Latest / The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast / #113: Gill1918 presents Mike Erb "How to be a Great Assistant Coach Part 2"

Transcript

#113: Gill1918 presents Mike Erb "How to be a Great Assistant Coach Part 2" · The Gill Athletics Track and Field Connections Podcast

0:00
Welcome to the Gill 1918 Project, a podcast series by
0:03
coaches, for coaches powered by Gill Athletics.
0:06
Think of this as the Ted Talks of track and field coaching.
0:09
Short, insightful, and packed with valuable strategies to help
0:12
you grow as a coach. We'll bring in the once a year
0:15
track clinic straight to your ears daily.
0:17
Interested in creating your own episode?
0:19
Everyone's welcome to participate.
0:21
Check out the show notes below For more information.
0:23
Now let's get into today's topic.
0:27
Marquette So the, the, the Division Three thing was cool,
0:31
right? I enjoyed that.
0:32
I had ended up being a head coach for about 5 years out
0:34
there. But what I wanted to do, I was a
0:37
Division Three athlete. I had always just wanted to be
0:41
at a higher level. I, I wanted to be at the highest
0:43
level that I could possibly get to.
0:46
And turns out we were pretty good at that little Division
0:49
Three school in Redlands and had some athletes that would have
0:51
been, I thought at the time more they've been fairly competitive.
0:55
They could have been on a Division One team, but so Long
0:59
story short, I had an opportunity to work for free,
1:03
but it was at the Division One level and it was at Marquette
1:05
University. So one of the things that I
1:07
learned there was how much difference there really was
1:11
between those two levels, that Division Three level to Division
1:14
One level. Now out here, I went out there
1:16
as a volunteer assistant, another assistant to the.
1:20
So this was very much following somebody around very much doing
1:25
whatever they needed me to do and but at the same time getting
1:29
an opportunity to see what a Division One program looks like
1:33
and how it operates. So what I wasn't getting in pay,
1:37
I was getting in experience. That was just totally invaluable
1:42
for what it was that I was ultimately trying to do.
1:45
And, and what I realized was I thought that had I, if I just
1:48
knew how to coach, if I just knew how to, you know, make
1:52
athletes better, if I just knew how to program things, if that
1:55
was all that it was going to take to be able to make that
1:57
transition to the Division One level.
1:59
Turns out the Division Three level to the Division One level
2:03
is night and day different. I didn't know that at the time.
2:06
It was significantly different. Now we're talking about many
2:09
more year round training opportunities.
2:11
We're talking about recruiting, we're talking about travel that
2:14
went more than a couple hours down the road.
2:16
We're talking about budgets that look very, very differently and
2:20
all sorts of things. So I was there a year, like I
2:23
said, I did that for free, but it just really allowed me to
2:26
understand what that Division One world looked like that I had
2:30
just never been a part of. The other thing that I realized
2:33
or learned from that was that that Division One experience,
2:36
albeit, you know, I'm not saying that Division Three school would
2:40
have, we'd have been at least competitive with them in a dual
2:43
meet. We wouldn't have beat them by
2:44
any stretch of the imagination, but we wouldn't have embarrassed
2:46
ourselves. But that experience with a mid
2:50
major Division One program made all the difference in the world
2:54
when it came to next stop coach. My goodness, you can't see it.
2:59
Well, I'm going to have to try to read that myself.
3:01
That's a that's a tough one. University of Illinois.
3:06
So moving on to the University of Illinois at the time, I know
3:09
we had some U of I Anybody else here is simply here.
3:12
OK, they all left. So I just just, I make sure that
3:15
this is a long time ago, but I wouldn't want to contradict
3:18
anything that they had said. And it was very different time
3:20
and a very different program, right?
3:23
But I went to the University of Illinois, worked for first year
3:27
head coach Tanja Buford Bailey, who was a several time Olympian.
3:31
And I think just in the past couple years, she went from
3:34
being like third or fourth in the world all time in the 400
3:36
hurdles. But 4 hurdles have gone through
3:38
the roof for the last couple years.
3:39
So now she's like 8 or something like that, but pretty incredible
3:42
person. But she was there in her first
3:47
year. And now this was my first
3:48
opportunity to be that assistant coach that we had talked about,
3:51
right? Not the assistant to the now I
3:54
had a group now I had a, a group of jumpers and throwers actually
3:57
at the time and an opportunity to really be invested in the
4:01
culture and in the development of this program.
