What You Can Borrow From the NFL to Keep Your Culture Alive During the Season's First 10 Days.
Issue 147- Jason Payne, CMPC
NFL training camps open this weekend. The football fan in me can't wait. However, I love summer and can't believe that we are already talking about football. The World Cup hasn't even ended yet.
Regardless, the NFL season is inevitable, and by the end of next week, the culture of thirty-two football seasons will already be set. Not the schemes or the depth charts. The culture. Who talks first in team meetings. What the veterans model in the walk-throughs. How the head coach handles the first mistake at practice. Whether the veterans hold the rookies accountable to the standard before the end of the second practice. All of it locks in before most of the country has read a single training-camp headline.
The first ten days are that important.
If you are running a program in another sport with a preseason coming up, the same window applies. Your fall soccer team. Your winter basketball team. Your spring baseball team. Somewhere in the first two weeks of practice, the season’s culture takes shape. You either shape it deliberately, or it becomes what you allow. In other words, you intentionally shape your culture, or it shapes itself.
A great example is Jim Harbaugh’s first training camp with the San Francisco 49ers during the summer of 2011.
He inherited a franchise that had not made the playoffs in eight straight seasons. Fans had stopped showing up. The once proud franchise had absorbed a decade of losing. And the roster he was walking into was widely considered thin, headlined by a first overall pick everyone had given up on.
Harbaugh’s approach in the first ten days did not look revolutionary from the outside. He installed his offence. He ran a physical camp. He made his veterans compete for their starting jobs out in the open instead of behind closed doors. But underneath the visible work, he was doing something specific. He was intentionally replacing the losing culture with a new one every day.
The phrase that became his signature at San Francisco was Who’s got it better than us? Nobody! It sounded like a slogan at first. Players who told the story afterward described it as culturally jarring. This was a team that had earned nothing yet. The culture they had inherited was built on losing. Enthusiasm was not what this room had the credibility to claim.
Harbaugh gave it to them anyway. He named the standard for effort in the first practice and did not let a single rep pass that did not meet it. He asked the veterans to teach the new arrivals what the standard would be on the field, in real time.
The 49ers went 13-3 that year and reached the NFC Championship Game, losing only when a punt returner fumbled in overtime with a Super Bowl trip on the line. The culture Harbaugh installed in ten days carried into a Super Bowl appearance the following season.
Alex Smith’s Story Inside the Story
Alex Smith’s story inside the Harbaugh story deserves its own moment. It is the human illustration of what the culture reset actually made possible.
Smith had been the number one overall pick in the 2005 draft, taken by the 49ers ahead of Aaron Rodgers. By the time Harbaugh arrived in 2011, Smith had played for six different offensive coordinators in six seasons. The organizational dysfunction was so complete that his development had been nearly impossible. The label he was carrying by year seven was bust. The team had drafted Colin Kaepernick in the same off-season Harbaugh was hired. Most of the football world assumed Smith was about to be replaced.
Harbaugh made a different call.
In the first ten days of camp, he told Smith publicly that the starting job was his. He simplified the offence around Smith’s strengths. He walked into press conferences and talked about Smith the way he wished someone had talked about him as a young QB. Decades before Harbaugh had been Smith. A bust in his time with the Bears early in his own playing career. He gave Smith the identity of a starting quarterback and then treated him like one every day until Smith started to believe it, too.
Smith threw for 3,144 yards that season with 17 touchdowns and 5 interceptions. He had the highest passer rating of his career. He led the 49ers to within a fumble of the Super Bowl. The same quarterback the football world had written off in December was leading a team the football world had also written off, all the way to a home NFC Championship Game.
The stat line was Smith’s. The identity was Harbaugh’s gift.
This is what the first ten days can powerfully do. They are not just about culture as a group-level concept. They are about who the players on the team become. Every coach has an Alex Smith on their roster: a player who has been miscast, mislabeled, or written off somewhere along the way, waiting for a coach who is willing to give them a different story to live inside. The first ten days are the window where you decide whose story gets rewritten.
The scheme was mostly the same as the season before. The players were mostly the same. But Alex Smith in 2011 was not the same player. Because his coach had told him, from day one, that he was somebody different now.
