Quentin The Small Steps I Took to Rekindle My Love for Coaching Issue 156- Jason Payne, CMPC I have written a lot about the moment when my coaching career flipped. Burnout led me to make an important choice that significantly changed my life. I needed to find a more meaningful way to coach or find a different way to spend my time. The cost of maintaining the status quo was too high. What I have not written much about is what I did the following season. The changes were not dramatic or flashy....
12 days ago • 4 min read
Quentin The Sunday Scaries Issue 155- Jason Payne, CMPC You know the feeling. It's Sunday night. You start thinking about the week ahead, practices, games, maybe a tournament. You're doing what you love; you should be excited, or at least ready. Instead, something in your body feels heavier than it should be. Not tired or stressed about a specific play or a specific player. Just off. Most coaches call it burnout. Or fatigue. Or the season is getting to them. It's usually none of those. Not...
19 days ago • 4 min read
Quentin Is your Coaching aligned with what you want people to remember about their time with you? Issue 154- Jason Payne, CMPC Dolly Parton passed away this week, and I was amazed at the outpouring of tributes to an artist I did not know much about. I am not a country music fan, and I have never really been one. So other than a brief time in the early 80's when 9 to 5 crossed over to mainstream radio, her career existed off my radar. What blew me away this week was the wide variety of...
26 days ago • 5 min read
Quentin Green, yellow, or red? One question to ask before each practice. Issue 152- Jason Payne, CMPC You walk into your team room for a random weekday practice. The players are dressed. The music is on. From the outside, it looks like any other practice during the season. But you can feel it within ninety seconds. Something is off. Two of your seniors are quiet in a way they aren't usually quiet. The freshman in the corner is going through the motions. Your captain, who is normally the first...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Quentin The Orange Ball Has Given Me More Than I Ever Asked For. Issue 151- Jason Payne, CMPC In the last month, I have coached athletes from twenty different countries, alongside coaches from five continents. Building those relationships has been the kind of gift I would never have thought to ask for. It does not seem to matter where I go. The game finds a way to put me across the table from someone worth learning from. The world is truly a global village, and sport is one of the few things...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Quentin A Four-Minute Diagnostic To Help Work from The Inside Out Issue 150- Jason Payne, CMPC You know your team’s win-loss record from last season. You can probably tell me who led your team in scoring, in rebounds, in assists. You have scouting reports for every athlete you have ever coached, whether you kept them formally or in your head. The ones who improved or plateaued. The player you knew was going to become something more than the version who walked into your gym at the start of...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Quentin Something I've Been Writing For Six Years and Thinking About For Twenty-Five Issue 149- Jason Payne, CMPC Somewhere in the last twelve months, you have probably had this thought. Maybe it hit after a bad game that left you drained of energy like you had played instead of coached. Perhaps it arrived on a Sunday afternoon when you realized there was a part of you dreading practice on Monday. Or it was the exhaustion you felt in every cell of your body the day after your season...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
Quentin The Version of You That Athletes See That You Don’t Issue 148- Jason Payne, CMPC Somewhere around my tenth or eleventh year of coaching, an athlete of mine told me something that was hard to hear, but true. Fortunately, it has shaped my coaching ever since. He was a senior. Our program was struggling that season. It was late February, and his career was winding down. We had a practice coming up in an hour. He was hanging around the office after his class, and casually he said that, as...
2 months ago • 6 min read
Quentin 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...
2 months ago • 8 min read