S6 E7: The Psychology of Athletic Coaching w/Dr. John McCarthy

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• EPISODE RESOURCES

  https://www.bu.edu/wheelock/profile/john-mccarthy/

• EPISODE TAKEAWAYS

  • Coach Mac shares his journey of coaching and how he ended up at the doctoral program at Boston University studying sport psychology, where he is not a professor.

  • Coach Mac compares the US youth sport system to Iceland and other smaller countries who do so well in the Olympics where they seem to play the sport out of their cultural love and community rather than the grind it out systems we may have here.

  • Coach Mac validates how coaching is hard on every level. There are different contextual challenges that manifest in different ways, but it all comes with challenges.

  • Coach Mac learned about coaching from various experiences across different levels from coaching youth sports all the way to coaching D1 scholarship athletes.

  • Coach Mac learned about what he did not know, as a lifelong learner, through experiences coaching and working with inner city youth while in the BU doctoral program.

  • We discuss there is no one size fits all form of coaching yet systems are set up that way. Coach Mac describes how some of the elite youth sport systems are created for an incredibly small number of athletes to play at the highest of levels even though a tiny fraction of the kids ever even make it that far, which makes such systems unhelpful to so many other athletes who simply have a different path rather than feeling like a failure. He explains how this can contribute to a lot of kids feeling like a failure and/or even dropping out of sport and exercise at an early age.

  • Coach Mac talked about how climbing the coaching ladder can take a toll on wellness because of the incredibly long hours of preparation. He discussed how many coaches take on the ethos and culture of over preparing and never feeling like it's ever enough. He discussed how this never feeling enough mentality, which may or may not be necessary, can spill onto the players who begin to feel like they are never enough, perpetuating the cycle.

  • Gerald discusses how athletes and coaches can be conditioned to be driven by fear instead of intention, leading to an up and down rollercoaster of confidence, described by the late sport psychologist Ken Ravizza. 

  • Coach Mac explains how the early specialization and obsessiveness can lead kids to not even recognize why they are doing the sport in the first place. There's a high dropout rate of youth athletes who may lose all their identity and benefits from athletics and exercise.

  • We talked about how over working may not even lead athletes to learn how and when they perform their best. Just working harder does not simply equate to better performance or learning skills, strategies, and techniques effectively. 

  • We discuss how important promoting and facilitating joy in learning and relating is. This requires intentionality and creating a context for it to happen by the leaders of the team.

  • Coach Mac discussed how sports has become very professionalized (travel teams, showcases, etc) and for people to profit, which can take all the joy and purity out of the athletic experience. 

  • Coach Mac shares how sometimes you get a random coach who provides joy and ‘gets it’. His friend Mike Luke called it "random acts of coaching" meaning a random coach who creates a positive learning environment. Coach Mac thinks that it shouldn't have to be random and we can develop coaches' approach better in a proactive way since coaches are not necessarily trained in coaching, teaching, and learning.

  • Gerald shares how society can often fall into attributing an "either-or" mentality to athletics, meaning it’s either fun and you’re losing or it’s not fun (just hard work) and you’re winning; but that it can be both.

  • We discussed how highly winning coaches may utilize questionable or even hurtful behavior toward athletes that can get overlooked within the context of money and prioritizing winning. Coach Mac shares empathy for high level coaches in terms of the immense pressure they can feel to succeed with unreasonable expectations from systemic pressure, which can spill over onto the coach leading to these types of behaviors. Gerald shares how this can be considered coaching out of fear rather than intention.

  • Gerald shares how coaches may select players willing to tolerate harmful coaching tactics and antics. This is a selective bias which may make it look "okay" and normalized when it's not. 

  • Coach Mac shares how much pressure college coaches have to win. And how challenging it is to maintain a career in coaching.

  • Coach Mac shares his doctoral dissertation where he interviewed 20 of the most successful college and professional football coaches at the time. He was fascinated to find such a wide array of coaching styles while having success. He's suggesting there is not one answer to coaching. 

  • We all discuss how much athletes can need a different approach based on their differences (cultural, past experiences, way of learning, even past traumas, etc.).

  • Coach Mac shares how coaches can figure out how to relate to and with each of their athletes and create a culture that works for everyone to thrive, where everyone can be their best self toward a common goal. He describes how that can create some of the most incredible life experiences. 

  • Bennett Lombardo "Humanistic Coaching" reference to how coaches so often tell athletes what to do or what they've done wrong but rarely ask questions. We discuss how important it is to approach athletes in a way that evokes reflection, genuine learning, and communication rather than just seeking compliance and giving orders. The compliance approach may not actually develop learning and growth. It can also create shame and blame instead of learning and intrinsic motivation. 

  • Gerald shares how trust allows open communication and shared understanding between coaches and athletes. Alexis shares how this actually allows executive functions to work well and adapt and make changes. 

  • Coach Mac talks about how coaches often blame the athlete for when things go wrong rather than considering how coaches set the athlete up for success. In his dissertation, he interviewed the most winning football coach in division 3 history held this philosophy - John Gagliardy, in 64 years he had only 3 losing seasons. This coach took on the responsibility to set his players up for success and if things did not go well, he blamed himself for not facilitating the conditions for things to go well, rather than falling into yelling and blaming the players. 

  • Coach Mac shares how important it is to not just run through plans or just try to ‘get through plays’ during practice when the players may not even understand enough due to just trying to "get through" a program or plan. Gerald and Alexis share this comes down to how coaches prioritize time and energy. It is intentionality to facilitate learning, not just ‘getting through’.

  • Coach Mac discusses Canadian researcher Gretchen Kurt, who studies "relational maltreatment". This is about methods and approaches coaches are using that can be misguided and harmful. Immature, inappropriate, and abusive tactics can be tolerated because of "success" and money pressures. He shares how athletic directors used to be former coaches who may have had an investment in the athletes on a personal level, but now are more business minded people. He shares that when coaches mistreat their players, sometimes coaches are just let go without acknowledging this type of behavior so it’s hidden and not recognized in society.

  • Alexis talks about positive youth development and how sports can embrace contribution toward others.

  • Coach Mac shares how important it is to facilitate positive change in an organic way through even the smallest of ways.

  • Coach Mac shares how his friend Lou Burgolz describes the sports landscape where - “you know you have a team culture when the players defend it.” Coach Mac suggests coaches ask themselves, - “What would you want your players to say about you when you're gone?” He says that building a culture is an ongoing process that goes beyond words. You start over everyday; even start over every new season and with new players. 

  • Alexis shares how important it is to give time and space for learning and positive change to grow. 

  • Coach Mac shares how important it is for coaches to be open in their own coaching development. When trying to help athletes learn and grow he suggests not always taking on the ‘expert’ role all the time, which can miss the mark in understanding the athletes and the process they may need. Coach Mac shares - coaches can benefit from asking more questions that guide learning (not condescending questions like, “What’s wrong with you?!”).

• TRANSCRIPTION

  Gerald Reid  00:12

  Welcome back to season six of the ReidConnect-ED Podcast. Today we're going to be discussing the topic of coaching and sports and who better to bring on to our podcast talk about coaching than Dr John McCarthy, aka Coach Mack, who is a beloved clinical associate professor of applied human development in the graduate program at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, where he is in charge of the sports coaching specialization and also teaches and supervises of the sports psychology students. I'm so grateful to have known Coach Mack since starting my graduate studies and training at BU many years ago, and currently have the honor and privilege to call him a colleague as I now teach and supervise the counseling graduate students in the same program. To those of you who are listening who already know Coach Mack, he does not need an introduction. You know him from his passion for improving the conditions and experiences of sports and coaching. You know him by his compassionate heart and pioneering and leading the Get Ready program for Boston inner city kids, and you know him for his positive and thoughtful approach as a professor, as a colleague and as a friend. For those of you who do not know Coach Mac. Here's a brief bio. Dr John McCarthy received his undergraduate degree from Williams College, an incredible liberal arts college here in Massachusetts. He went on to receive his master's and doctorate degree in developmental studies with a specialization in sports psychology at Boston University's School of Education. Currently at BU he oversees the coaching specialization in physical education, health and coaching graduate program. He is also the director of the Institute for athletic coach education, which offers training and education for coaches and the community, particularly those who are involved in youth sport. Dr McCarthy has extensive practical experience gained from 15 years as a coach at the college and high school level. He has also been highly active in the field of coach education. He has been the Regional Coordinator for the NFL coaching academic program and sits on several advisory boards for organizations that are aimed at developing youth through sport, including Giro Boston and the starfish Foundation, and we are just so, so happy to be sitting down here in the studio with with Coach Mack. This is just such a pleasure for Alexis and I.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  02:29

  Thanks Jerry. That was, that was a lot to take in, but appreciate that wonderful introduction. Awesome.

  Gerald Reid  02:37

  Well, you know, Alexis and I, we always say that this podcast is a way to give back. We want people to learn about topics maybe they're not completely familiar with, or even if they are to learn from someone who's been immersed in these topics for their professional life. And I think you're just such a wonderful example of really wanting your career path and everywhere you put your energy to make things better. You know, in particular with those involved in sport, you know, we've been saying on the podcast that, you know, when you watch sports, you can celebrate the successes, the championships, people celebrate who's scoring the most points. You know, you get the highlight reels, but there's so much that goes on behind the scenes, you know, and the students that we teach and, you know, just practical experience with the athletes and the coaches and the people we work with. You realize that there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that doesn't get discussed in society as a whole, but it's very, very important, because people spend so much time in sports. It's not like they just jump into sports. They jump out. People spend, you know, their whole youth, right? Or their whole, you know, many, many years of their life involved in sport, and some even going to coach as well. So just so happy to hear, to have you here to share and shed a light on this topic of, you know, the inner workings of the psychology of coaching and the psychology of sports.

