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02-25-2005, 12:39 AM
FROM INSIDE LACROSSE MAGAZINE:
subscription information @ www.insidelacrosse.com
Winston Churchill or Captain Caveman?
You can take just about any approach to the pregame speech. Here’s some stories and pointers from the best in ?the game
BY John Jiloty (Inside Lacrosse Magazine, Nov. 12, 2004)
Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” speech is so famous that many people—Notre Dame fans or not—can recite it word for word. It inspired the Irish to go out and upset heavily favored Army back in 1928 and has gone down as one of the most legendary speeches in any sport of all time. Even Charles S. Dutton breaks from his stoic character Fortune in Rudy when Rudy does his Rockne impersonation in an empty Irish locker room.
The Gipper speech was just one in a symphony of Rockne classics. And largely because of his ability to fire up his players, Rockne is one of the all-time great coaches.
Unfortunately, though, there is no science to giving locker room speeches. No flash cards for the new coach. No Locker Room Speeches For Dummies. Most coaches aren’t even comfortable talking about it. (You may as well be asking them to verbalize how to catch and throw.)
Each coach, each team and each game is different.
More importantly, each player is different. So how do you motivate a team that includes some meatheads who get fired up by a coach putting his fist through a chalkboard and some thinkers who respond only to a philosophical story about, say, building a church? How do you know when the team needs to be ramped up with some fire and brimstone and when the edge needs to be dulled with a little humor? How do you know when to use the opponent as motivation and when to keep it in your house?
What about props, theatrics or even … fire?
Well, after conversations with more than 20 lacrosse coaches and players, it’s obvious there are no clear-cut answers to these questions.
However, that doesn’t mean the experts didn’t have anything interesting to say. And since halftime speeches are more a product of the first half, we’re focusing on how to address the team before the game. So pay attention.
THE SCENE: Hobart’s Boswell Field, Syracuse vs. Hobart, April 19, 1986.
The scenario: The Orange are coming off a loss in the DI final the previous season, while the Statesmen are the defending DIII national champs. Gorgeous day. About 9,000 fans are piled into the 5,000-seat Boz for what is at the time the biggest game in Upstate New York every year. Adding to the intrigue, the game wasn’t played the previous season because of a measles outbreak on Hobart’s campus. And it’s the first year the Kraus-Simmons Trophy is awarded to the rivalry’s winner.
The Hobart boys are a little tense in the locker room before the game. So what does coach Dave Urick do to lighten the mood?
“I just said that fans were out there sitting on top of porta-johns,” he says. “So it’s gotta be a big game.”
The result: Hobart 16, Syracuse 13—the last time the Statesmen have beaten the Orange.
The reason (okay, part of it): Urick correctly observed that the pressure and electricity of such a huge game had his players too nervous and jittery. He knew that he needed to poke some of the air out of the bubble before it burst. “It’s a matter of being able to read your team,” he says. “Obviously—that’s what they pay you for.”
Buffalo Bandits coach Darris Kilgour admits to struggling with that early in his coaching career when he was in charge of the NLL’s Washington Power. Arguably one of the most fiery, intense players in box lacrosse history (he was once so amped up that it took most of his team to keep him from ripping an opponent’s head off—at the postgame party), Kilgour took that right into the start of his head coaching career. “It was just raw emotion,” he says. “I was flying by the seat of my pants.” As a result, he says his players would be too excited, make mental mistakes and try to win games in the first quarter. He’s since learned to curb that emotion.
That’s one of the unique things about lacrosse. It’s most like football schedule-wise, but because of the intricate skills, players can’t go tearing out of the locker room ready to eat their sticks.
“In lacrosse you need to catch and throw and execute on offense, so you can’t get so worked up that you can’t execute things you need to do on the field skill-wise,” Urick says. “You don’t want guys coming out blowing snot bubbles.”