4:04
So and Tanja was just a incredibly unique, super high
4:10
energy character of a person who to this day, we're still great
4:15
friends. But you know, as so many things,
4:18
this is just couple things really that I learned from her.
4:21
The first one on there was just the way that she was able to
4:27
direct or she was able to interact and work with different
4:30
groups of athletes, right? We have a very diverse group of
4:33
athletes and watching the way that she was just kind of
4:38
magical in calming people down. She was magical in just being
4:44
understanding where people were coming from.
4:46
And the thing that I took away most from that was just her very
4:49
direct, very fair, very firm way of dealing with these.
4:53
And again, this was a separated men's and women's program, so it
4:56
was primarily women that we were dealing with out there.
4:59
I would watch this is a true story and this is a long time
5:03
ago, so statutes are probably done what not, But we were at a
5:06
national championship meet and I watched two women that were on
5:09
the same 4x4 team in the warm up zone come this close to actually
5:14
swinging at each other. I'm talking nose to nose.
5:15
These are on the same team, right?
5:17
And 15 minutes later they're out there, you know, making the
5:20
final or, or or being an all American in that relay.
5:23
And it was really just her ability to manage those
5:26
personalities to deal with those people.
5:29
And really it was just the directness and, but with a lot
5:33
of love and a lot of care that she was able to do that.
5:35
So that was I think a super important thing.
5:37
Again, whether you're a head coach, whether you're an
5:40
assistant coach, secondly, just the, the excitement and the
5:44
passion and the enthusiasm for doing what you're doing can
5:47
really go a long way. You know, looking back, I
5:50
realized she had been an assistant for a while.
5:52
This was her first head coaching position.
5:54
This was my first real Division One assistant coaching position
6:00
and we were both just super excited to be there and super
6:03
passionate about what we were doing and just that energy and
6:08
that excitement. I think that I still try to
6:09
think about those days and apply that to what I'm doing these
6:12
days because that really can get you through some really
6:15
difficult situations and it's infectious and it really affects
6:19
the culture positively to allow those athletes to really achieve
6:23
what they what they're trying to achieve.
6:25
So that was something I really took away from, from learning
6:28
from her. The other interesting thing, and
6:32
this was just sort of the deal between I, I feel like it's, I
6:35
have on here meaningful and appropriate workplace
6:37
relationships. And really what I mean by that
6:39
is community, you know, as, as a, as a track and field staff,
6:42
my goodness, do you end up spending lots of time in the
6:45
same place, right. And I think allowing, you know,
6:48
various assistants, assistants and head coaches to really, you
6:51
know, allowing yourself to lean on each other, allowing yourself
6:55
to, you know, help each other out to just really, you know,
7:00
decompress Sometimes when you're traveling or you're at a meet or
7:03
it's between events or things like that, I really sort of got
7:06
to understand what that relationship would look like.
7:09
And her and I were really, really close friends.
7:11
I put the word appropriate in there only because we had this
7:14
great professional relationship. To this day, I call her up
7:17
anytime if I have a question or you want to just talk to her
7:20
about her kids and learn about what's going on with it.
7:23
I don't I couldn't also to this day tell you where she even
7:26
lived in Champaign, IL, right? So we had this really unique
7:29
balance of relationship of being very close on one hand
7:32
professionally and kind of personally in that world, but
7:35
also had a separation. When we went away, we went away.
7:38
When we went home, we were home when we were at the track, we
7:40
were at the tracks. So that was a a really great
7:44
sort of thing that I hope to take forward with other Staffs
7:47
that I was with. And lastly, this is going to
7:50
sound a little counter intuitive, but prioritize down
7:54
and I want to I want to explain what I mean by that.
7:57
And this has come up a lot in my career and and really kind of
8:00
figured out, sort of came to this understanding fairly
8:03
recently. But as an assistant coach, I
8:07
think it's, it's obviously important and we're going to,
8:09
there were other lessons that came from other places.
8:12
But you know, like I said, you are as an assistant coach, you
8:15
have a responsibility for a group of athletes.
8:18
In my opinion, and this is coming from the times I was a
8:21
head coach or the times I was an assistant coach.