  Alexis Reid  03:58

  I would say too that for our listeners, that I feel like everybody at some point in their life becomes a coach, whether it's like our inner coach, where we're coaching ourselves through tough and tricky situations, or you're a parent or a caregiver or just a friend, sometimes we have to coach each other to get through different moments in life. So if you're not like an athletic coach or a sporty person, there's still going to be a wealth of information that I think will be shared and shed some more light on through this conversation. So we're really glad you're

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  04:29

  here. Oh, it's great. I always think of like, if someone says, Do you want feedback? And you're like, not really. But then if you say, can I give you some coaching? Then people often respond better to that. That's a

  Alexis Reid  04:40

  really good reframe. I like that. Yeah,

  Gerald Reid  04:42

  I love that. So Coach, Mack, tell us a little bit about how you got into this area of you know, really wanting to support coaches and kind of how they go about the philosophy and the process of being a coach, which is more intricate than people may realize.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  04:57

  Well, it's a good i. It's probably a multi headed question, but I think growing up, I played sport. I enjoyed playing lots of different sports growing up, and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to do that and do that through high school and even college. And then I think after that, I was probably still tied to that identity of, you know, being an athlete, or identifying with that kind of the camaraderie of sport. And, you know, I bounced around for a while trying to play beyond college, but at one point I was, I was fortunate to actually know Bill Parcells and he, you know, I had volunteered coaching high school football, kind of in between trying, trying out for teams and doing stuff. And I coached at a high school in New Jersey, Manasquan High School, and I worked for this really legendary high school coach, and he was really good at the techniques and tactics of sport. He was just he could have coached at any level, and he had a lot of really interesting ways of coaching. And I remember the first time I ever coached, and I thought I knew a lot of stuff. And in the middle of practice, I was coaching the receivers, and I was talking to them about how to do something, and all sudden I hear he had this real high pitched voice, and he said, Hey, McCarthy, sentences, not paragraphs. And I was like, Huh, oh, okay,

  Gerald Reid  06:43

  stop

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  06:46

  talking and get them doing some stuff. And so, like, had these early experiences where I was realizing I didn't know as much as I thought, even having played for quite a bit and experienced a lot as a player at a fairly high level. I actually didn't know that much about and I was also really stunned by he could stand behind the offense and look at all 22 players, both the offense and the defense, and he would point to like you're out of position. You you you want back side, you should go front side. You know, it was like, wow. And I remember saying, like, how the hell does he see that? Right? So, he was a master coach. He was somebody who had studied it, lived it, and thought about coaching all the time. But, you know, I was like, volunteering wasn't like a sustainable lifestyle. And then I had the good fortune, as I mentioned, to meet Bill Parcells. Or Bill Parcells happened to have gone to the same high school I went to. And so Parcells was this, you know, legendary Hall of Fame coach, and he said, When are you going to get a real job. And, you know, he had this really kind of rough way of saying he's, like, I got a guy who who's looking for somebody. And so I ended up starting coaching, college coaching at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings point, Long Island. And that was a really, like, an interesting step, because now I started to meet all these guys who it was their career to be coaches, and I was still kind of one foot in, one foot out, like thinking, I'm not sure this is for me. But that job, I worked there. Then I worked the next year at Wagner College as an assistant coach. And then one of the guys I had worked with at the Merchant Marine Academy came up here to Boston University, and they had a position open. And so I was sort of doing that, you know, climbing the ladder like I think people would think, and it's a very, you know, coaching, and in that time particularly was, wasn't you weren't getting paid much at all, and you really had to have a passion for, yeah, sure, the guys at the highest level were paid decently or handsomely. But at that time, you know, I remember coming up here to Boston, you know, I lived in my friend's basement of his basement apartment. And, you know, we were just working 70 hours a week and coaching. And it was a part of that that I really loved, you know, the the camaraderie, the feeling of putting together a plan and trying to get the team to come together and execute it. But I realized, I started to realize it was a lot more than I, like you say, behind the scenes, than people think. You know, I always laugh when people would say, well, the season's over. What do you, you know? Do you just have off the rest of the year? No, it. Like we were watching film, and we have spring practice and we're doing recruiting, and it's like, it's not, there's not a lot of downtime, right? And so, but somewhere along that journey, because I was working at Boston University, I was able to take classes where there wasn't much time to do it, but I took like, one sports psychology class, and I was like, wow, I really like this. And it took not, you know, I would have to fit it in during the summer or but every time I went to a class, I was like, this stuff, how the hell do I not know about growth and development? Or how do I not know about teaching and learning, or, How do I not know about motivation? Or, how do I not know about the psychology of you know? And it was kind of I felt like so both energized and also kind of like scratching my head, like, how does anybody coach without this knowledge. Like, how do you, how do you? How did I? I was a history major in college, so I didn't know a lot of this stuff. I didn't have a physical education teaching or learning background, and so, and then I looked at my colleagues, and I said, Oh, that's true of a lot of these guys. They don't one guy was a fireman. One guy was, you know, like, you know, they didn't, they didn't have the training. And it was, it became more and more obvious to me that there was a huge need. I would almost go back to, like, the coaching office, and I'd be like, what about this, you know, like, or, Why are we doing it this way, you know? And, and they would look at me kind of sideways, and, you know, yeah, and I remember this one guy, I think it's kind of funny now, the Wally dabowski. He used to call me the professor. I didn't know it was, he was on it, but it was like, because I was always kind of wondering, like, there's got to be a better way. Like, this doesn't seem like the optimal way to be approaching these guys. And I not that I had any answers. But because coaching super hard, it's like, at any level, coaching is challenging. I've coached my kids in youth basketball. I've coached, you know, college age division one scholarship players. It's like anywhere in between there, my experience has been it's just a different challenge. It doesn't matter where you're coaching. It could be coaching little league baseball or youth soccer. And each context has its own challenges. So that's the initially, how I got really was my first kind of like, I guess, awakenings to like what coaches might need. And then I would say, but kind of, fortunately for me, it didn't. It was a sad event at the time, but Boston University in 1997 dropped their football program, and it was a real Cross Life Crossroads moment for me, because I, you know, I met my partner at the time, and they were in the program. And you know, now, am I going to go just find another job, wherever it is? And I remember like feeling like, am I letting go of something here? Because in coaching, especially college coaching, the worst thing you can be is out of a job. So that's why these guys will take a job anywhere, anywhere, all over. You know, they'll, they'll pack up their family and leave, because they know if they're out of a job too long, they might not get another job. It looks bad on this. Yeah. So it's, it's really kind of a, it's a, some people say it's at that level, it's a good job, but a crappy profession, you know, because it's super stressful. If you got to pick up your family move, it's kind of like a military family has to, like, Okay, you're moving, shipping out, out of here, you know, right now. And so that was part of my calculus, to say, like, I don't know, but I was getting more and more interested in, like, just all the stuff that I was, you know, became interested in during my master's. I was able to finish my master's, right when they dropped the program, fortunately, and then pursue the doctoral program, like, like you did at BU. But during that time I I was one of my jobs, you know, a part time job I had, was working with a program called play it smart, where they did academic mentoring with urban and rural football teams. So it was funded by the. National Football Foundation and partially funded by the NFL Players Association. So it was just really cool program because it was developed by Al Petti paw out at Springfield College, and some Dan Gould and some other people that were in the sports psych field that were really trying to do that academic counseling for this, you know, urban football team, right? So it was kind of an interesting role. Was kind of a step back for me, back to that high school age group. And what I really liked about it was like counseling, training oriented. So we were we were there to try to provide academic resources, structure support for kids to take the SATs and a C, T's, and, you know, develop their, you know, pathway to college or or to, you know, a higher level of education or training. And so what was really cool about that was like I was getting an introduction of how to work with this unique population. It was at the Madison Park, tech vote, tech school. So these are kids who, you know, not the highest performing academic kids, but kids who are following trades or following other kind of pathways that wasn't the, you know, the high academic achieving schools that we, we think of, but they were kids that just really looking forward to improve their life. And I really enjoyed working with them, but in the time I was there, I probably learned a lot about what I didn't know about culture, about inequity, societal inequities, how how unfair the landscape is, in terms of, you know, sport participation and resources and and access and affordability and transportation, all these things that I just sort of you know, when you're coaching scholarship football, you're like, just tell the guys to show up, and they're there. But now at Madison Park, these kids are like, Coach, I gotta babysit or leave practice in the middle, or I gotta leave go get, you know, medicine for my grandmother. Or now you're like, oh my like, this is a different this is a different endeavor, and

