After last weeks loss to Grand Valley State (kudos to former Missouri State assistant Rick Wesley) Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo banned his team from the lockerroom. He was trying to send a message that they had it too soft….If I had done that to one of my teams they would have jumped for joy. At St. Francis College in New York, where I got my first head coaching job in Division I, the lockerroom was so small that we had all of our meeting in the weightroom….Michigan State on the other had has flat screen televisions, an x-box and even toothbrushes for their players…We used to have soap night where fans brought in bars of soap for the price of admission so that the players would have soap in the lockerroom.
Izzo is not the first coach to throw his team out of the plush surroundings, but rather the latest. Coach K, Roy Williams and a list of other Hall of Famers have done it…I guess I should have. Who knows we may have won a national championship!
This is just one of the coaching ploys that have been used to motivate players through the years. It dates all the way back to the “Win one for the Gipper” speech courtesy of Knute Rockne. (That speech must not be working for the Irish football team this year.)
A couple of motivational tools I have used through the years that have worked, but if viewed from the outside I might have been thought to have lost my mind. After closing the season with 4 straight losses as the head coach at the university of North Florida, I knew I had to do something dramatic to change our thinking. After instructing my Athletic Director to not look in the window during practice (I thought if he did he might fire me on the spot.), I had every player and coach put a brown bag over their head. For the first 10 minutes of practice that week we visualized all the bad going out of our heads and brought in positive karma…It worked as we upset two higher seeded teams on the way to the Sunshine State Conference Championship game. We lost in the final seconds, but it did prove what positive thinking could do.
A couple of years later my team was in a must win situation to qualify for the conference tournament (they had not made the last two years under the previous coach). I decided to paint a “W” on my chest and at the opportune time I would rip my shirt open and impress that they needed to play like warriors. I happy to say that it worked and we won the game. However, it took me a week to get the marker off my chest.
My point is this…Coaches are teachers and teachers need to get the attention of their students…Sometimes you have to go to an extreme!!
By the way Michigan State opened up with a 33-point win. Good job Coach Izzo!!!