8:23
In my opinion, as an assistant coach, your priority should be
8:27
doing the best job that you can do for those people that you
8:30
coach. That's priority #1 And I mean
8:33
that because by doing that, if I prioritize down, if I my, my,
8:40
you know, the, the importance I place is on those athletes that
8:43
I coach, they're doing well, reflects up the chain the whole
8:48
way. Does that make sense?
8:50
So, you know, if I've got a group of athletes that are
8:53
happy, that are working hard, that are contributing really,
8:57
really well to positively to the culture, that's going to make.
9:00
And again, it's not about me, it's not about the head coach,
9:03
but that's going to keep me in hopefully good graces and, and
9:06
doing well. That's also going to make that
9:08
head coach happy because there's the lower success is their
9:11
success. And same all the way up to the
9:13
administrators all the way. If your focus turns to just
9:18
making your boss happy, if that's your priority, it's just
9:21
making sure you're just reiterating and it doesn't it
9:24
it's, it's a, it's kind of a fool's errand because if you
9:27
ignore the people that you're coaching to serve the person
9:31
that's above you as the priority, then that trickle up
9:36
tends not to happen, if that makes sense.
9:38
I hope I'm explaining that well. This is something I've been
9:39
mulling around in my head for a long time and hopefully I can
9:42
communicate this well, But I really think that you just do a
9:45
lot better for a lot more people when you're really focused on
9:49
the people that you're coaching. So from Illinois, we move on to
9:53
the University of New Orleans. Also a pretty cool track pad,
9:57
Gormley Stadium, little history lesson that's that's in a park
10:02
called City Park in New Orleans. If you know anything about New
10:05
Orleans, I promise you, you probably don't know anything
10:07
about City Park. If you ever get to New Orleans,
10:09
I highly suggest you visit there.
10:11
It's bigger than Central Park. You'd never believe it.
10:13
It's there's this huge swath of green in the middle of New
10:17
Orleans that everybody's down on Bourbon Street, which is highly
10:20
overrated. If you're ever down there,
10:21
there's so many other cool things. 1992 Olympic trials, I
10:26
think were held there. It's a really cool old historic
10:28
stadium and and that's what we used.
10:32
So get to New Orleans. I've just finished with this big
10:35
10 program and now I've had the opportunity to be the head coach
10:38
at what is not a big 10 level program.
10:41
It is a Division One level program, however, so you know,
10:44
we're expected to hopefully be I always I I give you credit back
10:48
there, man. You know, you know what I'm
10:49
going through down there, right like that, that mid major world.
10:54
But the biggest thing, and this is more of a kind of where that
10:58
Venn diagram overlaps with assistant to head coaches.
11:00
You know, I think you get we've all as an assistant coach
11:05
thought about or been part of a decision that a head coach makes
11:08
and you go, what in the hell are they?
11:11
Like, why would they ever do X? You know what I mean?
11:14
This doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
11:16
I have no idea why we're doing this.
11:17
Well, what I learned pretty quickly as the head coach of a
11:20
of a mid major Division One institution is there are all
11:22
sorts of things that you have to deal with and you have to
11:25
understand and you have to make decisions about that.
11:27
Those assistant coaches may have zero clue on what you're even
11:31
dealing with. Right.
11:33
This was no exception. I again, another whole clinic on
11:37
how New Orleans went. It was a lot of fun, but it was
11:40
a man, the hit started at 6:00 in the morning and they didn't
11:44
stop till midnight. It was, it was a pretty, pretty
11:47
trial by fire situation. So, but but there I really was
11:52
able to understand just kind of the differences and the, you
11:56
know, why certain decisions are made and the difference in the
12:00
the of the skill set between being a head coach and assistant
12:03
coach. As such, I was in a hurry to get
12:06
back to that big 10 Division One kind of stuff and had the
12:10
opportunity to end up at Indiana.
12:13
Can I switch to this next one arrow to the right?
12:16
We can do that. Cool.
12:19
And then we ended up at Indiana University for 11 years up until
12:25
last summer. So the cool thing about South
12:29
Redlands, I was there for five years, year at Marquette, five
12:32
years at Illinois, one year at New Orleans and then I spent 11
12:35
years at Indiana and we almost there.