  Gerald Reid  17:33

  sports is so expensive now, oh yeah, and

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  17:37

  that these kids did not have those resources, and most of their parents or guardians were working one or two or three jobs, and you know, if I had a parent meeting, the parents couldn't come there. They just didn't have the space to do it. And at the same time, I started coaching their JV football team. So for five years, I coached like 55 kids by myself, Wow, and it was like, actually an unbelievably demanding job, because, you know, I I, I wanted to do it, because I felt like I could, like I knew a lot about football at that point, so I could teach them football. But, man, in that five years, I had to keep re learning. How, like, how do I teach these kids? Some of these kids had learning disabilities. Some kids had language disability. You know, language differences they had, you know, they didn't speak English. Some of them, you know, some kids are just immigrant kids that, you know, from Nigeria or, like, culturally, all this stuff was happening at once. And I think that provided me, or like, a rich tapestry to kind of look at, to say, oh, man, I don't, I don't really understand a lot here. So I really had a lot of those moments where I'm like, what is I don't understand, right? And so I think that was a really important step in my kind of journey of understanding people who come from different backgrounds than I came from. You know, I'm white, middle class, blue collar, kind of. My dad was an FBI agent. So I had a certain kind of military my dad was in the Marine Corps. My brother's in the Marine Corps. It was like a certain kind of experience, but, you know, that was not my lived experience, you know, being in these kind of kind of neighborhoods where kids had to deal with violence, kids had to deal with poverty, kids had to deal with, you know, lots of things that I didn't have to deal with. So that was an important step for me, and that's, I know, I'm kind of long winded here. You know, how do I how did I get to where I wanted to work with coaches, I felt like that. Those experience really informed that pathway, of, like, my own discovery, of like, what I don't know, really helped shape, you know, towards the end of my doctoral program, I wanted, I was like, I want to work with coaches and some people like this. Is that a job? You know, it's like, I don't know if it's really a job, but it's like, it definitely is needed.

  Gerald Reid  22:02

  Yeah, there's so much there. Oh my god. And I just want to give a shout out to my sister, because she has a similar experience of wanting to help kids with executive function, and that Job didn't really exist. And she's like, well, similar to you, like, I just want to make it work. And she just started and did it, and it's really been helpful for people. But Tom, there's so much there that you shared. I just want to give a larger theme of your story, which is that you developed your philosophy about coaching and about working with people through all of your experiences. And it just shows what kind of lifelong learner you are to go through experiences at every level, like you said, like coaching is hard at every level because it's unique, there's contextual challenges, and it's always hard because you're trying to help someone. It's like even just trying to help your friend is hard, right, let alone a group of 2050, people, right? It's helping someone is a hard endeavor. We know that even as therapists, so I was just

  Alexis Reid  22:57

  gonna say too that I don't know if you know this, John, but our taglines for the podcast are actually life is hard, and also be open, be curious, be well. And I feel like your whole story you just shared was all about being open, being curious, and cultivating wellness among the group of athletes or even other coaches. I'm sure we'll hear more about that. How you get the coaches to be on board with your philosophy of doing things too, which it's I don't know, in my opinion, at least, and I think Jerry might share these values too. I think that's what life is about, right? Because when we are open and curious, we don't make assumptions about what might be needed, even though we have all this research and knowledge and wisdom from all the studies we've taken on for ourselves, like as much as we know we don't know. And I just appreciate that so much that you share that. Yeah,

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  23:50

  thank you. You know, what made me think of immediately was like, I also part of my decision to not continue on at the, you know, climbing the ladder in college football was increasingly, there was a feeling of it's, this is not a I'm not well to pursue this the way it's being pursued. Uh, feels like it's, it's not going to get better. You know, the amount of time we spent, like, just watching film per day, and the kind of every weekend, you know, recruiting or, you know, like there was this imbalance that sport has become football was sort of like the leader in sport, becoming hyper professionalized and organized and obsessive, almost. Yeah. Well, the excessive preparation is part of the ethos at the higher levels. Absolutely. Well. Where you can never prepare enough, and there's always more to do. And there was a feeling of being a bit trapped in that and and I remember talking to my dad, and my dad was an FBI agent, and the guy worked hard, and he knew how to work, but like, I remember having a conversation with him, and he's like, What are you doing? And I'm like, I'm in the office, dad. And he'd be like, you can't work that long, you know, like you're not, you're not going to be useful after a certain point. And I really stuck with me. It was like, he was right. It was like, it doesn't matter what you're doing if you're grinding yourself to the to dust you you're not that sharp, you're not really that. You're not going to make good decisions. You're not going to feel good. And there's a cause to that. So like, I like that tagline because it's adding, you know, be curious, but you know more that wellness is sort of like a life balance issue, I think in in coaching in particular, we,

  Alexis Reid  26:13

  we just interviewed the author of a great book, How to be enough, right? And Dr Ellen Hendrickson, who's actually from Bucha at the card center, and we had this conversation about, there's a fine line between perfectionism and taking care of yourself, right? And you need to figure out how to straddle that line, because to be whatever qualifies as the best or successful in whatever chosen path you have, it does require some self discipline and sometimes going a little bit above and beyond. But to pay attention to that wellness piece, I mean, I constantly am straddling that line, and I admit it on the podcast frequently that you know this is part of my own challenge, because I think like you, and I know like Jerry, too, I just love my job that sometimes it blurs the lines between, like, professional path and personal path, because it's just such a passion of for me that it doesn't feel like I'm doing work.

  Gerald Reid  27:10

  And coaches definitely feel that.

  Alexis Reid  27:14

  Yeah, yeah, there's this, I think, for athleticism, and I hope we could talk about this more too. Like, once you enter the world of sports, whether you're a player or a coach, there's such a strong identity that connects to that that I think makes navigating different phases of life kind of challenging. And I hear that in your story, too,

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  27:36

  yeah, something that I you know currently, that I talk to a lot of this students at BU about is, is the very thing that has gotten them to be successful. It's like that discipline and that hard work and that, you know, that kind of mindset where they just keep going and push themselves through that very same quality at some points becomes a liability. And so I feel that's especially true with coaches. I can remember there was a guy that worked with us at BU, a guy named Jason swepson and played at BC, he became, later was a coach at Elon, and I coached at North Carolina State and and he was working with us then, and I remember it was like Thursday, and the our tradition was sort of like we would just grind it out, and then at some point on Thursday, he put his feet up on the desk, and he would start reading the paper, and I start to get annoyed, you know, I'm like, and he'd be like, he's because I was the offensive coordinator, he was a receivers coach. And he'd be like, Hey, Mac, you got anything else for me? And I'm like, no. But then he said, Okay, I'm out. And I was like, I was damn annoyed with him. And I was like, you know, we got a game coming up, you know, like, this is important, but it's like, I didn't have anything for him to do. There was nothing else for him to really do on a Thursday night, you know, we're gonna have our last walk through on Friday and then play the game Saturday morning. It's like, what in? You know? What happened? I got enculturated in my early years, it's like there's always more to do. There's always more to do. And like, the further I get away from that, I see how obsessive, perfectionistic it is, and that tendency is rewarded, yes, because you are prepared and you are, you've seen every scenario. And then if you're trying to prepare other people, you feel like, well, you're never there's never enough. But I think that never enough

  Gerald Reid  29:54

  kind of feeling probably on a lot of T shirts, actually. Yeah, never enough. Yeah. That's true

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  30:00

  is is quite detrimental to the coach, and I would even say it's an ethos that is spilling out on the athletes in a way that they feel they've always got to be doing more, and they got to be more focused and work harder. And it's a it's quite oppressive. It's not very liberatory, and it's it's orientation. So I know success requires you to do that, but I think how do we find that balance? I think that's an important we're here for you to support, you, to go to the cape, and

  Alexis Reid  30:42

  that's right. There are very many moments of that. My dog keeps me balanced.

  Gerald Reid  30:46

  I love what you're saying, though, that it does spill over into the athletes. And like, you know, we've talked about my practice, and other people that you know who work in the sports psychology world, they end up talking about this, like, grind it out mentality, to just work harder and harder and harder. And in our perfectionist episode, I point out like it's that's driven by fear. It's not driven by intention. And there's athletes I've worked with who are just, they don't really even know what makes a good practice. They're just, I don't know, spending eight hours practicing in a day, and they don't even know what makes it good or bad, so they try to, almost like, have a perfect ending to the practice, to make them feel like they're a good athlete. And if that doesn't happen, they're just not a good athlete in on that day. And it's like such a roller coaster, like, you know, Ken Rosa's book heads up baseball talks about the roller coaster of confidence. And this type of mentality is a very all or nothing mentality that you know, when I try to work with these athletes, is make what you're doing more intentional, because if you're just driven by fear, it's just going to be this up and down roller coaster. And it's not sustainable, like you're saying, right? It's actually detrimental to feeling confident and feeling loose and feeling ready in that type of way, because it's not just and finding

