Laxicon010: Army Lacrosse Head Coach discusses leadership and team building

01/08/16 • 53 min

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At the end of each season Coach Alberici has a ceremony that he derived from his days of working with Mike Pressler at Duke, he arranges the locker room so that all of the seniors are up in front and then juniors, sophomores and freshmen are in the back. Once everyone is arranged he takes the seniors nametag off of his locker and talks about each one of them on a personal basis, not a statistical one. He brings up stories that have taken place over that players 4 years on the team. Stories of how the player overcame adversity to excel, how the player did something special outside of lacrosse to give to others, and other stories such as those. The stories are Coach Alberici’s way of coaching to the underclassmen the kind of person that he is looking for without directly saying it. After Coach is done telling the stories, the senior comes up, grabs his nametag and then walks out of the locker room one last time. This exercise is a real “eye-opener” for a lot of the underclassmen, they start to think about what will be said about them when they are a senior. At the end, everyone moves up a stool in the locker room to symbolize that they are moving up and then Coach talks about what needs to be done going forward for the new team. Some of those things are things that need to be improved on regarding the season they have just finished, some are things from the past that apply to the new team and need to be addressed. Overall it is a very emotional and powerful experience.
Summertime is a good time for small things that may not even be lacrosse related. Coaches need to attend to the whole individual and go to their non-lacrosse related events when possible, at other times just sending them a text asking how their exams went or things like that send the message that the player is valued as a person. Coach also keeps a birthday calendar and contacts them on that day to wish them a happy birthday and let them know he cares about them as someone other than just a lacrosse player. If you are thinking about a player, text them, let them know, it makes a difference.
Team captains are selected by the team including outgoing seniors because he wants them to continue to have a stake in the program. He ensures that players put their name on their vote for captains for the following year. He has players rank order 1 through 3 their choices of captains and he almost always goes with who the team chooses. He wants captains who can come to him with issues, and walk the walk. Coach says that even though he may only have 3 captains he ensures all players know that they all don’t need a “C” on their chest to be a leader on the team.
Despite all of the leadership training that goes on at West Point, Coach Alberici does conduct some separate and focused leadership training, but mostly he has regular captains meetings so that his captains feel empowered to bring issues to him and he actively solicits their feedback on players who may be being inadvertently overlooked and who need some of the coaches attention.
In terms of team activities and community service, the team does a Jimmy Regan run together in honor of Sgt James J. Regan who was a lacrosse player at Duke who graduated with a degree in Economics and was headed to a lucrative career on Wall Street when he decided that he needed to volunteer to fight for his country and was subsequently killed in action in Iraq. They have also taken groups down to Harlem and done clinics there to support the lacrosse development in the inner city areas as well as held free clinics at West Point, and there are many other team oriented activities they do that can be fit into their very limited time available as cadets.
Regarding goal setting, Coach Alberici has all his players come in during the fall and address 5 different categories and assess them. 1. Strengths 2. Areas for improvement 3. Individual goals (including academic) 4. Team goals (Beat Navy,

Previous Episode

Developing leadership and positive team culture on the University of Michigan Mens Lacrosse team

Coach John Paul from the University of Michigan talks about developing a positive team culture and how the skill of leadership can be learned by every player and is essential to each players development. My notes from our conversation are below:
The next season starts “the day after” their previous season ends. Each new team has its own identity, its own leaders and its own followers.
Summers present an interesting challenge because almost immediately after the season is over players are off in a variety of directions, however, Coach Paul uses the media that is available in this day and age, mostly group emails, to keep his players interacting and thinking about each other. Topics might be serious or they might just be a player sharing a joke or funny situation they experience during the summer, either way they are continuing their relationships and staying in touch.
Once players return to school the focus is on getting the freshmen settled and into what their program is about. Communicating standards, core values, expectations and letting them know what their program is all about is an immediate priority. Coach says he doesn’t have a system that he applies every year, but rather he has developed a set of tools over the 20 plus years he has been coaching at Michigan that he can apply to his team based on the composition of his team.
This years team has decided to form a leadership group of 10-12 players who each will be assigned 4-5 players to lead with each group having at least 1 freshman in it. Their duties are to ensure that team duties, tasks and events are properly communicated and attended to by everyone in their group. The smaller groups make it easier for the leader to manage and also allows them to get to know their group on a more personal basis and mentor them.
Previous years where his team has not had obvious leaders, Coach Paul did not assign leaders but rather let them develop by giving the upperclassmen additional duties to fulfill and seeing how they did with them. Things such as “stretching lines” and then rotating those duties amongst the available players and seeing how they develop. One year he didn’t pick captains until 4 weeks into the season and then only because the team felt they were ready and knew who those leaders were.
Getting the right players recruited and on the team is not an “exact science”, and has been hard in recent years because coaches have been forced to recruit players so early that they haven’t had time to demonstrate the character traits he is looking for. At present coaches have to make some predictions based on how the players interact with family, how they interact with others as they play.
Book recommendations:

The Hard Hat: This book is good for giving players something to strive for. Its like a substitute value system for players who are still struggling with what their values are. He had his leadership group read the book over the summer and then sign their names and year on the inside flap of the book to signify having read and studied the book. Coach Paul did that based on a recommendation from the books author, Jon Gordon, and he thinking it might have been even more effective for them to have purchased 50 copies and handed the book down from player to player. Either way, its a great read especially for lacrosse players because it is about a lacrosse player.
Legacy: by James Kerr. A great book about a great rugby team, the New Zealand All Blacks. There are many good lessons in this book but Coach Paul mentions that what impressed him most was how the superstars on this team all bought into the values and ethics of the team in all aspects. One of the things you would see an All Blacks player doing after a game would be to sweep out the locker room and clean it up “better than they found it”, even their visitors locker room. There is much more in this book for coaches to use to help their ...