12:38
OK, try to wrap this up quick. And so I'll pick two of these
12:43
things here real quickly. What I kind of realized there
12:46
was we talked about those hard skills, the technical stuff, the
12:49
bio mechanics is that and the other, those take time for us to
12:52
learn, but they also take time for the athletes to learn.
12:56
And I think that as a, as an assistant coach who's really
12:58
specifically dealing with a particular group of athletes,
13:01
it's really important to understand when I'm there for 11
13:04
years, that was the first time I really had the opportunity to
13:07
see multiple careers finish, right?
13:12
So whether it be 4 years, five years, six years, I was able to
13:14
see that several generations of classes and to see that
13:19
sometimes you might not get much anything for a year or even 2
13:23
years, only for that year 3 for things to blossom.
13:27
And I really wish I could explain exactly why sometimes it
13:31
takes a year or two or three years.
13:33
I would love to tell you why. If anybody knows, I'm all ears,
13:35
let me know. But sometimes that's just the
13:38
way that it goes. It's not that we plan for it to
13:41
be that way. It's not that we would love for
13:44
everybody to have to take all that time to get to where
13:46
they're going to go. But I could tell you multiple
13:48
people who, you know, some of them out of the gate, they're
13:50
awesome and they pick it up and it just makes sense.
13:53
Others, maybe you're just on the fence, you know, are they really
13:56
even good enough or talented enough to be at this level?
13:59
And, and you put in the time and you realize that just that
14:02
overtime those hard skills can really take hold and let's see
14:07
what we got here. Let's go one more understanding
14:10
your boss. This is obviously very specific
14:14
to to assistant coaches, but I had the I I had the the
14:19
privilege of working for a guy named Ron Helmer down there for
14:22
for 10 years. And if any, if you guys don't
14:24
know him, he just got inducted into the college coach Hall of
14:26
Fame posthumously. He coached there.
14:28
He coached for 40 or 50 some odd years and his last 15 or so were
14:33
at were at Indiana And you know, so understand your boss and
14:38
understand what you can learn from them.
14:40
And I'll kind of retouch on something I said earlier with a
14:43
with an example. The thing that I got most from
14:47
from coach Homer number 1, he was a fantastic speaker.
14:49
I used to joke. I mean, he was like he didn't
14:51
speak in front of a group. He gave sermons.
14:53
And I don't mean that in a religious way.
14:55
It's just that I think in another life, he just had a
14:57
presence about him that was so stoic and calm and
15:02
authoritative. I mean, he was a pleasure to
15:04
listen to when he was in front of people, but to watch him
15:07
coach a workout, kind of bring it back to the beginning here.
15:11
Off the top of my head, I remember one of his favourites
15:13
to do, don't write this down. This isn't a workout to write
15:15
down, but one of his favourites. He would do sets of two
15:18
hundreds, like 3 by 200, like two or three sets of 3 by 200
15:23
with like a 800 meter group. And they'd be, he want like the
15:26
women running 28 or 29 and the men running 25 or 26.
15:30
And it was like equal recovery on those two hundreds.
15:33
So it would be 200. And if you were a woman, 2830
15:37
seconds of recovery, 230 seconds of recovery, 200 boom, boom,
15:40
boom. And then you'd get a recovery
15:42
and go back. He'd have some 400 meter runners
15:44
in there. He'd have some 800 meter runs in
15:46
there. He'd have some of them.
15:48
I have athletes or decathletes in there whenever we do that,
15:51
right? But so on paper, you see two by
15:54
three by or three by three by 200 with 30 seconds rest in
15:59
between those, right? That's what you see on paper.
16:01
I know people are looking, holy cow, right?
16:03
And some people could do that. Some people could do that and
16:05
they'd run, they were a woman, they'd run 2O2 and 800.
16:08
If they were a guy, they were running 147 or something like
16:10
that, right? Some people couldn't, but to
16:13
watch him stand, just stand on the track with that, well, he
16:16
had like 5 stopwatches, right? Like all these stopwatches and
16:20
just sort of OK, I'm going to pull this one out.
16:24
You're going back in somebody else's little more recovery
16:27
here. And it was like watching
16:29
somebody conduct an orchestra. And again, I can write that work
16:34
out on the board and you can put it in your board.
16:35
You're going to go back and you're not going to be able to
16:37
do it. I can't do it the same way.