  Alexis Reid  32:03

  the flow of the moment instead of just grinding through it, yeah,

  Gerald Reid  32:07

  like forcing it, yeah,

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  32:07

  yeah. It makes me think that a lot of you know, I teach the undergrad sports Psych class in the springtime at BU, and I've totally kind of changed the way I teach. It than than I used to teach. It was used to teach concepts and, you know, goal setting and visualization, and we still do all that. But it wasn't till I started to shift the focus to, how do you how do you perform better and and pick something that you're working on. It could be one year. I had a guy who was a pop up chef, whatever that is, and then I had another young woman who was an EMT. She was a brand new EMT, and she was struggling with, she would sit in the front row because she was struggling with, like, she would get on a call, and if she didn't react soon enough, people would, like, push her out of the way and just, you know, start the code, or do whatever they were, you know, the IV and and she was, like, she really had a reason to get better at her performance. And then, of course, there's a lot of athletes in the class, and other people are musicians who are just trying to do better in school, but we really try to, like, break it down. Like, performance is performance? Like, it could be a test, it could be the violin, it could be playing lacrosse game on Saturday afternoon and when, when I started to orient the class around goal setting and performance, like, process goals, like, you know, how do you want it to be? How do you want it to feel? And this is a very foreign thing to them, because they, they do have this. I call it the Kobe Bryant, grind set, you know, it's like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna shoot 500 shots before everyone else has come to the gym. And, you know, then you see it's tagged on Instagram. And then it's like, held up as the, the answer to greatness. And it's like, maybe, but, you know, we kind of forget that Kobe's dad was a professional coach, he had these unusual qualities, physically and all these other things that made him super special. And then maybe sometimes he wasn't even that nice a person, you know, someone might say, but I think for them to discover how do they want it to be is, to me, that's an individual journey, and it's a very important part of that intrinsic motivation to do something because, I think, because sport environments now are so they're they are driven so early to. For this excellence and early specialization and a lot of investment, and it's very elitist in the way it we it's set up, and these young kids give up a lot of their lives to go to get a scholarship or to play at a higher level, and it doesn't necessarily give them room to discover why they're doing it for themselves, and I think that, to me, that's the important work, both for like, how do we coach? Coaches to create an environment where the kid can be themselves and contribute, obviously become their reach their potential. But there's a lot of competing narratives about like, how coaches should coach, and I think, to me, that's interesting. You know, it depends on who the kids are and what their goals are. But even within that, I feel like coaches feel kind of obsessed and are sometimes driven to take that out on their players in a way that's counterproductive.

  Alexis Reid  36:15

  Wow. I was just gonna say I don't really talk about this publicly too much. But when I was in my first year of undergrad, I actually took a sports Psych class. I was drawn to it. I actually almost went into sports broadcasting as my career path, and then for various reasons, and here I am. I mean, a lot of the skills I learned through that path and that part of my path actually have helped me a lot of ways as a public speaker, as a teacher, as podcast CO has all the things, but it's very interesting when you think about the people who show up who want to learn about sports psychology and you want to learn about performance. And I was very fortunate in my graduate studies to have like multiple paths of what I learned. I crammed in as much as I could and got as much as I could out of it, where I one of my three primary paths was, was positive youth development, right? And when we think about coaching, especially, that's such a big part of the puzzle. So you mentioned the developmental side of things, and I think from a coaching perspective, it's so important to hold on to the fact that there are so many individuals who are not necessarily on this like linear, linear trajectory, to start at point A and end up at point B. There are going to be so many twists and turns and nutrients, from a developmental perspective, positive nutrients, that we need to be able to invest in their journeys. It's not a one size fits all. It's not at all, right, going Jerry always brings up, I love it. The Universal Design for Learning. Aspect of things, you know, nothing really is one size fits all, like some things even in, you know, I always say, even in our evidence based world, as much research as we have, even in scientific research, it doesn't work for everybody all the time either. So as a coach and thinking about, how do we nurture these gifts and challenges that you see before you, I think it does require this as you're describing, kind of taking a step back and looking at what people's goals are, because the primary goal might be, how do I perform better? But as you mentioned, their secondary or tertiary goals might be like, how do I show up for work? How do I show up in a relationship? How do I show up in these different contexts? So as a coach, I don't see you as just like coaching the sport, athletic side of things. I also see it as you're developing individuals and humans, and depending on what level you're coaching at, you might have a different experience or different needs right before you. Yeah,

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  38:48

  for sure, the when you talk about positive youth development, I think one of the things that I try, I have a methods of coaching class I teach in the fall, and I truly try to get the students who are going to be coaches to to consider like we, because we have this very elitist approach that, you know, we're setting our kid up to be the, you know, get the scholarship to go to Stanford or something. Is like, actually, so few people actually get to that level that we've designed a we've designed a system that serves almost nobody perfect, and so, yeah, it's great for maybe those you know, few that actually go to a scholarship level or a professional level, but it's so infinitesimal, the number of people that get that opportunity, there's only 300 to 400 players in the world that play in the NBA. Yeah, the world. So it's like, that's insane, that a parent is thinking. My kid is going to play in the NBA? Yeah, of course, it could happen, but, but the the problem with it is it's inverted. It's on its head. It's like, we're we think, okay, then we're going to set up our au systems and everything to get to that level. And in the meantime, we're basically telling a lot of kids you're not good enough and and you shouldn't get the benefits of that playing sport like in Norway. Norway's kids play into their late teens, and Norway, for the size of the country, does way better in like, the Olympics, then, not just the Winter Olympics, like, then a much like, we have a massive population, you know, compared to Norway, and we, you know, like, how is it possible that Norway, or how are we worse at soccer than than Iceland? You know, because our system is so set up to, like, just grind, grind it out and, and really not, and have the kids enjoy it. Yeah, there was one of my former students who played here at soccer at BU, and he said, I don't understand the US. He's like, all my teammates are like, so sad. The season's over, and it's like, in Iceland, we just keep playing, yeah? You know, he's like, Yeah, my friend who was, you know, he didn't get good till he was 29 and he's the guy guarding messi in the World Cup. And it's like, what a different way of thinking about is they play because it's a part of their community value. They play into their adulthood. And it's not about, you know, you know, grinding out these young kids and then, you know, the few that emerge from it. And so I think, for me, it's a lot is thinking about, how can the kids, when we're talking about positive development, first, enjoy their experience, want to play longer, get the benefits of friendships and skill development and that sense of competence that they and discipline that they learn in a team setting. And you know, the dropout numbers are bad, like for girls, it's around 11, sometimes 10 and a half, that feeling that I'm no longer perfect, or something's changed, and because of that, I'm not good anymore, or, Oh yeah, I don't look the part anymore something. And, you know, we lose those kids at early ages to, you know, sometimes a lifetime of not enjoying physical activity. Yeah, and so from positive youth development standpoint, that's why, you know, we've run our program at Boston English high school for the last 18 years. Because I started out working with teams over there, but I realized, like even that was elitist to say, Oh, we only work with the sports teams. So now we work with, you know, we work with the school is send us kids who want to move, and some of them are athletes, and we can help them, you know, develop, teach them how to weight, lift or box or do, you know, develop skills. But it doesn't, doesn't have to be, yeah, we want to teach them the joy of working together, the social, emotional skills that you can learn from working in a group, and we have certain frameworks for working with that, self reflection. I'm sorry, self reflection, yeah, it's like, it's not just about who's the fastest, biggest, strongest. It's about, you know, how much do you care about your teammate and or your classmate? And that work is to me, every kid could benefit in that physical activity setting from those skills, that you dispositions, that you develop through that activity.

  Alexis Reid  44:11

  I love it when I work with families who say my kid is a little averse to sports, but I want them to get the benefit of moving their bodies, working together with others, learning through failures and challenges, to be a part of a team. And I think, like that is the beauty, especially if I'm kind of talking more about youth sports here. But also, you know, I see the other side too, where these kids are in so many clinics or involved in multiple teams at the same time. It's not to say it's good or bad. I just think, to your point, it's important to say, what is the intent in the goal of doing this? Because if it is to find joy and build skills and interact with each other like that's a beautiful thing. In fact, in my universal design for learning work, my friends and colleagues. They cast just redesigned their guidelines to help teachers to understand how to make learning environments more flexible and accessible. And key point, one of my favorite parts of these new guidelines is they talk about promoting joy in learning, because I think we've, like, sucked so much out of that thinking about just the end goal, which, as you mentioned, is like such a small percentage of people will get to the level that I think a lot of families and youth athletes, and especially collegiate athletes, are trying to achieve, which is, it just blows my mind sometimes, but I think this idea of joy is the most important thing. And thinking about coaches and parents and teachers and any adult in the life of a younger person like that's kind of our responsibility, is to share joy, not just to say, like, go do something joyful, but to be joyful with create

  Gerald Reid  45:55

  the context for it to happen, which takes a lot of intentionality, create

  Alexis Reid  45:58

  the culture, create the opportunities to fun.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  46:03

  For me, that's where the coaches come in, because the system that we the support system that exists, has become very much professionalized. And there's it, it's also designed for people to profit off of like when I was a kid, and even in high school, nobody made any money off of us, you know, like the coaches did it. They were the dads in the community that wanted to help out, and my high school coaches were all physical education teachers or history teachers, those kind of people that were like lifelong educators. And the environment has shifted, you know, these AAU clubs and different soccer clubs and all the hockey clubs, they're they're big money, and there's somebody's making money off of it, the tournaments and the showcases and all this stuff is like

  Alexis Reid  47:06

  reels for the kids that are made all the sixth grade.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  47:09

  All this stuff is an industry in Unfortunately, none of those, I wouldn't say, none of them. There are some well meaning people, but the way the system is set up, it's recruiting people into the the into the environment that are trying to profit off of it, trying to use those kids to get to the next level or to and I think the the educator coach as educator model is, you know, not, not in the US ethos, for sure. So I think reclaiming some of the purpose, the joyfulness, comes from a coach who's and there are so many great coaches that are doing this, but it's one of my mentors was a guy named Mike Luke, who was a coach educator. And he, he, he called it random acts of coaching. I love that. So if you're fortunate enough, you just randomly get this coach who gets it, who makes it a joyful experience, who's helping you develop your skills, helping you learn about teammate, you know, being a good teammate and but that's just random right now, and we could do better than that. You know, we could do better

  Gerald Reid  48:34

  than and it doesn't have to be like a either or. I think in society, everything feels like an either or where it's like, if you're joyful, you're not really getting better. And I remember one of the textbooks that we have as part of the curriculum for your sports psych program was the gene the gene Williams book. And I remember reading this quote. It stuck with me for like, so many years. It was like, was Bobby Knight a great coach because of his antics, or because he was just a good basketball coach despite his antics.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  49:03

  Well, yeah, I mean, with those, Bobby Knight was a tactical genius, like he, he understood for the

  Alexis Reid  49:11

  audience who might not know Bob Knight. I actually

  Gerald Reid  49:12

  brought this up to a high school student. He's like, who's Bobby Knight? Yeah, wow.

