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    Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl
    Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl
    Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl
    Ebook198 pages3 hours

    Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl

    By Dan Blank

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    About this ebook

    This is what your coaches would have said to you if you were a boy, told through the story of a small-college team that won more games than it ever had a right to win. It’s an inspiring and straightforward look at the qualities that define the most competitive females, and what separates the ones who get it from the ones who don't. Everything Your Coach Never Told You is the instruction manual for female athletes who want to do more than just play. It's for those girls who want to win, win big, and never apologize for it. It's the call-to-arms for competitive female athletes who dare to color outside of the lines. Not recommended for readers under the age of 13.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDan Blank
    Release dateFeb 23, 2017
    ISBN9781370516100
    Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl
    Author

    Dan Blank

    When Football.com named it's Top 14 Books for Soccer Players and Coaches, seven of those titles came from a single author - Coach Dan Blank. Dan Blank has emerged as the most popular how-to author for soccer players and coaches. His first book, Soccer iQ, was named a Top 5 Book of the Year by the NSCAA Soccer Journal and has been the #1 bestseller in Amazon's Soccer and Coaching Soccer genres since 2013. It's also been an Amazon #1 best-seller in Canada and Australia. It has been featured in various soccer publications and websites and has been translated into six other languages: Russian, German, Danish, Dutch Chinese and Korean. Dan has been coaching college soccer for over twenty years and most recently served as associate head coach at the University of Georgia. He is the first coach in Southeastern Conference history to lead the conference's best defense in consecutive years at different universities (Ole Miss 2009, Georgia 2010), a feat that is detailed in his book Shutout Pizza. He has an 'A' License from the USSF and an Advanced National Diploma from the NSCAA. Coach Blank has also authored: Soccer iQ - Volume 2 Every Thing Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl HAPPY FEET - How to Be a Gold Star Soccer Parent (Everything the Coach, the Ref and Your Kid Want You to Know) ROOKIE - Surviving Your Freshman Year of College Soccer Possession - Teaching Your Team to Keep the Darn Ball Shutout Pizza - Smarter Soccer Defending for Players and Coaches You can buy his books and read his blog at www.soccerpoet.com.

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      Book preview

      Everything Your Coach Never Told You Because You're a Girl - Dan Blank

      INTRODUCTION

      Okay, you’re a girl, you play a sport and you want to win and win a lot. Fabulous.

      The problem is that, well… you’re a girl. That means coaches don’t talk to you the same way they talk to boys. You’re the recipient of a nice little double standard in which the world lowers its expectations of you because of your gender. Chances are that every coach you’ve ever had softened his message to you because you’re a girl and not a boy. Let me tell you something: That stops right now.

      I’m going to let you in on a little secret: When it’s time to play, I don’t care how nice you are. I don’t care that you made the Dean’s List or volunteered as a candy striper or saved a whale. When it’s game time, all I really care about is that you do everything in your power to win the stinkin’ game. Got it?

      I’m going to teach you everything I know about winning. And I’m going to weave these lessons into the story of a group of soccer players I coached at a small NAIA school in Daytona Beach. Why? Because they got it. They weren’t super talented or super athletic, but when it came to competition, they totally got it. They aren’t celebrities. You won’t know their names and you haven’t seen them on television, but don’t be misled. Inside the bubble in which we lived, these girls became notorious for their willingness to do whatever was necessary to win.

      Eventually I left that school and moved on to become a Division I coach. As I write this book, I have been a Division I coach for seven years. I could hide behind the Division I label and write about the players I’ve coached at a much more high-profile university, but I’m not going to do that. Why not? Because this book isn’t so much about what I taught a group of female soccer players; it’s about what they taught me. It’s all those lessons I learned from observing a group of players that overachieved on such a grand scale that their achievements deserved to be documented. I want to give credit where credit is due.

      Many of the players you’re about to meet weren’t highly recruited by the nation’s top programs because they were flawed in some form or fashion – they weren’t big enough or fast enough or talented enough. And most of them didn’t fit the girl-next-door image that we prefer in our female athletes. These girls were hardly typical. They were renegades and hellions and misfits. They weren’t afraid to color outside of the lines, and no one ever accused them of compassion – at least not during a soccer game. They were loud and obnoxious and funny and they didn’t care what you thought about them. They became the most hated team in the Florida Sun Conference because that’s exactly what they wanted. But make no mistake about it – they were winners – and you can learn a lot from them.

