Almost everything we celebrate in youth sports has nothing to do with becoming a great coach.
Wins. Rankings. Tournament hardware rattling around the back of the SUV. The loudest voice on the sideline. We cheer for all of it, and almost none of it develops a player.
I opened with that line for about eighty-five coaches at the JFC symposium on August 8. Then I gave them two tests. Their players started grading them on both the first day of practice, and most coaches go a whole career without seeing the score.
Before the tests, though, I told them about the worst Valentine’s Day of my life.
195 over 96
I was twenty-five and helping to lead a Franchise 500 company at the height of the dot-com boom. We went from $5.9 million to $15 million in revenue in eighteen months, while raising $5 million in venture capital at the same time.
So I did what every ambitious twenty-five-year-old does. I decided to outwork the problem. One hundred hours a week. I slept on the couch outside my office. I had a motto I said out loud: work hard, and harder.
Then Valentine’s Day. Tightness in my chest, no full breath, and a few hours later I’m flat on a gurney with electrodes on my chest, counting the dots in the ceiling tiles. My heart was fine. Everything I had strapped to it wasn’t. The doctors showed me my blood pressure: 195 over 96. Two months later, once I started taking care of myself instead of feeding the beast, it was back to normal. But I came off that gurney with the most important business lesson I know, and it’s four words.
You can’t outwork scale.
More hours on top of a broken approach doesn’t break the problem. It breaks you. For coaches it reads like this: you can’t out-yell, out-drill, or out-win a bad culture. A trophy on top of a bad culture is just a bad culture with a trophy. And effort on top of a broken approach breaks adults slowly and kids fast. An eleven-year-old doesn’t get a gurney moment. He just quits, and we never find out it was never about soccer.
The test that never lies
The Cross the Street Test is simple: ten years from now, when a former player spots you in a parking lot, does he cross the street to avoid you, or to come say hello?
He’s not eleven anymore. He’s twenty-one, he’s tall, and he sees you before you see him. At Publix. On a street corner. Across the lot at the beach. He votes.
Everyone who hears this takes the test immediately. A face shows up. Maybe a kid you coached. Maybe a coach you played for. Run it the other direction and I’ll bet everything in my wallet there’s one coach you’d cross four lanes of traffic to hug and one you’d duck behind a minivan to avoid. Both ran drills and knew the game. The difference was never tactical. The difference was how they made you feel, and thirty years later your feet still remember which way to walk.
It never lies because every interaction is a deposit into one of those two futures. There’s no neutral. Kids forget the score of almost every game. They never forget how you made them feel while they played.
The trap is that the test isn’t administered in ten years. It’s being administered right now, Tuesday night, under the lights. You just don’t get your results for a decade. It’s the cruelest grading system in the world, and the most honest.
It grades companies too
I advise CEOs for a living, and I’ve never had to change this for a company. Your people take the Cross the Street Test. So do your customers, the vendor you squeezed, the employee you let go. How you answer an email, and how long a customer waits for one, is culture. Culture isn’t the banner on the fence or the values on the wall. It’s the sum of a thousand small, boring behaviors done the same way, every time, by everybody wearing the badge.
Which is good news, because it means culture isn’t a talent. It’s a decision, repeated. The answer I give CEOs every week is the least inspiring phrase in leadership: be boringly consistent. Boring beats brilliant, because people don’t experience your philosophy. They experience your habits. Leaders create a predictable environment for people to thrive. That’s the whole job, mine with CEOs and a coach’s with kids.
I learned the second half of that lesson from a guy named Tom. He walked into my office one day and shut the door. “Dude, I just want to let you know that I trust you.” I sat back, chuckled, and said, “I didn’t know that you didn’t trust me.” Then he told me about a CEO who never paid him a bonus he’d earned, and how he’d assumed ever since that every CEO was money-grubbing. I had never done a thing to break Tom’s trust. It didn’t matter. His own history held it back until I’d been consistent long enough for him to let it go. That’s when I understood that trust is both. You act in line with the four pillars, but it isn’t your trust. It’s theirs to give. I always thought trust was earned. That’s the prerequisite. People give trust.
The pillars are competency, consistency, integrity, compassion. Competency gets you respected. Consistency gets you believed. Integrity gets you followed. Compassion gets you loved. And loved is what turns a twenty-one-year-old around in a parking lot.
One humility check comes with it. You own fifty percent of any relationship, and it never goes up. Tom proved you can’t control when the other person extends trust back. So own your fifty percent so completely that the other half has nothing to push against.
The second test
The Driveway Test asks one thing: on a random Saturday with nobody watching, does the kid pick up the ball?
His parents do what parents have always done and kick him out of the house. He’s standing in the driveway. No coach, no whistle, no standings. The first test measures his relationship with you. This one measures his relationship with the game. The kid who picks up the ball when nobody’s watching gets a thousand extra touches a month for free. The kid who was ground down has his ball in the garage, and it’s staying there. One is compounding and one is done at thirteen, and no tactical genius on earth can develop the kid who’s done.
In a company the driveway is the problem nobody assigned. Does anyone pick it up? You can’t drill anyone into loving the work. You can only make the work, and your presence in it, something worth loving. That’s true of eleven-year-olds and it’s true of your sales team.
What you actually control
Winning is an output. You don’t control it. The other team, the referee, and the weather all get a vote. Development is an output too. You can’t want it more than the other person and transfer the wanting.
What you control, every day, with no votes, are your inputs. Preparedness. Attitude. Care. Did I plan tonight’s session, or Monday’s meeting, with purpose? Did I choose who I was going to be before I got out of the car? Did everyone leave knowing I see them? Control those three and the outputs chase you.
So here’s the question, in a boardroom or on a sideline. Ten years from now, which way do they cross the street?
Be worth crossing the street for.
I gave this as a keynote to those coaches. If your room needs it, start at Speaking.