  Alexis Reid  49:18

  Can we operationalize who he is coach.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  49:21

  He was a famous, I think he had the all time number of collegiate wins, Indiana and then at Texas Tech and but he also was known for having, like, an unbelievable temper. You know, would throw flower pots at his secretaries. He would choke his players. He would throw chairs on the floor when they didn't get and so, because he had so much success, he's, you know, still lauded, as you know, one of the greatest coaches ever. But then it depends on what. Your your measurement is, if it's just wins, yeah, he's fantastic, but for the young guy, he choked and, you know, or players that suffered with his displeasure, you know, then not so sure. It would be the same experience and so, and

  Alexis Reid  50:19

  this wasn't like a football coach, where you're supposed to, like, channel that aggression into a hit. This is a basketball coach you're supposed to be finessing the game on the court where aggression might actually mess with your performance. That's just my opinion. There's also,

  Gerald Reid  50:35

  there's also some selective bias in a coach like that, right? Like he's gonna select players that are going to be willing to tolerate that, which makes it look like it's okay.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  50:46

  Yeah, I mean, I think this, unfortunately, the I like how you framed it, it's like there's a either or, you know, you have to be this way or that way. And I don't, you know, in the coaching classes that I teach is like more being more nuanced about it is it depends, depends on the context. We know that at professional sport, the coaches and high level college sport, it's a demanding job, and the the demand is for them to win. Yeah, you know, I also thinking about my job pathway back in the day. I remember when the Nebraska football coach at the time, you know, back then, was guy named Frank solich, and he had followed up a legendary coach, and his team went 10 and two and he got fired. Wow. And you're like, that's because the expectations at Nebraska are really, really high during that time. And so you have to have some empathy for these coaches that really are hard driving or that can be seen as controlling and or aggressive in their tactics. That a fear, I think, is it's not that I endorse it, but I have empathy for how hard their environment is and what the expectations are on them, and just how cruel the higher level is. It's like for every coach who gets that head coaching job. There's, you know, several assistant coaches that might get fired the next year, have to move their family and find a new job, maybe never find a job that's paying you as much as you were being paid. So it's like the environment is challenging, but back to Bobby Knight. It's like you could be really good at the techniques and tactics of sport and be very successful. But this is also what got me into, like, you know, why? During my doctoral studies, I was really interested in, you know, how coaches develop successful teams, because they're, you know that if we could bottle that folks, you know, we would, we would be wealthy, right? But there's no one like easy formula, right? And so for my dissertation, I interviewed 20 of the most successful college and professional football coaches at the time, and it was really interesting to me to see a wide array of styles of coaching. And to me, that's really hopeful, because, you know, some were organizational geniuses, some were more teaching and motivational, you know, they're setting up a motivational climate where people really thrive. Some have more kind of humanistic vibe to it. And so it was good to see throughout that, you know, I interviewed guys like Bill Parcells, who's kind of an old school, you know, Theory X, you know, they're lazy. I got to make them work harder. Kind of coach to a guy named frosty Westering, who coached at Pacific Lutheran, who was, you know, he was an educational Psych. Guy had his doctorate in educational psychology, but he had come out of the Marine Corps, wow. He just understood intrinsic motivation and wanting people to play because they wanted to play so kind of the whole range of these coaches were super successful. But it was, it was encouraging to me to say, Wait, there's not one answer to this riddle. You know,

  Alexis Reid  54:56

  I was just gonna say too thinking about one of your original comments. You. Made about looking at this team of urban football players that you worked with and saying to yourself, oh, they might actually need a different approach than I am thinking I need to go into this with, and I'm thinking about especially collegiate athletes or professional teams, where kids are coming from so many diverse backgrounds, with different value systems, with different experiences, different ways of learning, different ways of learning, different traumas that they might bring with them into their playing and into their lives and into this new context. And I see this all the time through clients, Jerry and I share stories that we share about when you come into college, when you live somewhere else, you're coming into a new community, coming into new space, a new place where one you might not be familiar, meeting all different kinds of people might not be the best fit. You might not even know what the best fit is for you. And then, if you're an athlete, you're asked to perform at the highest level because they brought you onto this team, or you've earned your spot on the team, and that requires, like so much. And then you have a coach, most of the time, who's like, I know what I do, to do this well, and I'm just going to do it. And you all have to adapt to that. And you're saying, you know, maybe there's a different place in between to think about, or some other aspects of psychology or education and coaching that maybe we can pull into this. I think incredible field, because I think sports are so valuable, whether you're a spectator or you're an athlete or family member that's cheering somebody on. I think there's so many really unique qualities that go into just sports, which not everybody always gets a chance to see.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  56:46

  Yeah, absolutely. The when you makes me think of like, I teach a class that I developed called the psychology of coaching teams, and a lot of that is really just what you're saying is that, how does a how does the group leader, who's the coach, develop a group that believes they can have success, and because, when they're coming from a new place, they're adjusting to a lot? What? What? What's their history? Do they have a history of trauma? Do they have a history of, you know, some difficulty that they're bringing with them? And I always think the team is this wonderful place where we can, you know, GRE would know about the Erwin Yale's work in in group psychotherapy, where it's like, it's not a therapy group, a team, it's not,

  Alexis Reid  57:44

  but I don't know if it really can be, because then it changes the context. Yeah, I mean

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  57:49

  a therapy groups for people who are suffering and life isn't going so well, right, usually, but, and that's why they're there, but a team actually has a goal, and their goal is to be successful. And it's a really positive frame to do that work of like how to, how to, for us to be more successful, all of us have to change and grow and develop and align our purposes. And there's some beautiful possibility there for people learning those skills, those interpersonal skills, and and kind of developing some altruism towards their other people in their group, and all those things that in a good therapy group are, in my view, present in the a good team, you know, those therapeutic factors, and it's really the coach is the it's this orchestrator of creating that environment where you can be your best self, and you can be your best self, and I can bring my best self, and we put that all together. And that's such an exciting thing to behold. When it really comes together, it's extraordinary, right? And that's why

  Gerald Reid  59:09

  they say, I feel like a family.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  59:09

  Yeah, it's hard work, and there's lots of up and down, and there's sometimes two steps forward, then three steps back. And it's like, you know, but when it happens, it's a beautiful thing to behold. You know, even if our group at Boston was high school, we have kids come in and we when they work together and they share, and they shout each other out, and they learn stuff, and it's like, man, you're like, that is just awesome, right? And we can do it if we facilitate that environment. And to me, that's, I guess, what I've learned later is like, there's no one right way to do it, but we can. There's definitely approaches to, like, how we can do it a different way. You know, like, one of the things I learned early. There was a guy who actually wrote his dissertation at BU, guy named Bennett Lombardo who wrote the book humanistic coaching. And he observed, like, I don't know it was like 700 hours of coaching, and he was just shocked at how, like, the coaches didn't ask any questions, no legitimate questions. Like, they would say, Well, are you crazy? Are you Are you kidding me? That's really not a question. He would say that you hear it on a lot of teams, right? Yeah, listen on the sidelines. It's like, yeah, what are you doing? You know, like, those are not really questions. It's like, shaming, actually, yeah. You know, putting the kids down, or, you know, those kind of rhetorical questions are threatening. And I think what I one of the things I learned is, like, really, just asking kids, what do you need? What are you trying to do today?

  Gerald Reid  1:00:53

  Why did you do that? Yeah, like, how so I can understand why that happened?

