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AFM Magazine


Follow the Leaders

Developing Senior Leadership on Your Football Team
by: Chris Creighton
Head Football Coach, Ottawa University
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Contrary to the opinion of many people, leaders are not born.
Leaders are made; and they are made by effort and hard work." —Vince Lombardi

Providing leadership is one of a football coaching staff's fundamental responsibilities. Coaches are expected to dictate the direction, set the standard and mold the attitude and character of their team. One of the outcomes of effective leadership is the development and empowerment of other leaders. Are you developing leaders on your football team?

In predicting the promise of an upcoming season or in evaluating a season just passed, coaches often refer to their seniors' leadership as one of the most prominent and determining factors of their team's success. When seniors have strong leadership qualities, coaches have hope for a successful season. We know that the leaders on the team will ultimately dictate the direction of the team's goals, attitudes, effort and character. As coaches, we can select the team's theme, we can hand out T-shirts with the team's goal on the front, and we can give fiery speeches. But in the end, it is those who control the locker room who control the team.

The intentional development of senior leadership is a neglected area in coaching football. Most coaches realize the magnitude of its importance but are not proactive in making it happen. In fact, leadership is viewed as one of the few uncontrollable factors in football. We hope it emerges each season, but we do very little, if anything, to make it happen. It seems as though the majority of coaches do not have a tangible plan to ensure that it happens. Why do so many of us leave such an integral component of success to chance? Senior leadership does not have to be a magical factor that randomly visits certain teams some years and leaves others wanting. Leadership can and should be taught to your team, particularly to your seniors.

Most coaches expect their seniors to be leaders. We assume it to be part of a natural maturation that players finally achieve in their senior year. Yet we all know that assuming anything breaks a golden rule in coaching. You cannot assume anything; you have to make it happen. Do not expect your seniors to be good leaders unless you have coached them to be good leaders.

Create an off-season leadership program

There are many effective ways to develop leadership, and each program should create its own approach. A general suggestion would be to meet regularly with your upcoming seniors in the spring of their junior year. This time is usually used for off-season training; it is also a perfect time to institute your off-season leadership training program. At Ottawa, I meet exclusively with the senior class five times from January to May. In order to communicate the importance of these meetings, we meet in my living room after a pizza dinner or a similar event to make the meeting special. Each senior is given a notebook with a legal pad and a pen. They are expected to bring the notebook to each meeting, take notes, keep handouts, and read articles.

The first meeting has three purposes:

•Define leadership—The chosen definition should be both easy to understand and easy to remember. "Leadership is influence" is our choice. Though leadership is a buzz word, do not assume that your seniors know what it means. Define it for them so that everyone is on the same page.

•Communicate expectations—Communication from the coaching staff is imperative. There is no one special formula for this; each coaching staff should think about their expected outcomes from their seniors as leaders and then make a list. What are the specific situations and where are the opportunities for seniors to provide leadership? The seniors not only need to know what leadership means generally but also what it means specifically in your program.

•Develop unity—Develop a tight bond within the senior class. The coaching staff must be a team within the team and so must the senior class because they will be much stronger leaders, as a whole, if they are unified. Although your seniors may have played together for four years, they might not all know each other beyond a surface level acquaintance. At the senior meetings we plan games and conversations that lead to deeper levels of mutual understanding. Develop a sense of urgency in your seniors. Make them realize that together they can make an enormous impact on dictating the outcome of their final season. A special bond forms when they begin to know each other on a deeper level and realize that, with each other, they can achieve higher goals.

Convince them that their leadership is essential

In the next meeting, it is important to establish why their leadership is so important. The seniors need to be told that it is inevitable that somebody or that some group of players will end up having the greatest influence on the team. This influence can be positive or negative; either way it will dictate the character and direction of the team. Leadership is demanding, difficult, and takes personal sacrifice. But if the senior class does not accept the role, someone else will.