      It’s time for you to stop worrying about the way you’re supposed to act and to start focusing on the way to bury your opponents. So, let’s take off the kid gloves and start talking to you like a competitor instead of talking to you like a girl.

      PART 1

      GETTING IT

      There are many coaches who are excellent at teaching the game. They are superb at helping you to improve technically, tactically and physically. Those coaches make you a better player. But make no mistake about it, there’s a difference between being a player and being a competitor. Most athletes strike some type of balance between the two. But winners, regardless of their level of technical/tactical/physical ability, always have their competitive gas pedal pinned to the floor. When game time arrives, those other abilities are stagnant. You won’t become magically faster, smarter or more talented between the first whistle and the last. In order to impose yourself on the contest at maximum volume, you’ve got to maximize your competitive fury. Let me put it to you another way: All other things being equal, the competitor beats the player.

      The game you play exists in a bubble, and you need to compartmentalize it accordingly. If you want to succeed in the theater of competition, then you have to make peace with the rules of engagement that exist in that theater. You have to rid yourself of that tiny voice that keeps nagging you; the one that says you must always work and play well with others. You’ve got to give yourself permission to do what is necessary to win. If you don’t, believe me, you’re going to lose to the competitor who does.

      1

      Getting It

      I’ve been coaching female athletes for 24 years and I believe they can be neatly divided into two groups: those who get it, and those who don’t. The ones who don’t get it far outnumber those who do. That’s why coaches are so elated when a player who gets it ends up on their roster. Those are the players that win championships.

      The ones who don’t get it are programmed to complicate their existence as athletes because they've never truly figured out the purpose of competition. They are forever walking an impossible high-wire, struggling to find a balance between competitiveness and relationships and being the girl that society wants them to be. Their competitive life is a never-ending compromise, a search for a comfortable middle-ground so that their desire to conquer won't threaten their social status or their relationships with teammates.

      That compromise dilutes their value as competitors. Although their competitive volume has the capacity of reaching ten, they won't turn the dial above seven. Instead of charging mightily into the arena of competition, they are always dragging one foot in a puddle of mediocrity.

      The beautiful few who get it are not hamstrung by this compromise. They have no problem separating their off-field relationships from their competitive duties. The two entities exist in two separate containers. They can be great competitors and they can be wonderful friends. They are hardly ever both at the exact same moment.

      There is one very simple element that separates those who get it from those who don’t: The ones who get it fully grasp that the very simple premise of competition is to separate the winner from the loser. That’s it.

      The ones who get it have this premise digested. It dictates the way they approach competition during matches and training sessions. It categorizes their relationships with teammates – relationships that differ radically between moments of competition and all other moments. They don’t bow to anyone during the throes of competition. They play to win because regardless of what you've been told, winning is in fact the end-all, be-all of competition.

      The primary purpose of this book is to teach those who want to get it, how to get it.

      I am a women's college soccer coach. My job is to teach young women that they have every right to want to win as much as men do, that they don’t need permission to do what is necessary to achieve victory and that they should never apologize for conquering an opponent.

      From 1998-2006, I served as the women’s soccer coach at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Due to the specialized academic curriculum of our university and our limited amount of scholarships, one thing was guaranteed: We would never be as talented as the best teams in the nation. We didn’t have the academic curriculum to attract the very best players, nor the scholarship money to buy them. To beat those teams and many others, we needed to maximize the tools that we had. And the most powerful tool at our disposal was always going to be our attitude - our conscious choices.

      Although we were challenged by our academic curriculum and scholarship budget, our program won a lot of games and championships. This is how we did it.

      2

      Winning the Parking Lot

      Darkness was settling in on Ft. Lauderdale as our team bus turned into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel and crept to a stop. Elizabeth Fisher rose from her seat and announced to her teammates, Nobody move!

      On the surface, Fish was the-girl-next-door. With straight blonde hair, soft blue eyes and a friendly face, Fish was positively approachable. She was kind and gentle with an easy smile – the kind that can only come from a warm heart. Like her teammates, Fish wore a dress that night – proper attire for the Region 14 Championship Tournament banquet. But regardless of how she smiled or how she dressed or how warm her heart was, when it came to soccer, Fish was an assassin.

      As her teammates waited in their seats, Fish walked up to the front of the bus and stood beside our driver. One of our competitors’ busses had already arrived and parked in one of the four spots reserved for busses. Our driver, Bill, had the option of pulling up beside that bus or tucking in behind it. He chose to tuck in behind it. That’s when Fish stood up. Now at the front, she leaned over his shoulder.