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:00:57

  Yeah, even, why is it a little bit challenging? Sometimes help me understand is, is there, what other ways are the way to get the ball down the court? You know, like there's lots of ways that we can approach kids so that they learn in this, not top down way. And from running the program over at English high I realized, and having worked at Madison Park, I realized that top down, way it could get you can get people to comply, yeah, and especially the sport of football, it's like, it's only get on the line and get set and do this and take your first step to the right. And it's like, we are good at getting people to do that. But are we good at getting them to understand why they're doing it? Yeah. And there was this funny moment. I was coaching at Madison Park, the JV football team and and I, I was in the huddle with them, and I called the play. It was the sweet, bright play, and I looked at every single kid, I said, You got it? You got it? Got in. The old said, Yes, coach, yes, coach. And I was like, All right, and then we go out and run and play, and all 11 kids wrong do the wrong thing. Holy cow, what? Well, then I started to go through, oh, Juan, you weren't here yesterday because you had to leave early. And then, oh, you weren't here. You were sick. And then, and I was realizing all these in I started to have to learn how to teach better. Yeah? So I'd say, you know, after that, I would say, Okay, let's go up on a line point to which direction to play is, oh, that's smart, yeah. Okay, what's your then take your first step in the direction we're gonna and then broke it down. You know, it was like, I had to, like, slow it down and learn how to teach better. It was not their fault. It was my fault. And I think when kids are not having success, we often blame the the athlete. We pull them out of the game and say, What are you doing? You gotta You can't miss that ball or whatever. And you hear this over and over and over, or you're not mentally tough, or you're not these, this constant blaming of the kid instead of the coach. My biggest thing is like, if, if the kid is not having success, that's likely they're our fault.

  Gerald Reid  1:03:20

  Didn't you say that in your dissertation? There's a great coach who actually that was, like, his philosophy of, like, if they're not doing well, it's because I didn't set them up for success in some way. And And to your point, I just want to get this in here real quick. Is that you're really talking about trust and vulnerability, to really ask a question to someone and them being honest, like, Oh, I'm sorry. Like, I literally was distracted about the homework I had because I have a paper that's like, that's why I didn't do it like to be honest and to be vulnerable with someone requires so much trust in that relationship. And I love what you're saying about just creating the culture where that is expected. That's okay. Well, I'm gonna hear you out, and we're gonna just understand each other better, and it's just more effective. Anyway, I'm going

  Alexis Reid  1:04:03

  to piggyback on that, because it's funny that you went there, because that's like, so valuable to the work you do. And then I'm immediately thinking about, okay, that trust actually relates to how our executive functions actually come online super stressed, and we don't trust that. I'm going to learn something here, versus being shamed by the situation that didn't go the way I wanted it to, it's going to shut down your ability to learn, adapt, make changes. From an executive function perspective, those frontal lobes, especially for younger athletes or younger people, aren't fully developed yet, and we do see that a lot of athletes, oftentimes, you might have ADHD or tensional difficulties, or their executive function systems aren't working as well. So the way you, like, broke it down and pulled it back and was like, Okay, let me build trust in you. Let me show you a different way, the fact that you did that in that situation, I'm breaking this down for the audience, the fact that you. Made that connection to say something was missing here, let's actually break this down and made it a learning opportunity that just taught them a million lessons just in those few moments. Right? It taught them that they could learn something differently, that they can actually slow themselves down to think about what it takes to get to where they're headed. And more clearly, right? That not okay, I didn't get it. But wait a minute, other people might not have gotten it. Also, like, maybe my question is valuable, because it's not just about me, it's about everybody making sure we're on the same page to work together. And that coach saw that and wants to break it down and support us. The

  Gerald Reid  1:05:41

  player's gonna want to, like, work harder for you because of that, right? They're gonna be like, Oh, that's my coach has my back. I'm gonna want to, like, even work harder. And you think that guy you you did and you interviewed for dissertation. Wasn't he the most winningest d2 coach?

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:05:55

  Yeah, no. John Gagliardi, who actually the division three championship trophy is named after him, the winningest coach of all time. Wow, amazing in 64 years. Wow, think about that. 64 he was. He had three in football, okay, he had three losing seasons. Wow, just so, like, so far, you know, the three standard deviations from the norm, right? And he said this exact thing, which was, if a guy, well, at first he said, Do you like to get yelled at? And I said, No. And he said, Well, I don't like it either. I don't want the president of the university coming down here raising Holy hell with me. So you know, I I would never yell at my players, and because I wouldn't want to be yelled at. So if, if they can't do something is because I didn't teach them how to do it. And so if I put him out there, that's my fault. And he said, If I have to put him out there, because there's nobody else who can do it, he's that's also my fault. And it was so liberating to me. It was what I was one of those like, smack you, smack your head, forehead, kind of moments where like, oh my gosh, he's putting the entire onus of the player's performance on himself, yeah, and his ability to teach them and prepare them and get them ready to have success. You know, he's not putting an immature person out there, probably going to struggle. He's saying, when you're ready, and I understand that you understand you're you're going to have success, and that confidence, but also from a learning you know, your your expertise Alexis, is that, you know, learning and executive functioning. I think you know, because Jerry and I share this kind of sports psyche background, whereas motivation and visualization and goal setting and, you know, breathing and all this stuff. Yeah, that's important for sure. Yeah,

  Alexis Reid  1:07:59

  that helps me in my work too, yeah, and it's part of

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:08:03

  the deal of performing well. But I actually think a lot of the stuff that I'm interested in working with coaches actually has much more to do with teaching and learning stuff, because that's the stuff I didn't have. And you know, that basic, you know, back to Madison Park, when 11 guys do the wrong thing, it wasn't their fault. It's like, I didn't check for their understanding before they went out and ran the play. And I should have had better ways of of as I was had to learn to say, Wait a minute. He it's not I didn't teach it clearly enough, or they were ready for. And now, if I put the onus on me, then I spend more time on that.

  Alexis Reid  1:08:46

  So sometimes, especially with athletics, depending on the context of where the athletes are coming from too, as they join a team, they might have learned skills differently, right? And then they join a new team, and the coach has this expectation of, you know these skills because you're on this team, but their interpretation of what they're being asked for or techniques might be different. So what you guys are saying too is like, we need to get a better understanding of how skills are being developed from a learning perspective, and then also consider the performance side. So I don't think those two are separate, because in any kind of change in life, any kind of learning or wanting to improve oneself, like all of that is a part of that process. So I just want to point out, too, that you're you're making a really great point to the coaches out there who are listening. And I want to validate both the coaches and the teachers, because sometimes we know all the right things, but we don't have enough time to give it to. Like, actually learning well, sometimes it's like, Oh, I gotta get this down, and we need to move on to the next play. So true. Or I need to get this lesson down. And you know, if there's half the class that's failing that's kind of on them to step up and have the responsibility to do what they need to. But I love how you're emphasizing the point of, like, if something's not going as planned, we need to take a step back and look at ourselves as coaches, as educators, as adults in the lives, as younger people or or other people that we're working with to see what tweaks and shifts and changes might be necessary.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:10:33

  Yeah, it was the last year I was coaching here at BU there was a what I considered a master coach. This guy, Dan derazio, rest his soul, fantastic teacher, and I remember he was a very, very intense guy, and he would be standing on the side when we were running plays. He coached the offensive line, but and I had a script of plays that we were going to run in practice, and then he we ran a play and really didn't go well. And I said, Okay, next play. So that means, you know, we have to get ready the defense, ready to run the cards and, and, but I see Dan on the side, and he kind of tilts his head. And then I pause for a second. I go over to him, and I say, what's up, coach? And he's like, John, we can't run that play. We can't run any play. And I like, I still get chills thinking about like, he was like, don't just run plays to run plays. It's like, do them figure that one out, and we'll, if we figure that one out, we'll probably figure the next one out. We might have to spend a little more time on it and and where's the gap in understanding, and why didn't we throw it to the right guy and and all that stuff is like, we get our plan as a coach, and we just want to follow it and run through it and feel good and pat ourselves on the back. We got through 60 plays today, and it's like, but did they really learn? You know? Did they know they they understand the nuance of it? That was a good lesson for me.

  Gerald Reid  1:12:22

  Yeah, that's great. It's like you're saying it's come down to intention and priorities. You know, what are you prioritizing with the time that you have with the athletes, and how is it being utilized? It's just such a fantastic philosophy of how to go about being a coach. Is really thinking yourself, is how are you facilitating that time, Coach Mac, there is kind of, I do want to just get your take on this, because it's a pretty significant aspect of athletics. Is things that I have seen sometimes working with athletes, and you hear stories through people you know in the sports world that sometimes, like, there could be bad things that actually do happen within the sports world. And sometimes it's intentional. Sometimes it's not, you know, just there's different reasons for it. And, you know, we try not to stigmatize people, anyone involved in things that happen, but we do want to try to understand it. And so can you speak a little bit to, you know, kind of, sometimes when, like, things kind of go bad and wrong, and it's not just because someone lost, or maybe, you know, like, feels bad because they lost the match, but something you know more deeper than that, when it's like, oh, that person's really kind of was in pain because of what was going on in their sports team, not just because they lost or something like that.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:13:40

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, there is, there are a very, very high number of incidents at in youth sport, college sport, high school sport, where there's a lot of work being done by Gretchen Kerr at University of Toronto, that would characterize a lot of the abuse and as what she calls relational maltreatment. And when we unfortunately, because there's there's an incentive structure around sport to succeed. Sometimes the methods and approaches that coaches are using are really sometimes misguided and and harmful, and we sadly, a lot of the abuse will be tolerated like we were talking about with Bobby Knight. Is like, if Mo. Most people choke their players, they would be fired immediately, yeah, but he wasn't fired immediately because he was so successful these scandals. It's like this stuff is is pretty prevalent in

  Gerald Reid  1:15:18

  kids getting overworked and getting injured or hurt because of the inappropriate ways

