Five Questions With: Eric Hodgson — educator, coach and friend of Badger Region
Friday, November 20th, 2020
Eric Hodgson, the director of outreach in the Arizona Region, has visited Wisconsin on multiple occasions to assist with CAP clinics. He has also traveled the world to train other coaches and learn from them.
Earlier this month, he sat down with Program Director Brian Sharkey as part of the Badger Region’s “5 Questions With” feature.
FOR THE FULL VIDEO, CLICK HERE.
A lot of our clubs have very young coaches. What are some of the common pitfalls that young coaches have early in their career?
When young coaches get into the game, there’s usually a fork in the road. One way is they want to coach they way they were coached. Sometimes that is really, really good. But if they have had a yeller or a screamer or someone who has made them do push-ups, it doesn’t always work. Then they go and work with a younger team and it just doesn’t work. All of the science, all of the psychology and sociology says that doesn’t work. The other (fork) is that we as coaches tend to think that our job is all X’s and O’s. We need to figure out the best way to set or run the offense or whatever. But when you listen to experienced coaches whether it’s in baseball, softball, pick a sport, inevitably they will all tell you that it’s relationships. It’s how you win your kids over. It’s how you make them feel good about themselves. It’s how you treat them with respect and dignity. Even if they are the 12th man on your volleyball team – how do you make them feel important? It’s the emotional stuff and the relationships that are the most important thing.
Is it harder to build a relationship with an athlete in a digital world where they are always attached to devices or they are hidden behind a mask as we are currently facing in the middle of a pandemic?
I have been using this downtime to do some deep dives into things I want to get better at and one is looking at what a coach, Mark Williams, said is the needs-based coaching approach. It’s how do I go to this kid and find out what they need the most. Do they need more X’s and O’s? Do they need more confidence in themselves? Do they need a hand on their back and a coach saying, “you’re going to get this?” Do I need to stay after and work with a kid more one-on-one? We need to figure out as coaches, what is the best way to reach these kids? As John Kessel says, “This is a competition of learning.” How can I teach my kids and get them to learn faster than you can? And if I can do that, I am going to be a better coach than you. Then my kids will be able to execute what we need them to do when they need to do it.
What are your coaching principles that you base everything off of?
My biggest one is “be good to and for your athletes.” If you do that, everything else for you as a coach shuffles into line. You have to put their well-being before anything else – winning, your ego, your goals – you have to put them at the top of the mountain. And everything you do should be based on that criteria. I also have said that I have to become a better teacher – how do I make my gym a better learning environment? And by looking into that more, I feel that I’ve been able to share more with coaches here in Arizona.
Is getting coaches to think about their “why” difficult?
It is for some coaches. I talked with a coach recently who said she was frustrated when her team lets balls drop. Now, this is a seventh/eighth grade team. So, I asked, “How many of them were club players?” “None,” she said. “How many of them have played volleyball before?” Five or six, she said. So you’re getting angry at them, but do they know “why” the ball is dropping? Do they know whose ball that is in a serve receive situation? Sometimes we as coaches assume that since we saw kids do it well in tryouts, they’ll get it in practice or a real match. But for some kids, it’s a slower process. You can yell and scream at them all you want, but is that what’s going to get the best out of them? We have to do a better job of going to the next level of “why.” Let’s ask why they aren’t getting that ball. Are they confused about who should get that ball? If they are, then I’ve done a bad job as a coach giving them instruction and I need to go back and be better at that. Maybe the next level is why aren’t some of the girls getting rotations? Well, in the same conversation with this coach, we learned that a girl on her team was dyslexic, and once they learned they that, they could begin teaching in another way – going back to needs-based coaching. We can’t assume the girls want us to look bad. It’s not on them. It’s on us as coaches to be better. As coaches, we need to look in the mirror a little longer. And we need to ask why four or five times to get to the root of the problem. It might make us as coaches feel a little more uncomfortable.
If a doctor practiced medicine the same way today as he or she did 20 years ago, they would be sued for malpractice. If we coach the same way we did 20 years ago, something similar might happen. What has changed over the course of the past two decades in regards to coaching and philosophies that makes that the case?
An athlete from 20 years ago is different than an athlete from today in a lot of ways. We didn’t have video 20 years ago. Now we can pick up our cell phones and we have video. The kids also want that instant gratification. Their attention spans are shorter. And those aren’t meant to be negative. Those are just facts. And we as coaches have to react. The idea of a 12-year-old team doing a 40-minute drill – are you going to get a lot out of that drill? Chances are probably not. The science drives us in the right direction. So, every clinic I’ve been to recently has been talking about “Growth Mindset.” The problem is that that book came out in 2006. It’s taken us 14 years to make it part of the coaching nomenclature. That’s a long time. Right now, we need to start working on “external feedback.” There are so many scientific articles on the advantages of external feedback. I don’t want us to wait another 14 years for us to start implementing that. Those are the kinds of things we need to look in the mirror and react quicker and start using. The way we teach, the way we learn – we just need to be better and make that gym a classroom. We have to adapt.
BONUS QUESTION: What’s the hardest part of connecting with coaches for them to get better and improve their own game?
As people are progressing, people don’t have as much time to do things like read a paper or watch a YouTube video. Our job as coaching educators is to find the best way to get things out to people that is easy and without friction and it fits into their day. Coaches will appreciate more items that they can do or watch on their own time. We all have IMPACT training as the baseline for our coaching, but there are so many things covered during that course – there are 40 or 50 things that you can take away from that. We really need to do a better job of compartmentalizing better and take some more time with certain subjects in order for our coaches to learn a little better. It’s great to have two-day clinic, but people have to realize that we can’t talk about 70 subjects in two days. We can cover like 10 or eight, and allow coaches to do a deeper dive into things to give them an actual chance to learn it, understand it and use it. Coaches often have regrets when they’ll attend a CAP course ask tons of great questions, but when they get home, they go back to what they were doing before. So our issue is that we haven’t given a good enough roadmap on how to implement those things.
