FINDING THEIR FIGHT
Female athletes can struggle with unleashing their competitive drive. The best coaches know how to help them turn it on.
By Kenny Berkowitz
Kenny Berkowitz is an Assistant Editor at Coaching Management. He can be reached at: kb@MomentumMedia.com
In 2001, after seven years of coaching boys’ and girls’ high school volleyball, Leanne Ulmer took the reins at NCAA Division III Carthage College. The program was in desperate need of an overhaul: In its four previous seasons, the Lady Reds had continually finished in last place in their conference, recording one victory in their last 28 league games.
The athletes were demoralized, their performances sloppy, and their expectations low. Worst of all, they didn’t know how to compete.
To turn them around, Ulmer immediately restructured practices to bring out her athletes’ sense of competitiveness. She set concrete goals for every drill and refused to accept anything less than their best.
“I think of myself as a winner, and from the start, that’s what I expected out of this program, too,” says Ulmer, who’s since led the team to a 162-57 record with 23 consecutive conference wins and three straight conference championships. “Everything we did in practice was about being competitive, exuding a sense of self-confidence, and seeing ourselves as winners. They learned to be competitors.”
What does it take to bring out a “we’ll do anything to win” attitude in your players? How do you light a fire under them? In this article, we’ll provide drills that teach competitiveness, explain the competitive cauldron, and discuss the psychological side of the issue.
Outside Their Comfort Zone
From a young age, most boys are trained to be competitive. By the time they reach high school, male athletes are ready and willing to compete at just about anything. But for many young women, even elite female athletes, the experience of growing up has been very different.
In her book, Gender and Competition: How Men and Women Approach Work and Play Differently, AVCA Executive Director Kathy DeBoer writes about some of those differences. At the pre-teen level, she explains, male athletes compete from the moment they enter the gym, while female athletes sit on the bleachers, waiting for their friends to arrive before picking up a ball and engaging in cooperative play. Even in elite international play, she’s found that females spend far more time perfecting their technique and far less time in competitive drills than their male counterparts.
The solution, says DeBoer, is for coaches to keep pushing female athletes out of their comfort zones, teaching women to set aside cooperative play in exchange for hard-fought competition. Instead of assuming female athletes know how to compete, coaches at the high school and college levels need to make competing a regular, disciplined, and evaluated part of every workout.
After coaching both males and females, Ulmer agrees completely. “You don’t have to teach guys to be competitive,” she says. “They compete at everything—whether they’re warming up, playing in a game, or just hanging out together. But female athletes tend to have issues with self-esteem or feeling afraid they won’t be liked if they play too hard. As coaches, we have to train them to step outside the group and take charge in competitive situations.”
In one early demonstration of the issue, Ulmer asked athletes at Carthage to pick their own three-on-three teams. The result? The most competitive players chose each other, while the least competitive players picked their friends, regardless of skill. For Ulmer, the message was clear: Before they could win, the Lady Reds needed to rethink their competitive strategy. “Guys would have tried to form teams that would win,” she says, “while the girls were content to just pick their friends, even if they didn’t stand a chance of winning.”
Drilling Intensity
Paul Dill, Head Men’s and Women’s Volleyball Coach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has witnessed a similar dynamic with his teams. When his men’s team hits the gym for practice, they have one question: “Coach, when are we going to play?” His female athletes, on the other hand, are eager to work tirelessly on honing their skills and are less comfortable competing with one another.
That’s why one of Dill’s top priorities with his women’s team is to bring out their competitive drive. He does this by spending less time on safe, no-stakes drills and instead places his female athletes in competitively charged situations every day in practice. Many of his drills are, in fact, do-or-die scenarios, like his “first kill” drill.
“This is a six-on-six drill where we’re feeding balls in and the offensive team can’t rotate until every player in the front row has a kill,” Dill explains. “Every time, it will come down to one player who hasn’t made a kill. Everybody knows the set is going to her, and it places tremendous pressure on her.
"It can lead to a lot of frustration and a very tense atmosphere, but that’s what I want,” he continues. “This player has to beat her teammates to get out of the situation, and if she can find the grit to push herself in a practice situation, she’ll find it in a match. I tell my women’s team to expect our practices to be just as competitive as our matches, if not more so.”
At St. John’s University (N.Y.), Head Coach Joanne Persico-Smith also runs very competitive practices. Every drill has a winner and a loser, with clearly understood consequences—generally sprints, pushups, sit-ups, or volleyball skill drills. That way, says Persico-Smith, every athlete knows why she’s competing, and it becomes clear which players are more competitive than others.