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:15:23

  of training. Yeah, so there's, there's, there's these levels of abuse, manipulation, and I think we need better athletic leadership, because, like in college sport, for example, athletic directors used to be former coaches because they understood the coaching domain. They understood the difficulty. They understand what how hard it is for coaches to recruit and to spend the time away from their families and to but I think increasingly, especially during the N i L of, you know, name, image and likeness era where money and boosters and all this stuff is really big time, that I feel like There's going, you know, we're in a new period where, if you're making money at something, and it's big time, you know, reward there, then the the possibility for abuse is much larger. And so that's what I'm getting to this. Like athletic directors used to be these coach type people. Now a lot of them are fundraisers and facilities people. And, you know, booster, you know, the money out of people. And I feel like that's a that's a red flag, because at the athlete coach level, there's going to be a lot of incentive to just win, just win, no matter what happens. And sometimes coaches are have immature notions about how to get people to do things. And I think it sets the stage for a lot of this relationship abuse. If you don't, you don't line up with my expectations for you. I'm going to punish you. I'm going to shame you, rank you lower. I'm going to, you know, do things that could be quite inappropriate. And I think a lot of times, colleges will fire a coach, and they will just let them go, and they won't, they won't. They'll say, Oh, well, you know, Thanks for, thanks for coaching with you know, like I think for that psychological and physical safety is we need athletic leadership that can help promote the same way coaches can create a facilitate an environment for the players. I think the athletic directors, we need, these human centered type athletic directors, or at least assistant athletic directors that are trying to set up an athletic department or a team department or a high school athletic department that has shared values and has shared approaches and has some supervision, like, if the coach wins, does that mean that whatever they do is okay? Well, that's that's usually what they say.

  Alexis Reid  1:18:42

  There's so many things going through my mind right now. I'm thinking about, you know, this idea of supervision, and if you're winning, doesn't matter. And I'm also thinking about, you know, the people that are in these positions of power of some sort, athletic, you know, directors or even just coaches Right? Like it trickles down to how people see sport, and I'm thinking back, and I have to give props to this student I work with, who's now a ninth grader. Last year, he was an eighth grade um buyer, and it was the greatest story, because it really rocked him. He was umping this game for I think it was second graders, right? You know, youth baseball, and the coaches were yelling at each other and cursing, and he had to step in as an eighth grader and say, This isn't appropriate. You know, this is not the way we're supposed to show up to be a part of youth sports, and he did such a brilliant job moderating these two grown adults, parents of kids who were on the teams who were cursing at each other. I don't remember the exact context, but you know when we see these like people who get away with bad behaviors because they're winning? Or because of whatever the case, they're making money for the team. You know, that trickles down to how coaches think at all levels it's okay to behave. And I think this is a bigger, grander societal conversation, probably too. But I think in the context of what you're sharing, I think it's so important first to step up and one say this is not just about money. Even though sports is one of the highest profit earning industries, I think that probably is. I don't know the specifics, but I'm sure it is. But also, thinking about, you know, how we conduct ourselves, is actually dictating what comes next for the athletes, the players, their families, their lives, right? And this is what I love about positive youth development too, is that this is not just about getting through school or athletics. This is about being able to grow in a healthy way. And ultimately, you know, there's different ways of interpreting positive development, but, you know, the Lerner camp, Richard Lerner and Jackie Lerner, who I was privileged to work with Jackie at BC, you know, they think about the last C of the six C's of positive youth development as contribution, as giving back. And I think sports has such a huge responsibility in remembering that piece of it and

  1:21:26

  has that potential.

  Alexis Reid  1:21:29

  I hope, I mean, maybe this is my naivety, like in thinking about it, but it's happening

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:21:34

  out there, both the good and the bad. Yeah, these arguments and these disagreements are happening all over the place, but also there, there are these beautiful things happening in the sport context. And so it's, how do we create the environment where it's more likely to happen? Yeah,

  Gerald Reid  1:21:51

  yeah. I love all three of us. Kind of like the energy we have here is so beautiful and amazing, because we kind of have we come from the same place of like, wanting to understand, wanting to help. At the fundamental level, there's more people listening to this who can kind of get involved in any type of aspect, right? That the eighth grade kid,

  1:23:25

  yeah, between the adults, right? The

  Alexis Reid  1:23:28

  parents and the league actually nominated and gave him a ward for the way he carried himself and how he he set the tone for what sports should be, which I am so proud of, and he

  Gerald Reid  1:23:38

  wasn't doing it like for attention, it was like an organic, genuine thing coming from the kids heart and like we all this little stuff gets, you know, like you can make a difference in such a small way. Yeah, even if it's not like for attention, you're not gonna like go on SportsCenter for it, right? There's, there's so many ways to contribute. As you're saying, I love what you said. Let's contribute,

  Alexis Reid  1:23:58

  not just random acts of kindness or coaching, but intentional acts of kindness and coaching. Can we shift to that? Yeah,

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:24:04

  so I think you know, getting to your point, Jerry and really echoing what Alexis is saying is that even with the positive youth development programs, a lot of them say all this, you know, this is what we do here. And I say the, you know, for a couple years we got, we got grants to study some local youth development programs here in Boston, and then we got another grant to study Little League baseball in Allston, Brighton, Hyde Park and mission Hill communities. Oh, wow, I didn't know about this. And so we we went around and we observed the coaching of all these different organizations. I went to a lot of little league games. We went to softball games, you know, T ball and the next level up. And it was. Fascinating, because we started to ask people who were running these organizations, saying, I remember, this is one meeting we had in Hyde Park. You know, it was in like a Knights of Columbus. The guys are like, drinking beer and but, but they're listening. And we're like, at the end of a year of T ball. What should a kid know and be able to do? Wow, such a great question. And for a while they were like, it was this, if we asked them, you know, how do you split the atom, you know, like, they were like, like, What do you mean? And and I was like, well, that's my fault. It's like, what do they What does every kid got to be able to do? So that the coaches of the next year in Hyde Park, it's called Pony League. When they play pony League, then every coach would know your every kid got exposed to it. And so then one guy raised his hand he says, like, a good batting stance. And I'm like, Yes, that's a great one, because it's a foundational skill. Everyone's got to learn how to do it. They can have their own individual style in it, but they got to have a solid batting stance. And another guy goes, well, you know, kind of funny, because they've seen this before, to run around the bases in the right direction. And I'm like, Yeah, that's actually a thing, right? Like, they don't understand. Every year you see a kid run to third base, so it's like, that's something we can teach the kids, not that they're all going to be the next, you know, Cal Ripken or something. They that they know some basic skills and but then it was really cool, because after the session was over, a guy came over to me and he says, I didn't say anything, but I'm an electrician, and what I want my kid to learn is how to be a good teammate. And I said that, sir, that that's an outcome that we could we can't teach everything, but we could definitely be intentional. Yes, about saying this League's about teamwork, and so we talk about it, we enforce it, and model it, we show it and we show how to do it, yeah, and yeah, sometimes you have to say, that's not what we do around here.

  Gerald Reid  1:27:25

  Very, very, very, of course, boundaries are normal, yeah, yeah. Like at our program

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:27:30

  two days ago, Thursday, one of our eighth grade boys was at the end, was shouting out one of our bu grad students that worked with him. He said, I want to thank Ari for helping me with the bench press today. We're like, Yeah, that's great. Then he said, Yeah, but he's weak. And I said, Hey, did you just put him down too? And he's like, no, no, no, I didn't. I didn't mean that, you know. And it was like, because we got to show him, he did great work, right? He he was working out, he was learning. He's shouting out somebody for that help. But then he's been taught elsewhere. If I put him down, that's cool, you know, yeah, where if I I'm gonna feel better if I do that. But then in that moment, we just sort of like, said, that's great, and then that part's not so great, yeah? And like, everybody needs that help, especially an eighth grader, you know, because they're trying to figure out how to be, yeah? And so I think that's what we can do, is show folks, like, how do we want it to be, and what's our intentional way of doing that? And then when everybody in the environment knows that yes and that becomes a shared language, a shared parlance, a shared way of being, then then people will hold each other accountable. Yeah, you know, my friend Lou Bergholtz said, you know, you know, you have a culture when the kids defend it, yeah, that's beautiful, yeah. So it's like, if you, if you were putting someone down, Alexis would go to, hey, Jerry, we don't do that here.

