Читать книгу Get More. A Championship coach's Formula for Achieving Breakthrough Results онлайн

31 страница из 53

I’ve known a good friend of mine for almost a quarter century, since our days at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Our wives use to work together, we were business partners at one time, and now we both coach for The King’s Academy High School in West Palm Beach, Florida. Jake Webb is the head varsity boys’ lacrosse coach at The Kings Academy, and I coach varsity boys’ soccer. Jake didn’t play a lick of lacrosse as a kid, but Jake is a competitor. We used to play intramural sports against each other in college, so I know. Many times in coaching I’ll lose a battle to win the war. Jake is going to try to win all the battles and the war.

He probably never played soccer as a kid. I’ve been playing all my life. The first year my son was playing pee-wee soccer, we were in the playoff finals of five- and six-year-old coed soccer. I’ll never forget it, because it was so fascinating. Our teams were in the finals, and I had a good team. They had been fantastic all season. I think the only time we lost was when we were missing players and playing down a man. We were in this championship finals game against Jake’s team. Now again, we are talking about mostly five- and six-year-olds, so this was like super fun, and we were just having a great time of it as players, coaches, and parents. There were some rules on substitutions, I think, at the time, or maybe we had our own internal rules—can’t recall exactly—but what I remember is his strategy. Every time I subbed a couple of my better players out, he would immediately sub all his best players back in. I mean, I noticed this within the first couple of times it happened. He had scouted us and worked out a strategy, a winning strategy, in five- to six-year-olds recreational soccer to win the championship in a sport he never played. It still makes me laugh.