Former Toronto Rock coach Les Bartley, who was just named the franchise’s vice president, is known as a master of figuring out the right way to address his players before gametime—so much so that in 2003 after winning his fourth Champion’s Cup in five years he was asked by Brock University to teach a class on leadership and was approached by more than one corporation to give motivational speeches to its employees. He used to talk to every player during warmups and give them the “psychological sandwich”, which is telling the person what good he’s doing, adding some things or making some corrections and then asking if he’s comfortable and telling him to keep up the good work. This gave him the gauge he needed to know how to give his locker room speech and also checked off a lot of the personal pregame responsibilities for players. Then when the players went out for a final warmup he stayed in the locker room to prepare his speech. Back in the early days of his coaching career he says he wrote out his speeches and read them verbatim off paper, but learned eventually to just write down “trigger words” so it flowed more naturally.
“You need to sense as a coach whether you need to pull them down off the rafters because they’re too high or get rid of some of the funning around and get their heads in the game,” he says.
Another master of this is of course Roy Simmons, Jr., whose approach really can’t be compared to anyone else’s in lacrosse, or possibly any sport for that matter. “He’d pull out anything from Mae West to Vince Lombardi,” says his son, SU assistant Roy Simmons, III.
Simmons’ legend is so great that this year SU’s players requested to have him speak to them before the NCAA Semifinals and Final in Baltimore. He claims he was taken off guard by the request but spoke anyway, running with the familiar threads of emotion, hustle and positive energy that characterized the free-wheeling Syracuse teams that won six NCAA titles under his guidance.
Gary Gait still remembers some of Simmie’s speeches. One revolved around building a church and talked about how someone went around interviewing everyone while they were working on it. The carpenter said he was putting up walls. The plumber said he was installing pipes. On and on until the interviewer got to someone sweeping the floors. He said he was building a church. The moral: everyone’s important to the team.
Then there’s one about the potato farmer who always outsold his competitors because he was the first one ready at the market. He was able to sell so well because, rather than wait to sort his potatoes when he got there, he let them sort themselves in a wheelbarrow on the way there—the big potatoes jumping to the top and the small ones sinking to the bottom. The moral: go out there and be a big potato.
Roy III remembers another where his dad was yelling at his players, demanding to know whose middle name is “The”. Naturally, no one had any idea. The answer, of course, is Winnie the Pooh.
The point here is that you can use just about anything.
“I won a lotta ballgames when we didn’t have the best team on the field and I knew that,” Simmons, Jr. says. “The difference was attitude and passion. Sometimes it happened in reverse too. We came up short because we didn’t give the enemy enough respect. You have to make them believe they can win. You have to erase any doubt in their mind. If we work hard enough and do what we practiced, the reward will come on the scoreboard.”
You can’t just pick a pregame speech out of a hat, though. Simmons spent a lot of time researching for those anecdotes. There is a certain delicacy about what to say.
When Richie Meade is asked about his pregame speech before last year’s national championship game, he tells a fascinating story about how he was sitting in the officer’s club at West Point 12 years prior watching the national championship game on TV when he was an assistant for Army. A colleague asked him what his goal as a coach was. He said it was to win a national championship on Memorial Day at Navy.
Great story, right?
The players never heard it.
“At the end of the day when you’re coaching, it’s never about you,” he says. “It’s not about my deal. My deal is between me and me.
“Beyond all the external stuff everyone was talking about last year at the final four was internal and the meaningful accomplishment of our players.”
Meade eschews the importance of pregame speeches in favor of a more tailored approach. He frequently puts written passages in everyone’s lockers before games—handwritten notes from him, photocopied stories, some general to the whole team, some just for one player. “It’s more meaningful if they read it by themselves and digest it,” he says.
This thinking-man’s approach can work on just about anybody. Even a guy like Pat Coyle, one of the NLL’s most physical and, some say, dirty players. Eight years ago noted sports psychologist Dr. David Cox (who works with numerous Canadian national teams) spoke to his Coquitlam Adanacs summerball team. What he said completely changed Coyle’s approach to pregame preparation.
Cox brought in a 20-foot-long two-by-four and asked the players how many would be willing to walk across it. Of course, everyone raised their hand. Then he asked how many would walk across it if the same piece of wood was perched between two towers 50 feet in the air. No one raised their hand.
“That hit me like a sledgehammer,” Coyle says. “Athletes start worrying about outcomes. If you think about failing, chances are you’re going to fail. If I think, ‘I can’t get beat, I can’t get beat’ I get beat, instead of focusing on having quick feet and good position. It’s amazing.”