This is also the meeting where we discuss team goals—both for the off-season and for the upcoming fall. Any goals that have been discussed by the coaching staff are shared with the seniors, who are now included in making these decisions. The seniors are challenged to think about their legacy. When the seniors decide the defining characteristic of the team, we encourage them to commit to using their influence to make this happen.

Teach them how to lead

In the remaining meetings we focus on the practicality of leadership. In order for your seniors to begin to learn how to lead, it is important for them to evaluate where they currently stand as team leaders. Using our original definition of leadership we ask them to write down how many players they feel they are influencing and to what degree. Whether they feel they are currently influencing a majority of their teammates or a very few, chances are they will want to have an even greater influence on their teammates.

John Maxwell, in his book, entitled, Developing the Leader Within You, has created a leadership pyramid that defines five different levels of leadership and what it takes to ascend from the bottom level to the top. This pyramid is an extremely useful tool in determining where the seniors stand as leaders. We have rewritten the pyramid with terminology that specifically relates to senior football players. The pyramid provides the seniors with tangible steps to increase and monitor their leadership on the team. The pyramid is our measuring stick for how we are progressing as leaders.

Use a leadership pyramid

•Position—The mere fact that a player is a senior automatically places him in a position of leadership. Seniority in any business initially invites the chance to lead but is the least influential form of leadership.

•Permission—To reach this second level the senior must have gained some influence on his teammates by beginning to develop a relationship with them. The younger players are not following the seniors just because they are older but because a relationship has been established and the underclassmen feel a part of the team. The underclassmen are now following specific people rather than merely acknowledging a more generic position.

•Production—Talk must become action. In the off-season the seniors must be the most committed and the hardest working. Throughout the season they must practice hard, understand the scheme, and be able to execute their assignments. They must produce positive results on and off the field.

•Personal Investment—Most leaders do not make it to this level; separating great leaders from good leaders requires self-sacrifice. Personal investment means deepening your relationships with teammates beyond a surface-level acquaintance. It means putting others' needs before your own; it is serving others.

•Personhood—The final level is reserved for those who have been producing and serving others by personally investing in their lives for years. It is for a select few who have had an influential presence or aura about them throughout their career.

We emphasize "production" and "personal investment." The seniors are challenged to produce. Producing in our program is leading by example on and off the field. The seniors are to commit the most, work the hardest, and invest the most time and energy.

By far the toughest challenge for our seniors is to attain level four: to personally invest in the lives of their teammates. Putting teammates before yourself is unnatural. As a senior it is extremely difficult to not be selfish, but we believe that serving others is the best and most effective way to lead. Most seniors get caught up in leadership as a right. Leading by seniority, fear or intimidation can be effective to a certain degree but eventually will not get the most out of those you are trying to lead. When seniors can place underclassmen above themselves, ultimate leadership is achieved. Hazing freshmen, in the end, is only detrimental. Underclassmen will willingly run through a brick wall for seniors who serve them and genuinely invest in their lives. Sun Tzu, the fifth century B.C. Chinese war lord, rightly recognized this concept, "Treat your soldiers like your own beloved son and they will walk through the valley of death with you."

Create opportunities for leadership

Throughout the off-season we constantly provide leadership opportunities for our seniors. This year at Ottawa we put seniors in charge of running one workout each week on their own. No coaches were present. It was the seniors' chance to lead and to make the workout the best one of the week. This was a great way for them to evaluate how much influence they had over the team.

Another leadership opportunity for our seniors in the off-season involves our annual "Team Competition." Each year, our seniors captain one of four teams that they draft in the winter. The teams compete in academics, class attendance, strength, agility, running, raising money for our lift-a-thon, a basketball tournament a softball tournament, a bowling tournament, and various other competitive situations. The team competitions enable the seniors to lead a smaller group and invest in those teammates' lives. This daily responsibility allows them to put into practice all that they are learning in our meetings.

