Improve Your Coaching Health: Developing a Structured Format for a Year-End Assessment

written by Bill Utsey, Director of Athletics, Greenville County Schools, Greenville SC

Imagine that your team has just finished a dismal season having shown few signs of progress. Or perhaps the feedback in your community has been overly negative about your program. Alternatively, maybe your program is winning but you want to take it to a higher level of performance. As coach, what can you do to initiate significant change in a positive direction? What would your plan for improvement and change look like?

Even if your program is currently successful, what follows below are a series of suggestions for coaches designed to improve programs and nurture coaching health. These suggestions offer a unique, structured and proactive approach that is coach initiated and will result in a self-generated improvement plan. Also attached to this article are four sample tools you can use to gather data. You can adapt these Excel formatted tools to suit your needs.

Common sense tells me that any good coach already has a general or formative idea of what makes his or her team good or bad, what caused every loss, and what led to every win. In this article I'm going to present you with a structured approach that will give you a summative program assessment with specific, supportive data as to why your team won or lost games.

The goal of any self-assessment is to provide coaches with information that will lead to significant increases in team productivity (i.e. more wins, more positive experiences, more winners!). The included self-assessment can be used to re-affirm the productive things being done in your program that led to wins and successes. More importantly, the information gathered could be used to eliminate the non-productive actions or inactions that led to negative results and failures.

The process outlined in this article will net results for you and your program because it is an exercise done by head coaches for the benefit of themselves and their assistants, the goal being to move the team and program in a positive direction. The process requires you and your assistant coaches to first do some homework: This includes assembling statistical and anecdotal analyses, participating in debate and discussions among the coaching staff, and writing an improvement plan with specific objectives and goals. If by using the process outlined in this article and the four tools attached, you are able to pinpoint one thing that makes you better or helps your student-athletes perform at a higher level, this article will have achieved its purpose.

All assessment tools include a series of questions, data gathering, and deliberations about appropriate measurements. The first step is to generate a set of measurements to form a basis from which coaches can analyze what was done right and what went wrong during the season. The second step is to come up with a series of questions coaches needs to ask themselves about their coaching, program, team, and players. Essentially, these two steps are a "where-are-we-now" analysis. In the business world, this is referred to as a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats).

Where should you begin? What questions should be asked? What measurements and data should be collected and used in the evaluation? I plan to share with you a wide variety of suggested questions (included in the four attached tools), that when executed will give you a clear picture of the things you need to continue doing. Likewise, this self-evaluation process will also enlighten you as to the things you need to do to make the necessary changes that will take your team to a significantly higher level of performance next season or seasons in the future.

Statistical Analysis of Total Season
Let's start with the obvious: A measurement of the statistics of your team's past season. Put these measurements in a table or spreadsheet format. See the attached sample sheet entitled, "Year-End Assessment #1-Statistical Analysis Total Season." The measurements in the chart (in this example they are in football format, but can easily be adapted for any sport), are only examples.

What's essential is charting the data! Your job is to use the chart and adapt it to your sport and liking by selecting measurements that will give you the information you are seeking. The important point is that you want the numbers to tell you something about your team's and your coaches' performances during the past year. So, put some thought into which statistics will talk to you the most. Total season statistics when compared to those of your opponents can show you coaching liabilities and assets as well as the weaknesses and strengths of your team. Each comparable statistic may also highlight where strategies were flawed or personnel were weak. It can also tell you where your teaching needs to be improved.

Statistical Analysis Game-by-Game
You may also want to consider a game-by-game chart showing the statistical measures that will speak the most about how your team won or lost a game. Attached to this article is an Excel spreadsheet with more detail and something you can adapt to your liking (See the attached sample entitled, "Year-End Assessment #2-Statistical Analysis Game by Game"). The measurements or statistics in the table are only suggestions. Again, it's the chart that is essential! You should choose your own meaningful statistical measurements! The criteria for selecting the measurements should be those items that will give you the critical information you want to find out for your assessment needs.

The information you gather should make you think deeper, ask questions, and come up with answers and solutions. This is what the assessment is all about. Information gleaned from team statistics can be very instructive. Such data and information will make you a better coach and if you use the information effectively, your team's performance can and will be ratcheted up to a higher level of play.

Analysis of the "Winning Edges"
The next step is to assess your "Winning Edges." See the attached form "Year-End Assessment #3-Winning Edges" The focus here are the aspects of coaching that more often than not significantly impact winning and losing. You will need to identify what these "Winning Edges" are for yourself and for your program. In my example, I chose to define these "Winning Edge" traits as follows: Talent of Players, Physical Condition of Players, Attitude of Players, and Strategy of Coaches. Like the above statistical analyses, these items are only used as examples. Your task in putting this type of analysis together is to select and define what "Winning Edges" you want to use in your assessment. Some of these 'edges' may include intangibles such as 'toughness' or 'hustle.'

When you develop your "Winning Edges" make sure you have a definition for each "winning edge" and all of your coaches fully understand the impact each makes to winning games. All you need to do next is to set up a chart with a game-by-game column showing where you or your opponent had the 'winning edge' for that particular game in that specific trait. From the "Winning Edges" analysis your objective is to get the vital information about these critical areas and how each item pertained to the performance of your players, team, and coaching during the past season.

Player Surveys or Exit Conferences

One of the most successful coaches in my school district does an exit conference with his seniors after every season. This coach claims it is one of the best coaching improvement tools he has ever used. A sample "Exit Survey" is attached ("Year-End Assessment #4-Player Survey"). You may choose to use this as an anonymous survey with players responding in private or use it in a one-on-one conference with your outgoing seniors or all of your returning players. Select your questions carefully by determining what specific information you are trying to gather. The attached survey contains only sample questions and statements in an "agreement" format.