16:38
And I watched him do it, you know, So just trying to glean
16:41
some wisdom from those head coaches and trying to understand
16:45
the art at this point my career, that's kind of, I've thought a
16:48
lot about that. Just the artistic side of what
16:50
we do to me is some of the most fun, most interesting, fun stuff
16:55
to talk about whole other clinic.
16:57
I think I'm getting close to the end of my time here, but thank
17:01
you guys for listening to that. And real quick, so like I said,
17:04
I've coached collegiately from I'm going to do a shameless plug
17:06
here if that's OK. I've moved into the private
17:09
space, Coach Herb Athletics, doing some offseason speed
17:12
training with some kids right now.
17:14
When the spring comes round and I get facilities, I'll be more
17:17
specific if you're looking for somebody again, and I'm down in
17:19
Bloomington, IN, but high jump, long jump, triple jump, Sprint
17:22
stuff. Do all that if you have
17:24
questions. Most of my stuff goes out to my
17:27
Instagram and you can contact me there anyway, but thank you all
17:30
for listening. Grab a grab a picture of that
17:36
and that's a great one to put on your your social.
17:38
One of the things before we turn to lunch here real quick,
17:40
though, I told you I'm real proud of him.
17:43
And this is This is why I think it's important for the podcast.
17:46
So Mike was on the podcast and one of the things he left out
17:48
because he only got 30 minutes and you get 3 hours, like we do
17:51
it right? You know when you are looking at
17:54
other jobs, whether it's another high school job or you're
17:56
looking to go to college or you're in college looking to go
17:58
to another job. One of the things in coaching,
18:00
regardless of the sport, but obviously here for track and
18:03
field, we tend to think that any job that's posted, they already
18:06
know it's already, it's already gone.
18:08
They're just posting for the formality.
18:10
You got to know someone, things like that, Mike, you saw
18:12
redwoods and and all that and Marquette and all that kind of
18:16
stuff. Do you know how he got the job
18:17
in Illinois? He applied.
18:19
He had no clue who Tanja. He knew who Tanja was.
18:22
Sorry, he had never met Tanja. Tanja didn't have him on his on
18:27
her short list. He applied and then does what
18:31
Mike ARV does. He just probably won't surprise.
18:34
You have to hear his story. Tracked her down, I think it was
18:37
at US nationals, went and found her and said, hey, I'm Mike
18:40
Herb, I see you have an assistant coaching job open.
18:42
I'd like to, I'd like to talk to you about that.
18:45
And you got the job. I love that because it proves
18:48
that these jobs that you see out there, whether it's again,
18:51
whether you're going high school to high school, high school to
18:52
college, college to college, they're not all filled.
18:56
You do what you do and prove that you can coach and all the
19:00
intangibles. Coaching is kind of the table
19:03
stakes, guys. We expect you to have that level
19:06
that you can coach your events. It's the other side of things.
19:09
And don't let it fool you. One of my favorite things to do
19:12
on the podcast is the bust myths.
19:14
And what's 1 of the myths that we have for our college coaches
19:16
when they have an open position is, oh, high school coaches
19:19
can't coach college. You don't know what it is to
19:21
recruit and things like that. It's malarkey.
19:24
You high school coaches are maybe recruiting more than our
19:26
college people because you're in your hallways every single day
19:29
or you don't have a team, OK? So don't give up on your dream
19:33
if it is the coach college. Also, trust me that it's not all
19:36
fairy dust and flowers on that level either.
19:38
OK, You might have it better in high school in a lot of
19:40
situations, but real proud of Mike and grateful for you being
19:44
up there and sharing your story, Mike.
19:46
Hey gang, Mike Cunningham here. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this
19:49
episode of the Guild 1918 Project series.
19:52
It's really my mission, my passion to bring you massive
19:56
amounts of value and I hope this one hit the mark.
19:59
The Guilt 1918 Project is really dependent on you if for you to
20:04
build your own episode, to hear your voice, to have your voice
20:07
heard you have something to say and teach other coaches out
20:11
there. So please get a hold of me
20:13
e-mail text message. Twitter smoke signals get a hold
20:18
of me and let's help create your episode of the Guild 1918
20:21
Project. Hope you enjoy today, they will
20:23
see you tomorrow.