got off the grid for a couple of days?

April 1997. Tiger Woods wins the Masters by twelve shots. Biggest margin in the tournament’s history, at 21 years old. Weeks later, he decides to change his swing. His coach said it would help in the long run. Nothing hurt. Nothing was failing. There was no day, and he wasn’t going to wait for one, so he scheduled it. Then he paid for it. In 1998, the best young player on earth won exactly one tournament all year. A full season of looking like he’d gotten worse, because he had. May 1999. He calls his coach from the driving range: “Butchie, I got it.” From August 1999 to June 2002, he wins seven of the eleven majors he plays.. The story doesn’t stop there. In 2003, he does it again. Eight majors, and he spends two seasons rebuilding a swing that had just made him the best player in history. Six more majors follow. Understand that you are always paying rent on your game. The only constant in life is change. For Tiger, two rebuilds that paid off enormously. The embarrassment isn’t a phase you get past. It’s the toll at every level, and it isn’t refundable.

“When you chase 5 rabbits, you catch none of them.” 🐇 @Doug_Lemov broke this down for us, and we can’t unhear it. He stops practice with five coaching points. All five are correct: pass on the ground with pace, receive on your back foot, eyes up, move it side to side, push higher. “Got it? Go.” Working memory holds about one thing at a time. So either the player picks one at random, and now you can’t reinforce anything, because you don’t know which one he picked, or they remember none of it and quietly get good at practicing while ignoring you. You didn’t teach five things. You taught them to tune you out. One rabbit. 🐇

In 2016 Jared Goff went 0-7 with the worst completion rate in the league. In 2017, TDs, 7 picks, 11-5. Same guy. New staff. One thing that changed: a one-page tip sheet waiting for him every morning. Corrections in yellow highlighter, and photos from practice with arrows drawn on them for feedback and learning. Feedback the next morning with the evidence attached beats a performance review every time.

The @Ravens have one job this season: Put @TURNSTILEHC “BIRDS” over a hype video and let Baltimore lose its mind.

Oregon football put "karma" on the whiteboard, then defined it as whether anyone talks to the janitorial staff after practice. They were running Ohtani's high school goal sheet - the Harada method (Which I explain a lot more in this week's newsletter). The staff didn't fill in the boxes. They handed the marker to the players. If your staff wrote your team's values, you don't have team values. You have a poster.

Nike paid $500,000 for a Beatles song and got sued for $15 million. Best money they ever spent. Capitol said yes. Michael Jackson said yes. Nobody asked the Beatles. Then the research said the ad tested badly. Knight ran it anyway and stopped testing ads entirely. Sales doubled in two years. A room full of nodding is not a green light. It means you made something familiar.