Persico-Smith also pays close attention to what will or won’t motivate her team to be competitive. “For example, if your team loves to run sprints, you can’t make that the punishment for losing a scrimmage,” she says. “You need to offer incentives and disincentives that will challenge them as a team. They need to see the whole group improving to feel the sense of accomplishment that comes along with it.”
Ulmer keeps her practices competitive with constantly shifting two-on-two and three-on-three drills, creating an atmosphere where every athlete is expected to give her full concentration. “We do whatever drills will make our kids compete with everything they’ve got,” says Ulmer. “It could be as simple as a relay race or a game of tag, as long as there’s a winning team that receives praise and a losing team that faces the consequences. And with every drill, they know exactly what we’re looking for and we talk about the results afterward.
“The more competitive drills you give your athletes and the more you talk to them about the end result, the sooner they’ll learn to compete,” she continues. “If you want your athletes to be more competitive, everything you do in your program has to be about competition. Any time you give your athletes a drill that doesn’t have a goal and any time you forget to talk about the results, you’ve lost an opportunity.”
She makes sure the team’s scrimmages are hard fought, too. “If they scrimmage, we’ll give them lots of challenges along the way, like shaking up the rules so they can’t rotate until they get two sideouts in a row,” says Ulmer. “If we don’t keep coming up with different nuances, the team will lose focus and the scrimmage will stop being competitive.”
Chris Catanach, Head Coach at the University of Tampa, adds a layer of competitiveness to his team’s practices by scoring every drill, then keeping a tally of each day’s wins and losses. “Everything we do is scored, because every time we emphasize scoring, we’re training for competition,” says Catanach. “To make players more competitive, everything has to revolve around scoring points. Athletes have to stay focused on that end result.”
Catanach emphasizes this point by asking athletes to tell him the score in the middle of a drill or scrimmage—with an extra task to be completed for wrong answers. “Winning isn’t everything,” he says. “But if athletes don’t play to win every time they hit the court, they’re not being competitive.”
Along with walking the walk, Catanach expects his players to talk the talk. “We want to hear competitive banter during practice,” he says. “When you watch a typical men’s practice, there are usually some pretty heated exchanges over scores, points, or just about anything. We want some of that same competitive intensity on our team, so we’re happy to see players arguing over a drill—anything but walking away.”
Inside the Cauldron
Some coaches take the idea of scoring drills to another level: They use the totals to determine who will start. Modeled after a system invented by Anson Dorrance, Head Women’s Soccer Coach at the University of North Carolina, the competitive cauldron gives athletes a score for every practice drill. Then, using a system of multipliers that weighs six-on-six scrimmages more heavily than general fitness exercises, those points are tallied into a single number. A running total is kept over a certain number of days, which is used to determine the starting lineup of each match.
Carl McGown, a coach and consultant at Gold Medal Squared Volleyball Camps and Clinics and former Head Men’s Coach at Brigham Young University, is a big believer in the system. “With the competitive cauldron, we’re objectively evaluating every athlete’s performance and strictly assigning playing time according to merit,” he says. “It holds every athlete accountable for every aspect of his or her performance. All it takes is a spreadsheet and about 15 minutes after practice.”
In McGown’s version of the cauldron, athletes are scored in group drills, tournaments against other players in their position, and six-on-six scrimmages with shifting rules and teammates. The scores are totaled every day after practice, the results are posted for everyone to see, and the leading scorer at each position earns a starting role in the next match.
“When athletes know they’re being graded, it makes the practice much more competitive,” McGown says. “It creates a training intensity you won’t otherwise get.”
Though the cauldron has its critics, McGown counters that with its emphasis on scoring, the system lends itself perfectly to volleyball, especially women’s volleyball. “People say that girls can’t withstand the pressure,” he says. “But in fact, we know lots of teams where females work very well with this kind of competition. As coaches, we have to teach them it’s okay to compete.”
University of Utah Head Coach Beth Launiere has adapted some of the ideas of the cauldron on the way to making the Utes a top-20 squad. “If you want your team to be competitive in games, they need to be competitive in practices,” she says. “There are definitely times when you have to teach skills, like in the offseason or even during the fall when athletes need to work on reps. But we score virtually every drill we do in practice, track who’s winning and losing, and accumulate those scores over a 10-day period. It’s not about keeping statistics. It’s about keeping track of who’s really competing from one day to the next.”
However, Launiere does not emphasize who is beating whom. “We let them know individually where they stand, but we don’t publicly post rankings of one through 12, because I don’t think women want to feel they’re always competing against their teammates,” she explains. “No matter how hard they compete, they need to know they’re part of a team.”