That doesn’t mean the meathead approach doesn’t work. Even Coyle says many of his teammates viewed Dr. Cox’s presentation as “new-age spiritual BS”. One DI coach says he relies almost solely on emotion and getting his players “ready to kill somebody.” He goes so far as to say he tries to recruit kids who he knows will react to that method of prodding—and avoids those who don’t.
There are plenty of opportunities for that in any locker room. Bill Tierney and Dave Pietramala are pretty fiery guys and they’re two of the best college coaches in the country. Brian Dougherty describes former Maryland coach **** Edell’s style as turning his players into timebombs: “He wanted us to be ticking and ticking and ticking until Saturday at 1 when we were ready to explode.”
As Kilgour already alluded to, though, a crucial strategy is mixing it up. If a coach comes in ranting and raving before every game, it’s going to get old. Just about every coach and player stresses how important it is to be genuine. Because if you’re not, the players will pick up on it immediately.
“You’re like the barometer,” says Simmons, Jr. “If you have a defeatist attitude, they can measure it in your facial and body expressions. If you do something totally unorthodox like you feel you can’t win without your game, the ripple effect is bad. They measure you more than you measure them. If they sense any kind of fear or trepidation, it will be infectious. You have to project the right attitude.”
Bartley says this can be anything from verbal ticks to hand gestures to facial expressions. He recommends giving a speech in front of a mirror or having assistants watch and give feedback. “Players read you like a book,” he says.
?Bates coach Peter Lasagna tells a hilarious story about a timeout speech he gave in a fourth quarter when he wanted to preach to his players how important it was to play with poise. But by the time he got to the message, he looked like Yosemite Sam, cranked to full volume with viens popping and spit flying. Fortunately, they still won.
That’s the intriguing part: it’s not always in the coach’s hands. A legendary fire and brimstone speech can still lead to a listless loss. And a flat pregame can still lead to a rousing victory. Plus, what you plan doesn’t always work out like you hoped. That can happen with stuff like this. Just ask Howard Dean.
One DI coach brought in a newspaper article that said his team was going to get worked by the opponent. He tore it up and threw it against the wall. His team still got worked. An MIAA coach was giving a pregame speech when a player let out a loud flatulence. The room cracked up. “Well, I guess we’re going to win,” was all the coach could say. They won.
Kilgour remembers a game when he swung and knocked a bottle off a table during his speech. It flew into assistant Dave Huntley’s stomach and everyone lost it. Virginia coach Dom Starsia recalls a game at Brown when his coach Cliff Stevenson ended his speech by saying something to the effect of, “I’m Batman!” “We were all like, ‘What the hell is he talking about?” he says.
Coyle describes some of his pregame addresses as train wrecks. “You wanna stop and say, ‘Okay, let’s start again,’” he says. “But you can’t.”
Princeton coach Bill Tierney once lashed into his players on the bus—pacing up and down the aisle—and made the mistake of ending his tirade at the back. Urick thought he had the ultimate halftime speech once when Hobart was down to a Carolina team that was riding an intimidating win streak. He wanted to pounce on momentum gained right before the whistle so he jumped up on the bench and declared, “The folks are as good as the people!” It makes sense: that Hobart is just as good as Carolina. But it sailed over everyone’s heads like a failed clear. “I thought I was being pretty innovative and clever,” Urick says. “They looked at me like, ‘What is he talking about?’”
You can borrow stuff—Starsia’s speech before the Cavs won the 2003 NCAA final came from Richie Moran’s talk at the NCAA Banquet that weekend.
You can repeat stuff—Dougherty remembers a classic line Edell used before every Navy game: “These guys are jumping on grenades while you guys are blacking out at Bentley’s.”
You can borrow people—New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick addressed Navy before its game with Princeton at last year’s final four and Mike Krzyzewski has addressed Duke’s women’s team.
You can even lie—Rumor has it many of Rockne’s motivational speeches were fibs. George Gipp existed, but it’s been alleged he never told Rockne on his deathbed to send the Irish out for him.
So what? It worked.
If you can use anything from Winnie the Pooh to Batman, porta-johns, potatoes and churches, you can obviously use any number of methods to address your team.