Servant leadership on Pike's Peak

At Ottawa during the summer before the seniors' final season, we take the entire coaching staff and the senior class on an annual trip to Pike's Peak in Colorado Springs, Colo. This trip is the culminating event of the off-season leadership series. There are numerous purposes for the trip such as class bonding, overcoming adversity, further goal-setting and a mountain-top experience. The main reason for the trip, however, is to focus on servant leadership.

In a meeting before we depart for the mountain, we discuss the concept of servant leadership at length and assign "Pike's Peak Partners." Each senior is paired up with another senior and, for the entire trip, the partners stay together and go all out in serving each other. For our players, it is very unnatural and uncomfortable at first, but the end-result is always amazing. In the van-ride to Colorado each set of partners is given a lengthy list of questions that they answer in an attempt to get to know each other on a deeper level.

The service component of the trip is the heart of the experience. Our players spend the entire weekend putting their partner before themselves. Serving may mean anything from buying lunch for their partner to carrying their backpack on the climb up the mountain. It is exciting to see skill players walking slowly next to their lineman partner.

This past year we blind folded one player at a time so that they were totally dependent on their partner for leadership. The experience is incredible. At 14,000 feet, with very little oxygen, and after 10 and-a-half hours of constant climbing, it is difficult to put someone else's needs before your own.

The one thing I noticed when we were climbing was that we stuck together as one group. When someone would fall behind, we would stop and let them rest. That person would then go to the front of the line; we didn't leave anyone behind. When someone was hurting, we put them first, encouraged them and let them know we were there. That this is how we overcame the mountain, and it is how we will overcome adversity in the season—by coming together as one and by helping those who are hurting and down.

What's A Coach To Do?

Coaches have done a good job in teaching players to approach contact with the head up. However, that is only half of the battle. It is instinctive to drop the head at contact to protect the eyes and face. I believe players who lower their head's at the last instant have not received enough practice time to overcome this powerful instinct. It's time to teach players to keep their head up at contact. Because football is a high speed, change of direction sport, not every contact can be initiated with the shoulder. But with proper instruction players can keep their head up. This greatly reduces the risk of axial loading to the cervical spine.

One common coaching error is the teaching of face-first contact. Initiating contact with the facemask is a high school rules violation and teaching it creates a liability nightmare. More importantly, poor execution of this technique places athletes in the spearing position and at risk of paralysis. There is a fine line between initiating shoulder contact with the head up and initiating face first contact. But it must be clearly drawn regarding what is taught. It is crucial for your entire coaching staff to be on the same page regarding these concepts.

The majority of coaches, officials, and players have never been associated with a catastrophic neck injury. Realistically most never will. Regardless of the probability, you must appreciate the movement to reduce head-down contact in the sport. Put the research and information to work. Eliminate head-down contact and the risk of paralysis goes with it. Increase the time spent on practicing correct contact techniques. Design drills that focus on shoulder contact with the head-up for all positional players. Run them regularly. The weekly review of game film presents an excellent opportunity to give players regular feedback on head position. There are roughly 20 spears per team in a game. Every coaching staff should aim toward keeping head-down contacts by their team to five or less.

Everyone associated with football has a moral responsibility to do all in their power to eliminate head-down contact from the sport. This includes coaches, medical professionals, officials, and administrators. Before an injury occurs we all must be able to say- "I've done everything possible to protect my athletes from paralysis."- and say it in good conscience. Because sometimes it may take 250,000 spears before an injury occurs and sometimes it will take only one.

Maintain the training throughout the season

During the season I will formally meet with the senior class once every two weeks. These meetings will give our seniors a chance to stay together in purpose and discuss how everything is going. It also gives the coaching staff a chance to encourage them and to provide counsel and further direction.

Conclusion

There is a direct correlation between a team's success and the quality of positive leadership from the senior class. Coaches expect seniors to be effective leaders, but many of us shirk our responsibility of coaching leadership. Our ability to develop leaders on our football team is a true reflection of our own leadership ability. Take the time to create a plan for growing leaders—it will produce tangible results both on the playing field and in the character of your players lives.






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