  Alexis Reid  1:29:10

  The opposite. Jerry would never put it quite literally,

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:29:15

  yeah, well, okay, but yeah. So I think that that intentionality is like, what we could infuse in our coaching a little little better, and really think about what we value and we want. What do we want? Like, I love this exercise of like, if I asked the students, it's like, if your kids were talking about you as a coach, what would they say? Or what do you want them to say? Yeah, because then that brings that to the next level of like, Oh, I gotta, I gotta walk this talk, and I gotta talk this talk, and I gotta show them over and over at this. Is the important stuff here, and it's ongoing. It's every day. Yeah, it's not just words, no. It's that. To me, that's the one thing I've learned running programming is like, we start over every day. Now you build some trust with a kid, like you're saying trust is important or then, but then you get a new kid, or you then it's a new group, and then you have to start over, and you have to have clear what you are trying to establish. And once that you know, once you have some run with those kids, after a while they they know what, they know how it's supposed to be, and then they bring their own unique flair to him. And that's, that's the fun

  Gerald Reid  1:30:50

  part. what are you saying Applies to every level, right? It's not just youth sports. It's not just, you know, in the classroom, it's it's any type of group that you're leading or involved in, for sure, or

  Alexis Reid  1:31:23

  family? Yeah, I was thinking too about my work, that a lot of people come to me and say, just give me the answers, give me a protocol, give me a thing to do. And I'm like, it's not that simple. It's about intentionality and integration of a lot of these things that we've been talking about here. And it goes back to what you were saying before. We can, we can drop feedback on people as they're learning, or we can invest in their learning, and we can invest in their wellness saying before. And I think, you know, coaches are great at giving feedback, like, yelling out, snapping out, like, do it this way, do that way. But until we, like, actually give a little bit of time and space, and space, and it doesn't even have to be that much. And I tell this to teachers all the time, like, you just got to give a little bit of that time and space to see how, you know, the feedback, the advice, the suggestion, can percolate and grow. Like that's where the magic happens. That's where we see, like that, that journey of growth. And I, you know, we're not a podcast that says, do these things and you'll feel great. And maybe I should stop saying that, but I I'm thinking a little bit about positive youth development and Benson Gail's work on like developmental nutrients, and I'm going to pull it back and frame it through the work you've done, through your dissertation and your countless years as a coach and as a professor and educator and mentoring guide, and think about if you were to pull out a few developmental nutrients air quotes that you think coaches should take the time to think about and invest in how it works in their own way of doing things, their own theory and philosophy of coaching. What would you suggest coaches think about

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:33:11

  I got many different thoughts there, but when I would say probably a couple things. I think the first thing that I heard from Carl Adams used to be the wrestling coach at BU and we used to after practices, we would end up sitting in the locker room and they would be talking about wrestling guys coming out of practice, and we'd be talking about the football guys. And Carl was a really high level coach, and he said, I want the athlete to go on to the mat and not look back, meaning, I want them to trust themselves. And I really stuck with me, because a lot of times coaches are just kind of keep trying to fill the kid's head with more and more and more stuff. And I think the second thing I would say comes from a phrase that Tony de Chico, who was the women's national team coach during, like, when Mia Hamm and all those great national teams soccer and, and I don't know much about soccer, but I know Tony they, they came to Tony de Chico right before this was, like, the World Cup that they won, I think, against China. And a lot of the team leaders came to him and said, Are you gonna cut us? And he was like, what? Like, Mia, I'm gonna cut me a ham. You know, we're like, the greatest soccer players in the world and and they said, because you. Never tell us what we're doing, right? And so after that, he actually wrote a book that he called, catch them being good. Wow. And I've borrowed that we use it in our program, because especially young people, they get corrected a lot, yeah, and especially in school, they're kind of take your hat off to pull your pants up. Do this, do that, do that, don't do that, don't do that. And it's like, I find, if we find what the kid is doing right, and that's the foundational thing for them to build off of. Then they can feel, oh, yeah, I'm doing that right. And then later they know sometimes when they're not doing something right. You know, I always say, like, when a football, like, guy drops the ball and the coach goes arms him, you can't drop that. It's like,

  Gerald Reid  1:35:59

  no kidding.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:36:03

  No kidding, dude. Like, of course I can't drop that. I don't I think I wanted to drop, you know, it's like all that's in their head and but then they just have to tolerate it and say, Yes, coach. And so I think that catch them being good is a has a really broad possibility for application, because then it then you have to do a lot of noticing of what, even the kids that are the most difficult, we have to now find what they're doing right, and then they can really have some success and build off of that. And then there's the trust. Wait this person sees me yes, in a different way.

  Gerald Reid  1:36:42

  Well, Coach Mac real quick. That is so sports psychology, because it focuses the kid on what to do versus trying to not do what they shouldn't do. And the more you focus on what you should be doing or want to be doing, rather, and the less fear you have about messing up, the better you're going to play, because you're more focused on visualizing what you want

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:37:00

  to do and all that. Yeah, and I just think we back to the like, how do we help young people, or in any setting, like, all this stuff is, like, like you mentioned, this is parenting, it's leading a business, it's coaching, it's, there's really no place that you couldn't use that same approach. And then the last thing I would say about it is just like learning to ask more questions, because I think coaches are. They're charged with being the expert, yeah, and it's the expert model. So then they think they have to be the expert in everything about, expert about I know you, and I know what you can do, and I know it's like, no, they don't. They don't know. They get things so wrong sometimes. And I think the longer I coach or even teach or even be a parent, is like, what do you think you know, or what, what's, what's, what's the matter, or what's bothering you, or what's what's in the way, or what's just asking questions, because we Find out so much more yes from the athlete, and then we can adjust. Oh, oh, if you need that. And I got I got you there, you know, I can help you do this. Yes, if that's what you're worried about, that's easy, but it's like, if you don't know, you're really, you know, flying without any instruments, you know, it's like you the questions are still hard for me. Sometimes to to to make myself do it, but when I do it, my my favorite one that I'll leave you with is like I learned to say, Would you like some coaching led to asking permission, yeah. And if the kid says no, yeah, and you say, okay, yeah, I'm backing off for a while. That's great, because now you're giving them the choice. I was very counseling psychology, right? It's 90%

  Gerald Reid  1:39:11

  so it's like, I live so much exposure to just asking questions. The more you do it, the more you get used to

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:39:17

  it. But have you ever had a coach that asked you that, right? No, and it's like, I played football, basketball, I played a lot of baseball, I played all those sports. No one said, Hey, would you like some coaching net right now? And I'm sure I would have said yes, but it just feels so different, yeah,

  Alexis Reid  1:39:32

  and it goes back to how we started, right? Are we encouraging compliance? Are we encouraging this, like engaged investigation of, how do we make tweaks, advancements, or maybe just stay where we are to be able to contribute and find some joy in sports and athletics.

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:39:56

  I I would definitely say most. The approaches in coaching are aimed at compliance. And I think an alternative model would be more about their learning and investment and engagement, which you're that's your expertise, but it's but it's also very counseling psychology in terms of, like, I don't know that, you I don't know the answer, right? You're great at that. It's like, let's, let's slow this down in a second. Like, let's figure out, I don't tell me what's up, you know, and that if we could infuse that counseling that that's why I was so excited about, you know, Counseling Psychology really fits with positive development, and it fits with coaching, and it's really, how do we bring that counseling? The best parts of counseling psychology into coaching, to me, seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

  Alexis Reid  1:40:53

  Ready here? Here's a quick phrase that might help, be open, be curious, be well,

  Gerald Reid  1:41:04

  Coach Mac, this has been such a joy. I feel like, like five hours just passed by, we could keep going. I have so much energy to keep talking with you. You're just such a special guy, and you're so important in the program, and the students love you and adore you and just benefit so much from you. And we appreciate you so much. We hope that this interview really shines a lot on you and all that you contribute, just in so many ways, and we appreciate you on many levels. So thank you for joining us, and we will see you soon, for sure. Thank

  John McCarthy "Coach Mac"  1:41:42

  you so much for this. You know, fun opportunity,

  Alexis Reid  1:41:45

  yeah, stay tuned. This is just a preview of what's to come. 

  Gerald Reid  

  Thanks for tuning in to the Reid Connect-ED podcast. Please remember that this is a podcast intended to educate and share ideas, but it is not a substitute for professional care that may be beneficial to you at different points of your life. If you are needed support, please contact your primary care physician, local hospital, educational institution, or support staff at your place of employment to seek out referrals for what may be most helpful for you. ideas shared here have been shaped by many years of training, incredible mentors research theory, evidence based practices and our work with individuals over the years, but it's not intended to represent the opinions of those we work with or who we are affiliated with. The reconnected podcast is hosted by siblings Alexis Reid and Dr. Gerald Reid. Original music is written and recorded by Gerald Reid (www.Jerapy.com) recording was done by Cyber Sound Studios. If you want to follow along on this journey with us the Reid Connect-ED podcast. we'll be releasing new episodes every two weeks each season so please subscribe for updates and notifications. Feel free to also follow us on Instagram @ReidConnectEdPodcast that's @ReidconnectEdPodcast and Twitter @ReidconnectEd. We are grateful for you joining us and we look forward to future episodes. In the meanwhile be curious, be open, and be well.

What goes into coaching in sports? Is it more than x’s and o’s? Is it more than just yelling orders at players to do what they are told? What is the psychology that is involved within coach-athlete relationships? What are the educational principles of teaching and learning that are part of coaching? What are the systematic and cultural aspects that influence the sport experience? In this episode, we answer these questions and more with Dr. John McCarthy, aka “Coach Mac,” who is a beloved clinical associate professor in the Applied Human Development graduate program at Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education & Human Development where he is in charge of the Sports Coaching specialization and also teaches and supervises the Sport Psychology students. This is an incredibly helpful resource for anyone in a leadership or coaching role, whether you are involved in sports or not.  

Be curious. Be Open. Be well.

The Reid Connect-Ed Podcast is hosted by Siblings, educational therapist, Alexis Reid, M.A. and licensed psychologist, Dr. Gerald Reid, produced by CyberSound Recording Studios, and original music is written and recorded by www.Jerapy.com

*Please note that different practitioners may have different opinions- this is our perspective and is intended to educate you on what may be possible.