Just don’t say the wrong thing.
subscription information @ www.insidelacrosse.com
Winston Churchill or Captain Caveman?
You can take just about any approach to the pregame speech. Here’s some stories and pointers from the best in ?the game
BY John Jiloty (Inside Lacrosse Magazine, Nov. 12, 2004)
Knute Rockne’s “Win one for the Gipper” speech is so famous that many people—Notre Dame fans or not—can recite it word for word. It inspired the Irish to go out and upset heavily favored Army back in 1928 and has gone down as one of the most legendary speeches in any sport of all time. Even Charles S. Dutton breaks from his stoic character Fortune in Rudy when Rudy does his Rockne impersonation in an empty Irish locker room.
The Gipper speech was just one in a symphony of Rockne classics. And largely because of his ability to fire up his players, Rockne is one of the all-time great coaches.
Unfortunately, though, there is no science to giving locker room speeches. No flash cards for the new coach. No Locker Room Speeches For Dummies. Most coaches aren’t even comfortable talking about it. (You may as well be asking them to verbalize how to catch and throw.)
Each coach, each team and each game is different.
More importantly, each player is different. So how do you motivate a team that includes some meatheads who get fired up by a coach putting his fist through a chalkboard and some thinkers who respond only to a philosophical story about, say, building a church? How do you know when the team needs to be ramped up with some fire and brimstone and when the edge needs to be dulled with a little humor? How do you know when to use the opponent as motivation and when to keep it in your house?
What about props, theatrics or even … fire?
Well, after conversations with more than 20 lacrosse coaches and players, it’s obvious there are no clear-cut answers to these questions.
However, that doesn’t mean the experts didn’t have anything interesting to say. And since halftime speeches are more a product of the first half, we’re focusing on how to address the team before the game. So pay attention.
THE SCENE: Hobart’s Boswell Field, Syracuse vs. Hobart, April 19, 1986.
The scenario: The Orange are coming off a loss in the DI final the previous season, while the Statesmen are the defending DIII national champs. Gorgeous day. About 9,000 fans are piled into the 5,000-seat Boz for what is at the time the biggest game in Upstate New York every year. Adding to the intrigue, the game wasn’t played the previous season because of a measles outbreak on Hobart’s campus. And it’s the first year the Kraus-Simmons Trophy is awarded to the rivalry’s winner.
The Hobart boys are a little tense in the locker room before the game. So what does coach Dave Urick do to lighten the mood?
“I just said that fans were out there sitting on top of porta-johns,” he says. “So it’s gotta be a big game.”
The result: Hobart 16, Syracuse 13—the last time the Statesmen have beaten the Orange.
The reason (okay, part of it): Urick correctly observed that the pressure and electricity of such a huge game had his players too nervous and jittery. He knew that he needed to poke some of the air out of the bubble before it burst. “It’s a matter of being able to read your team,” he says. “Obviously—that’s what they pay you for.”
Buffalo Bandits coach Darris Kilgour admits to struggling with that early in his coaching career when he was in charge of the NLL’s Washington Power. Arguably one of the most fiery, intense players in box lacrosse history (he was once so amped up that it took most of his team to keep him from ripping an opponent’s head off—at the postgame party), Kilgour took that right into the start of his head coaching career. “It was just raw emotion,” he says. “I was flying by the seat of my pants.” As a result, he says his players would be too excited, make mental mistakes and try to win games in the first quarter. He’s since learned to curb that emotion.
That’s one of the unique things about lacrosse. It’s most like football schedule-wise, but because of the intricate skills, players can’t go tearing out of the locker room ready to eat their sticks.
“In lacrosse you need to catch and throw and execute on offense, so you can’t get so worked up that you can’t execute things you need to do on the field skill-wise,” Urick says. “You don’t want guys coming out blowing snot bubbles.”