What the First Ten Days Are For
The first ten days are the codification moment. Whatever culture you have created in the off-season, this is the window where it either becomes real in the room or does not. If you skip it, the culture that gets installed by default is whatever was left behind last season, plus whatever the freshmen brought from their travel teams.
The good news is that codified culture reactivates quickly. If the returning players know the standard, they teach the new class the language in the first practice. If they do not, the whole first month gets spent trying to remember who the program was supposed to be.
If you have eight weeks before your season starts, you have a small window to deliberately design the first ten days. Not the practices. But how your culture lives on from the last season to the next.
Five Ways to Reactivate, Renew, and Reinvigorate Your Culture
1.) Name the standard on day one, before any scheme installation.
The first meeting sets the tone for every meeting that follows. If your standards are not named out loud in the first hour, the players will assume they are not important. Harbaugh named enthusiasm and effort in his first meeting because those were the standards he needed. Name yours before you install a single play. Define what it looks like to be above the line of your standards in the days that follow.
2.) Reactivate the returning players before integrating the newcomers.
The veterans carry the culture from last year. If they arrive on day one focused and committed, the culture reassembles fast, and the freshmen learn from watching them. If they arrive drifting from the standards, the freshmen learn standards aren't important. Meet with your leadership group or returning seniors within the first 48 hours and remind them of what they are responsible for teaching the new class. Do this before the first full team meeting, not after.
3. Design one shared cultural ritual for day one that becomes the season’s anchor.
Something the whole team does together in the first practice that they will still be doing in March. A walk-through of the field with the seniors telling the story of last year. A team meal on night one where the freshmen introduce themselves. A visit to the record board or the trophy case with an alum explaining what each piece means. Small rituals are often big cultural touchstones. The moment becomes a shared reference the team returns to when it needs to remember who it is.
4. Ban one thing publicly.
The first no is more culture-defining than the first yes. Pick one specific behaviour, phrase, or habit that eroded the culture last season and name it on day one as no longer welcome. Complaining about officials. Skipping the team dinner. The specific word your program does not use. The specific reaction to a bad rep. Name it, and hold it, and everyone in the room understands what kind of culture you are actually building.
5. Rewrite one player’s story out loud, on day one.
Every roster has an Alex Smith. The player who has a label they did not choose. The one who was miscast in the previous season. The one who has stopped believing they are what the team needs them to be. Pick that player. Then, on day one, tell the room who they are now. Not as a private favour. As a public identity reset. Then hold them to that standard. What Harbaugh did with Smith is available to any coach willing to do it. The best culture-building move you make in the first ten days is often for one specific person, in front of everyone.
The Compounding Cost of Skipping It
Coaches often fail to build culture in the first 10 days because it feels less urgent than schemes and depth charts. It isn't. The cost of skipping it is a season spent trying to catch up to a culture that has established itself.
The 49ers did not become a good team because Harbaugh installed new plays. They became a good team because the first 10 days revealed who the players were now. And Alex Smith did not become an effective NFL QB solely because of a new offence. He became the best version of himself because his coach told him, on day one, that was what he expected to see every day.
Your first ten days will tell your players the same thing.
Make sure the story you are telling is the one you want them to be living during the season
🎧 The Ultimate List of Coaching Podcasts
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Because the best coaches don't stay static…
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Are you or your athletes struggling to be their best?
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I help coaches thrive.
As a Certified Mental Performance Consultant and a basketball coach with 25 years of experience, I understand the barriers to peak performance for both you and your athletes.
I would love to help you or your team build a competitive advantage. Here are a few ways I can help:
- Consult with your team or coaching staff
- Teach mental skills to your team via Zoom
- Work 1-on-1 with coaches
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Book a Free Discovery Call
If you’re feeling the weight of expectations, pressure, or burnout, you don’t have to figure this out alone.
A discovery call is simply a chance to talk through your season, your goals, and your process with another coach who’s been there. No pitch. No obligation. Just a meaningful conversation.
Schedule a discovery call here.
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Thanks for reading, and have a great week.