The key, says Launiere, is to find the right mix between creating chemistry and training competitiveness. “One of the most important things in women’s athletics is to strike a balance between the two,” she says. “Athletes have to understand that you’re trying to make them into the best team they can be. That’s why they have to compete so hard in practice and why you need to make sure you’re putting your best players into a match. At the same time, they have to buy into the greater good of the team and believe they’re working towards a common goal. On this team, everyone understands the group comes first and the way we will reach our team goal is for everyone to compete as individuals in practice.”
Launiere also believes there’s such a thing as making practices too competitive, so the team occasionally conducts a practice or two without scoring. “When they need a rest from competing, we work on sharpening skills,” says Launiere. “When they can get a break, they come back refreshed.”
Easing Into It
Making your players more competitive won’t happen overnight, and in fact, coaches say it shouldn’t. Because most females have not had intensely competitive practices, it’s important to slowly introduce them to your players. And it’s important to talk to them about what you’re doing.
“I spend a lot of time explaining to my women’s team why I want a competitive focus in practice,” says Dill. “I tell them the goal in competing hard is to make their teammates better, not to embarrass them. After we do a drill that makes them uncomfortable, we talk about it. I ask them how it made them feel, and we work through it together.
“Another key has been creating the right atmosphere to make this level of competitiveness tolerable,” he continues. “Early on, I only focused on making them competitive, and I saw a lot of players become frustrated. I learned that to focus this hard on competition with women, you need an underlying team culture that’s very supportive. They need to know that even though they just went through a drill that completely exposed them, everyone on the team still cares about them and no one is mad at them. In that environment, they’re not afraid to make mistakes, and that allows them to compete as hard as I want them to.”
At Campolindo High School in Moraga, Calif., which won the Division III Girls’ State Championship in 2006, Head Coach Scott Bishop feels another key to making female athletes more competitive is to help them overcome the fear of failure. “Not knowing how to handle failure can make it very hard for females to stay competitive when they’re struggling,” says Bishop. “Their self-esteem is wrapped up in their current performance, so the worse they play, the worse they feel about themselves.
“When my players are caught in a vicious circle like that, I tell them that all good teams struggle, but it’s the great teams that can bounce back,” continues Bishop. “Over the course of a tough match, they need to expect that every member of the team is going to be challenged, but it’s how they deal with it that is going to make the difference between winning and losing. So I ask them, ‘If you make a mistake, will you be able to put it behind you? What will it take before you can move on to the next point?’”
Bishop takes the shame out of making mistakes by encouraging athletes to play hard, take chances, and challenge themselves. “As long as we’re moving in the right direction, I’m glad to see a lot of positive, aggressive errors,” he says. “It’s like John Wooden said: ‘Winners make the most mistakes.’ If they’re pushing themselves to improve their technique, I don’t mind the errors. Ultimately, it is making them more confident and competitive.”
Ulmer agrees that it’s crucial for the losers in practice situations to not internalize the wrong message. “There are always consequences to winning and losing, and everyone has to face that fact,” she says. “As coaches, our job is to help the girls deal with a loss in a way that they don’t walk away thinking they’re losers because they didn’t get the point. Most guys don’t have that kind of internal self-talk, but a lot of girls do.
“To keep outcomes from getting personal, coaches need to turn every exercise into a lesson about why everyone has to work on a particular technique and why the choices we make are so important,” continues Ulmer. “You can’t just talk about how great one athlete is. After each drill, talk about why some people succeeded and others didn’t.”
Understanding that female high school athletes can also have a difficult time competing against teammates, Bishop plays up the idea of competition being an inner struggle. “We take the focus off competing against other people and put it on competing against yourself,” he says. “We’re trying to establish a mindset where athletes stop comparing themselves to the person next to them. Their first priority is the only thing they solely control: their own effort. And the only comparison that matters is with the best they’ve been able to play in the past. So I’ll ask, ‘Are you trying to surpass that? Did you play to the best of your ability? Did you give your maximum effort?’”
Life Lessons
While teaching athletes to be competitive on the court can rack up more wins, coaches also emphasize how it will help them succeed in life. “We think we’re training our athletes to be better volleyball players, but really our job is to help them grow as human beings,” says Persico-Smith. “It’s about making good decisions under pressure.”
“As coaches, the most important thing we can do is develop our players,” adds Ulmer. “To keep moving forward, females need self-esteem. Stay positive with them and let them know there’s nothing they can’t do if they work hard enough.
“Teach them not to be afraid of competition and not be afraid to go after a goal that seems out of reach,” continues Ulmer. “As much as we want to win, what really matters is making a positive impact on our athletes’ lives. If you can keep everything in perspective, you’ll have a positive program and a winning program.”
To read a more in-depth discussion of coaching different genders, see Kathy DeBoer’s article, “A Balanced Attack,” in Athletic Management’s Feb/March 2007 issue, which can be accessed at: www.AthleticManagement.com