Former Toronto Rock coach Les Bartley, who was just named the franchise’s vice president, is known as a master of figuring out the right way to address his players before gametime—so much so that in 2003 after winning his fourth Champion’s Cup in five years he was asked by Brock University to teach a class on leadership and was approached by more than one corporation to give motivational speeches to its employees. He used to talk to every player during warmups and give them the “psychological sandwich”, which is telling the person what good he’s doing, adding some things or making some corrections and then asking if he’s comfortable and telling him to keep up the good work. This gave him the gauge he needed to know how to give his locker room speech and also checked off a lot of the personal pregame responsibilities for players. Then when the players went out for a final warmup he stayed in the locker room to prepare his speech. Back in the early days of his coaching career he says he wrote out his speeches and read them verbatim off paper, but learned eventually to just write down “trigger words” so it flowed more naturally.
“You need to sense as a coach whether you need to pull them down off the rafters because they’re too high or get rid of some of the funning around and get their heads in the game,” he says.
Another master of this is of course Roy Simmons, Jr., whose approach really can’t be compared to anyone else’s in lacrosse, or possibly any sport for that matter. “He’d pull out anything from Mae West to Vince Lombardi,” says his son, SU assistant Roy Simmons, III.
Simmons’ legend is so great that this year SU’s players requested to have him speak to them before the NCAA Semifinals and Final in Baltimore. He claims he was taken off guard by the request but spoke anyway, running with the familiar threads of emotion, hustle and positive energy that characterized the free-wheeling Syracuse teams that won six NCAA titles under his guidance.
Gary Gait still remembers some of Simmie’s speeches. One revolved around building a church and talked about how someone went around interviewing everyone while they were working on it. The carpenter said he was putting up walls. The plumber said he was installing pipes. On and on until the interviewer got to someone sweeping the floors. He said he was building a church. The moral: everyone’s important to the team.
Then there’s one about the potato farmer who always outsold his competitors because he was the first one ready at the market. He was able to sell so well because, rather than wait to sort his potatoes when he got there, he let them sort themselves in a wheelbarrow on the way there—the big potatoes jumping to the top and the small ones sinking to the bottom. The moral: go out there and be a big potato.
Roy III remembers another where his dad was yelling at his players, demanding to know whose middle name is “The”. Naturally, no one had any idea. The answer, of course, is Winnie the Pooh.
The point here is that you can use just about anything.
“I won a lotta ballgames when we didn’t have the best team on the field and I knew that,” Simmons, Jr. says. “The difference was attitude and passion. Sometimes it happened in reverse too. We came up short because we didn’t give the enemy enough respect. You have to make them believe they can win. You have to erase any doubt in their mind. If we work hard enough and do what we practiced, the reward will come on the scoreboard.”
You can’t just pick a pregame speech out of a hat, though. Simmons spent a lot of time researching for those anecdotes. There is a certain delicacy about what to say.
When Richie Meade is asked about his pregame speech before last year’s national championship game, he tells a fascinating story about how he was sitting in the officer’s club at West Point 12 years prior watching the national championship game on TV when he was an assistant for Army. A colleague asked him what his goal as a coach was. He said it was to win a national championship on Memorial Day at Navy.
Great story, right?
The players never heard it.
“At the end of the day when you’re coaching, it’s never about you,” he says. “It’s not about my deal. My deal is between me and me.
“Beyond all the external stuff everyone was talking about last year at the final four was internal and the meaningful accomplishment of our players.”
Meade eschews the importance of pregame speeches in favor of a more tailored approach. He frequently puts written passages in everyone’s lockers before games—handwritten notes from him, photocopied stories, some general to the whole team, some just for one player. “It’s more meaningful if they read it by themselves and digest it,” he says.
This thinking-man’s approach can work on just about anybody. Even a guy like Pat Coyle, one of the NLL’s most physical and, some say, dirty players. Eight years ago noted sports psychologist Dr. David Cox (who works with numerous Canadian national teams) spoke to his Coquitlam Adanacs summerball team. What he said completely changed Coyle’s approach to pregame preparation.
Cox brought in a 20-foot-long two-by-four and asked the players how many would be willing to walk across it. Of course, everyone raised their hand. Then he asked how many would walk across it if the same piece of wood was perched between two towers 50 feet in the air. No one raised their hand.
“That hit me like a sledgehammer,” Coyle says. “Athletes start worrying about outcomes. If you think about failing, chances are you’re going to fail. If I think, ‘I can’t get beat, I can’t get beat’ I get beat, instead of focusing on having quick feet and good position. It’s amazing.”
