if-you-do-what-youve-always-done-youll-get-what-youve-always-gotten-5

Winning?

Every team in every competition in every sport wants to win. That’s what they’d say if you asked them. They go out to play their best, play hard, play well and get the result at the end of the game. Show me a player who walks out onto a field, court or gym and doesn’t do their best. Genuinely, show me, because I don’t know any.

Motivation is easy once you’re out there togged out and the whistle goes. It’s natural. You’re already on the battlefield, it’s sink or swim time. Motivation to prepare to your best ability to give you and your team the best chance of winning, well that’s a bit more difficult.

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. In sports preparation, that’s a phrase to live by. The preparation phase is when you really find out if a team or player wants to win. The team that prepares best to win is the team that’s most likely to win. If you’re better physically, technically, tactically and mentally prepared than your opponent, you are more likely to win. There’s no getting away from that fact.

Many teams, coaches and players out there don’t want to win. What an outrageous statement that is! Let me qualify it a bit. There are many teams, coaches and players who’d LIKE to win, but aren’t willing to PREPARE to win. That’s a bit better. They would like to win, but not if it means they have to change. If you ever hear a sportsperson utter a phrase like “on our day we’re as good as any of them”, you can put your last euro on them not winning the championship they’re in that year. These performers would like to win, but only on their own terms.

There can be a multitude of reasons for that. Pride. Greed. All the deadliest sins are behind an unwillingness to change. Usually, in my experience, it’s not deliberate, but is an unconscious desire on their part to want to win ONLY if they can be coach, captain, leader, star player, whatever. A pride that “this is the way we do things here”. Yet, what good is it to you if you go out year after year to lose.

A wise lecturer recently remarked to me that for many managers in their sport, “losing is acceptable if you make the same mistakes anyone else would have made”. For example, it’s acceptable to pick the injured star player and lose, but not acceptable to drop a star player because he doesn’t fit the tactics needed in the game. There is a great example in the film Moneyball, where coach Art Howe says “I need to pick the team in a way I can explain in job interviews next year” when General Manager Billy Beane wants to make radical changes.

One way managers and coaches try to insure their careers against criticism is to copy what more successful teams do. “If we do what (insert successful team/athlete here) did, then we’ll win”. First, by the time you copy what the winner did, the innovators will have evolved past that so you still won’t win. Second, if all you do is copy others, you ignore the rule of individual difference: what works for one won’t necessarily work for another. Bringing in a Sport Psychologist because Kerry have one or having the team do pilates because Liverpool do it, is unlikely to improve the team unless there is know-how behind it, understanding of what it entails, and belief in it’s efficacy.

To be successful you must take risks. Innovate. Try things. Open your mind to possibilities. Good coaches explore sport science for help to prepare.  Sport&Performance Psychologists, Performance Analysts, Physiotherapists, Nutritionists, Physical Trainers can all offer help to prepare a team. The key is to open your mind, meet with them or try using them with the team or athlete. At worst, they give no help. At best, they improve the team by whatever percent.

Is there an acceptable way to lose? To me, there is. If you have prepared to do one’s best, to have gone out with pride to play the game hard, fair, with skill and to the best of one’s ability, then it is OK to lose. When you can look yourself in the mirror and honestly say “there is nothing more I could have done”, then there is no shame in losing to a superior opponent. That’s what any coach or player wants. To be able to look themselves and one another in the eye and know they gave it everything. No bullshit.