A Jerry Macnamara term
What is the Driveway Test?
The Driveway Test asks one question about whether a player loves the game: on a random Saturday, with nobody watching, no coach and no whistle, does the kid pick up the ball?
Where it comes from
I named it at the Jacksonville Football Club Coaches Symposium keynote on August 8, 2026, and I’ll be honest, it’s my favorite of the two tests I gave that room. Forget game day. It’s a random Saturday in October. A kid’s parents do what parents have always done and kick him out of the house: get off the screen, go do something. He’s standing in the driveway. Nobody’s keeping score. And in that driveway, he votes.
The math is why it matters. The kid who picks up the ball when nobody’s watching gets a thousand extra touches a month, free. Nobody scheduled a session. The kid who was ground down, who flinched every time he made a mistake, his ball is in the garage and it’s staying there. Same age, same league, same curriculum. One is compounding and one is done at thirteen, and no tactical genius on earth can develop the kid who quit.
How to use it
You can’t drill a kid into loving the game. You can only make the game, and your presence in it, something worth loving. Fun isn’t the enemy of development. Fun is the fuel.
In business, the driveway is the work nobody assigned. Does your salesperson read about the customer’s industry on a Sunday? Does your engineer tinker with the product on her own time? I tell the CEOs I advise: you can’t be world class at anything you don’t enjoy. Not sales, not surgery, not soccer. If your people only touch the work when you’re watching, you don’t have a talent problem. You have a driveway problem, and more pressure won’t fix it.
Run the two tests together. The Cross the Street Test measures their relationship with you. The Driveway Test measures their relationship with the work. Pass both, and it doesn’t matter what the scoreboard said in October. You won.
Questions people ask
Does the Driveway Test apply outside youth sports?
Yes. Swap the ball for whatever the work is. The question is the same: when nobody is watching and nothing is required, do they still reach for it? People who do are compounding. People who don’t are waiting to be told.
Why do kids fail the Driveway Test?
Almost never because the game was too hard. Kids quit because it’s boring, the pointless kind: standing in lines, drills with no decisions, laps for the sake of laps. Real challenge is a form of respect. Being ground down and scanning the sideline for a reaction is what puts the ball in the garage.
Can you measure the Driveway Test?
Ask. Ask players what they did last weekend. Ask your team what they read, built, or tried that nobody assigned. The answers come fast, and they tell you more than any engagement survey.
The full story is in the essay The Cross the Street Test. I teach both tests on stage in Creating a Culture of Accountability. If your team or your conference needs to hear it, start at speaking.