That doesn’t mean the meathead approach doesn’t work. Even Coyle says many of his teammates viewed Dr. Cox’s presentation as “new-age spiritual BS”. One DI coach says he relies almost solely on emotion and getting his players “ready to kill somebody.” He goes so far as to say he tries to recruit kids who he knows will react to that method of prodding—and avoids those who don’t.
There are plenty of opportunities for that in any locker room. Bill Tierney and Dave Pietramala are pretty fiery guys and they’re two of the best college coaches in the country. Brian Dougherty describes former Maryland coach **** Edell’s style as turning his players into timebombs: “He wanted us to be ticking and ticking and ticking until Saturday at 1 when we were ready to explode.”
As Kilgour already alluded to, though, a crucial strategy is mixing it up. If a coach comes in ranting and raving before every game, it’s going to get old. Just about every coach and player stresses how important it is to be genuine. Because if you’re not, the players will pick up on it immediately.
“You’re like the barometer,” says Simmons, Jr. “If you have a defeatist attitude, they can measure it in your facial and body expressions. If you do something totally unorthodox like you feel you can’t win without your game, the ripple effect is bad. They measure you more than you measure them. If they sense any kind of fear or trepidation, it will be infectious. You have to project the right attitude.”
Bartley says this can be anything from verbal ticks to hand gestures to facial expressions. He recommends giving a speech in front of a mirror or having assistants watch and give feedback. “Players read you like a book,” he says.
?Bates coach Peter Lasagna tells a hilarious story about a timeout speech he gave in a fourth quarter when he wanted to preach to his players how important it was to play with poise. But by the time he got to the message, he looked like Yosemite Sam, cranked to full volume with viens popping and spit flying. Fortunately, they still won.
That’s the intriguing part: it’s not always in the coach’s hands. A legendary fire and brimstone speech can still lead to a listless loss. And a flat pregame can still lead to a rousing victory. Plus, what you plan doesn’t always work out like you hoped. That can happen with stuff like this. Just ask Howard Dean.
One DI coach brought in a newspaper article that said his team was going to get worked by the opponent. He tore it up and threw it against the wall. His team still got worked. An MIAA coach was giving a pregame speech when a player let out a loud flatulence. The room cracked up. “Well, I guess we’re going to win,” was all the coach could say. They won.
Kilgour remembers a game when he swung and knocked a bottle off a table during his speech. It flew into assistant Dave Huntley’s stomach and everyone lost it. Virginia coach Dom Starsia recalls a game at Brown when his coach Cliff Stevenson ended his speech by saying something to the effect of, “I’m Batman!” “We were all like, ‘What the hell is he talking about?” he says.
Coyle describes some of his pregame addresses as train wrecks. “You wanna stop and say, ‘Okay, let’s start again,’” he says. “But you can’t.”
Princeton coach Bill Tierney once lashed into his players on the bus—pacing up and down the aisle—and made the mistake of ending his tirade at the back. Urick thought he had the ultimate halftime speech once when Hobart was down to a Carolina team that was riding an intimidating win streak. He wanted to pounce on momentum gained right before the whistle so he jumped up on the bench and declared, “The folks are as good as the people!” It makes sense: that Hobart is just as good as Carolina. But it sailed over everyone’s heads like a failed clear. “I thought I was being pretty innovative and clever,” Urick says. “They looked at me like, ‘What is he talking about?’”
You can borrow stuff—Starsia’s speech before the Cavs won the 2003 NCAA final came from Richie Moran’s talk at the NCAA Banquet that weekend.
You can repeat stuff—Dougherty remembers a classic line Edell used before every Navy game: “These guys are jumping on grenades while you guys are blacking out at Bentley’s.”
You can borrow people—New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick addressed Navy before its game with Princeton at last year’s final four and Mike Krzyzewski has addressed Duke’s women’s team.
You can even lie—Rumor has it many of Rockne’s motivational speeches were fibs. George Gipp existed, but it’s been alleged he never told Rockne on his deathbed to send the Irish out for him.
So what? It worked.
If you can use anything from Winnie the Pooh to Batman, porta-johns, potatoes and churches, you can obviously use any number of methods to address your team.
Just don’t say the wrong thing.