This Week’s Playbook. The through-line this week is the distance between what you already know and what you actually do about it. Nowhere is it wider than the advice you give every overworked director and have never taken yourself. This week is about closing that gap, in your back office, your athletes, and your own week, before the season sets around it.

“98% of the kids we coach are going to go on to do something incredible with their lives that has nothing to do with the sport they played. And the lessons they carried out of it will be a big part of why.”

— Chad Henry, Signature Locker | Read more →

A newer director corners you at a tournament and asks how you keep the operational side of the job from swallowing you whole.

You give them the answer you always give: put specialists on specialist work, and guard the hours only you can spend.

Then you go home to the payroll, the compliance, and the benefits you have never once handed off yourself.

See what your program would get back when that work comes off your desk. About a minute, no call required.

— Chad Henry

More from The Game Plan:

You built individual development plans so kids would stop drifting through seasons, and for most of the group it worked exactly as intended.

Then you notice one of your best kids used to try the hard move and laugh when it fell apart, and now she picks the safe option every time.

Nothing in her metrics looks wrong. Something in how she plays does.

Here's the sign a development plan has turned practice into a test a kid feels she's failing, and how to loosen its grip without scrapping it.

— Maddie Soviero

More from The Human Factor:

Almost every problem that lands on your desk was visible at a practice weeks before it reached you.

The slipping confidence, the family drafting the frustrated email, the kid with one foot out the door. A coach saw the small version, and nobody caught it, because catching it was nobody's job.

By the time it reaches you, the fixable version has grown into a parent meeting and a retention save.

Here's the 4-minute routine that turns what your coaches see into what you find out in time to do something about it.

— Ricky Reyes

More from The Toolkit:

Have a great sports week,

Chad Henry and the Signature Locker Team

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