      Bill, she said politely, You’ve always been our favorite driver and we’re happy you’re with us this weekend, but don’t ever park us behind another team’s bus. We plan on winning everything this weekend and that includes the parking at this banquet. Now pull us up beside that other bus, and make sure we park a little bit ahead of it.

      Bill, a kind man late into his sixties, did as Fish instructed, parking our bus a nose past our opponent’s. From my seat in the front row, I hid my grin and thought YES!

      Fish arrived as a decent, hard-working soccer player with a good attitude. But it was in our program that she developed that edge that took her from being a decent soccer player to being an unapologetic conqueror. As her career was winding down, it was clear that somewhere along the way, Fish had figured out how to become a winner.

      As Bill was maneuvering our bus into its new parking spot, I knew we were about to win our first regional championship.

      3

      What is a Winner?

      In 1997 I was speaking with one of the coaches of the U.S. U-21 women’s national soccer team that had just won the Nordic Cup. She was going into detail about the different players on the U.S. roster. One player she spoke of was Tiffany Roberts, a rising star in the national team system. This is how the coach described Roberts:

      She’s not the most technical player, but that kid is a winner. She totally refuses to lose. You tell her to win, and she goes out and wins.

      Now this coach, who had the luxury of choosing her team from the most talented U-21 players in the country, was telling me that although Roberts wasn’t as technically gifted as some players who didn’t make the team, her commitment to winning made her indispensable. That commitment is also what made Roberts an Olympic gold medalist. The description of Tiffany Roberts would forever stick with me.

      Dan Barlow is the strength and conditioning coach for Real Salt Lake in Major League Soccer. While Tiffany Roberts was skyrocketing to soccer stardom, Dan was serving as a Strength and Conditioning Coach at the University of Maryland. He worked mainly with the Terps’ football and basketball players, but one day the women’s lacrosse coach asked Dan to speak to her team. Dan summed up the experience succinctly: They were different.

      He didn’t mean they were different from men; he meant they were different, very different, from the other female athletes he had worked with. Dan said, I walked over to the field and they all had this look on their face like, ‘You better be able to teach me something or otherwise get out of here because you are wasting my time.’ I’ve never gotten a colder reception from a team of women.

      Yes, the Terps were different. Their mentality was different. Their view of competition was different. It was that mentality that guided them to five straight national titles from 1995-1999, a span that included a 50-game winning streak. That type of extended excellence doesn’t just materialize because of talented players, and it doesn’t happen by accident. It is the byproduct of a culture that treasures competitive supremacy. A culture like that is not easy to create or maintain, and it is certainly not common. That type of winning culture is different.

      Even when I had been coaching women for more than a decade, I still couldn’t pinpoint that intangible quality that separates the winners from the rest of the field. All I knew for sure was that when it came to competitions, the winners found a way to win. It wasn’t until recently that I realized precisely what it is that separates the winners from the herd. It hit me like a bolt of lightning and all at once it became very clear. There is a simple formula for winning, and I’m going to reveal it to you in a later chapter. The great news is that it is something each one of us has the power to control. And like so many of the principles you are about to read, it is as simple as making a conscious decision.

      4

      Winners Win… and Winners Win

      Winners win… and winners win… By 2002, that was a common saying in our program at Embry-Riddle. Rarely a day went by when someone didn’t mention it. But it was much more than a slogan; it was our governing maxim. It was the foundation of everything we believed about competition. Competitive variables are often unfair. Playing conditions vary greatly from one game to the next and technical performance is unreliable. But no matter how you slice it, at the end of the day, someone wins and someone loses, and winners win. Always.

      'Winner’ is a label that coaches do not pass around frivolously. It’s not about the team that wins one day or the team that wins occasionally or even the team that wins more than it loses. Winners are those athletes and teams that have a mysterious quality surrounding them; that regardless of circumstance, day in and day out, year after year, they find a way to get past all the excuses that they could have used and actually produce results. And because they consistently find a way to produce those results, they develop an aura. Even when things look their bleakest, they still expect to win - and their opponents expect them to win also.

      Winners have an aura. You can’t play against winners without also playing against their tradition, and although that tradition only exists in the minds of players, it still exists in the minds of players and that makes it too powerful to be overlooked. Winners manage to pull enough rabbits out of enough hats that no one believes a lead is safe against them. That’s the thing

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