You may select another format with questions or statements that will pinpoint the information you are seeking. Survey Monkey offers a free player survey online you may find to your liking. What matters most here is not how you administer your survey, but what you do with the information and comments gleaned from such a survey.

Brainstorming or Discussion Sessions
After you have assembled and charted your collective statistics and data for the season you will want to disseminate them to your coaching staff and have them study the data. Your next step is to meet with your coaches, in groups or individually. Such sessions may include your entire staff or a group of selective coaches (picked by you because of their knowledge and experience or your trust in their judgment). The purpose of these meetings is to define your strengths (the good things done that led to wins) and weaknesses (the things done or not done that led to losses).

In a "Brainstorming" session, you will need to set up a specific set of rules. For these sessions to be productive, each participant must be brutally honest, putting every thought, idea, and issue "on the table." These sessions are about the student/athletes and the productive future of the team. The sessions should never be about the personal feelings of coaches. The focus must be on the goal of making the program better for the future.

Typically, a brainstorming session should allow participants to express any idea or issue with no discussion, no limitation, and no threat of repercussion or retribution. If in a session a coach states that a specific strategy used was flawed, then this should be allowed without anyone coming back to debate his statement. The idea of a brainstorming session is the free flow of ideas and comments. These meetings must have an agenda and a recorder who will write down every statement. The agenda should be based upon the statistical analyses and data gathered in the charts and surveys used in your assessments. The head coach should cover each item and ask each session participant to comment on why a particular set of data revealed in the assessment tool was weak or strong.

You may elect to forego the brainstorming idea and simply have discussion sessions. If so, a set of guidelines should be written down and strictly followed for each session. A good example of a guideline is to limit discussion of each item to only two or three minutes, cut it off and quickly go to the next item. As in the brainstorming session above, a written agenda should be followed. At the very least, a list of questions should be used to lead the discussion sessions. As in the brainstorming session, you can expect things to get personal at times in a discussion format. As the head coach you should lead these sessions as an objective facilitator keeping in mind that the results and discussions are all about improving the team.

Regardless of the format used, either method should net you a list of strengths and weakness (or successes and failures). You now have data (statistics, numbers, and opinions from four tools) and input in the form of opinions, ideas, and suggestions from your coaches and, hopefully, from yourself all written down and recorded. All of these opinions and ideas now need to be placed in some kind of order.

Step one is to organize them into groups of positives (things that helped your team with wins and successes) and negatives (things that were lacking or led to losses and failures). Step two is to see if any of the items can be combined because they are closely related or mean the same thing. This will eliminate some items and lower the total number of issues to be addressed in the assessment. In step three, you will want to prioritize each list. This can be done by simply getting consensus on each of the items as to what were the best/worst or strongest/weakest items. One way to do this is to have each coach cast a limited number of votes on a limited number of items.

An example would be for coaches to be given ten votes with the condition that they can only apply them to four items with no more than four votes on any one item. This will net you all the items that are high on your list with the most votes and those low on the list with few votes. This technique works well well in prioritizing which items were the biggest contributors to your success or failure.

Plan of Action
The above process will give you some assemblage of the specific contributors to your successes and failures. Such a comprehensive analysis and study of the statistics and discussions with your coaching staff can make a tremendous difference in what you and your coaches should focus on in the off-season. The next step - the "where-do-we-want-to-go" and the "how-are-we-going-to-get-there" - is to formulate a strategic plan that will maintain what you are doing well and correct or change the things that led to failures. A good strategic plan has goals with objectives under each goal that will lead to its attainment. Each objective must have specific strategies and actions - process goals - that are doable and, if done, the objective is reached. Set a date as to when the action will be initiated for each specific strategy or action.

This entire strategic plan should include a consensus agreement from all of your coaches. If one of the coaching goals you set for the next season is, "reach the second round of the playoffs," then items such as, "increase overall team speed by one tenth of a second in…," is an objective. A goal such as the one above will have many objectives and each objective should have one or many actions or process goals. Your duty is to execute the actions vital in attaining the objective. To enforce and empower the actions, place a timeline or deadline on each of the actions. Timelines are initiators and motivators and will result in action occurring to attain the objectives.

You can now see that the real coaching of a quality high school athletic team is almost all done in the off-season. Gathering all the statistics and having many discussion sessions with your coaches will be a lot of work. And creating a strategic plan put on paper will take a huge collective effort. But remember that as head coach you are the team's leader. A strategic plan well executed takes both leadership and courage.

Summary
When all is said and done, the above processes, whether you choose to use some or all of them, will give you and your coaches many of the why's and how's your team won or lost in competition. More importantly, the information gathered and the discussions and debate you have with your coaches over these data analyses will give you the basis for setting the goals and objectives (with strategies and timelines) for what you and your players must specifically do to improve their performance for the next season and more importantly your coaching health for the future.

Biography: Mr. Bill Utsey is in his 14th year as the District's Director of Athletics. He is a 1970 graduate of The Citadel and holds masters and education specialist degrees from USC. He has been a school athletic director, teacher and head coach in numerous sports. Additionally, he served as principal of Wade Hampton HS for four years. Mr. Utsey is a member of the South Carolina and National Athletic Administrators Associations serving as president of the former (SCAAA). His awards include the SCAAA State Award of Merit and the NIAAA Distinguished Service Award.

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