Key to Success: Flexibility

by Karol Crosbie

“We’ve got to win! Bottom line.” With that as the most oft-quoted coaching mantra, flexibility might not immediately come to mind as one of the most essential attributes of the successful coach. But look more closely, and you see it at every turn.

Jerry Hammaker '89 coaches the women's swim team at Lycoming College.

Motivating the individual

Seth Duerr: “Probably one of the most important things in coaching is knowing your players on an individual basis and knowing what they respond to. Sometimes that may take a while.”

Jerry Hammaker: “I remember one summer, I had a female athlete who really liked attention. If you didn’t acknowledge that she had tried hard, the next day she wouldn’t try as hard. At the same time, I had a guy who was motivated the most when he had no attention. The more attention you gave him, the worse he did. So I learned to just give him a little look in the eye and nod my head.”

Adapting a personal style

Pete Meyer: “When I went to the deep South to coach, I had to harness some of the intensity that I’d picked up from Coach P. at Wooster. I just needed a more laid-back style.”

Changing strategies

Most coaches agree that their strategies are predicated by the talents of their individual team members. But perhaps no coach is faced with a more drastic shifting of talents from year to year than the Division III coach. Consider Coach Meese’s 2006 and 2007 seasons. The 2006 season marked the culmination of a four-year cycle, one in which Meese’s players had reached their full potential and ended with a 12-0 championship season.

And then fall 2007 arrived. Five players had graduated. One starter went overseas, another decided not to play. The team’s All- American member broke her collarbone in the second game. A third of the way into the season, the team was 1 and 4. “That was a very different kind of season,” says Meese. “It was hard for a team of returning players to take, after being conference champions.”

Meese’s first priority was to rebuild confidence by defining new goals. They would strive to be in the top five, and they would work toward being the first team to score in every game. “If you score first, you put more pressure on a team,” Meese explains. The team began marking their successes, including their small ones.

Second, Meese needed to develop a new field formation, based on the skills of her new players. “Part of coaching is not fitting people into a system, but creating a system around your people,” says Meese.

The Scots finished the season 11-7 as a rebuilt team ready for 2008, which will be a season of loftier goals and more experienced players. For Meese, this is the best kind of coaching. “Some of my best experiences have been in losing seasons.Not that I didn’t love going 12 and 0 last year in the Conference, but watching this team pick themselves up after they got a lot of kicking around and then becoming more confident and believing in themselves—that’s fun!

“To me, that’s the best fun of coaching—not taking the elite team and keeping them there, but taking the team that could go there and getting them to start the process.

“I love that.”