Holtz on His Approach to Daily Improvement

This article appeared the the May issue of The Championship Performance Coaches Journal and I thought it would be good to share.

We asked our coaches an players to ask themselves on a daily basis:

1. Where did I come from?
2. Where am I
3. Where are we going?
4. What have I done to help us get there?

When I took the job at South Carolina, I told the team I had no idea how long it will take us to reach the top, but that would be our goal. Any team must go through 4 stages to be successful

1. Learn how to be competitive. Go into every game believing you are capable o winning. We must reach the point when we believe we are good enough to beat anybody on our schedule.

2. Learn how to win. Regardless of the situation, you have faith and confidence that your teammates will make a play in order to allow us to be successful. You enter the season expecting to go to a bowl.

3. Learn how to handle winning. Losing presents some problems, but winning does also. The players want to bask in their glory and don't prepare to win. I have told our players that we will make many mistakes and I will forgive everyone of except one. That mistake is the failure to prepare. It is a known fact, that when teams start winning, they can take success for granted and stop doing the little things. You can also be assured that jealousy and pettiness will infect your team. Eventually, we must learn to hand success.

4. Take it to another level. When you cope with winning effectively and continue to dream, you will reach the level of the top teams in the country. This is the stage where you expect to not only win, but also do so consistently and impressively. You want to be the best and anything less is a disappointment. Losing becomes totally unacceptable. When an organization takes it to another level, they develop a sense of camaraderie and friendship with their teammates that is seldom duplicated the rest of their life.