Coach Mark Woodworth Takes a Visit

Sorry for the lapse in posts, been a little busy with everything going on. We had an interesting class the other night and welcomed in Wesleyan's own Mark Woodworth who is also an alum of Wes.

He can appreciate a class like Strategies of Leadership and how interesting it can get because it's student run. We began the class and finished our discussion from the week before on John Wooden:

• Leadership is more than X's and O's - the ability to teach and motivate is more important in the bigger picture.
• Coach Wooden learned that when coaching he was not handling players, but instead working with them. This allowed for the creation of an environment where people wanted to work and improve, because they knew that Coach Wooden was working with them - that he was not necessarily above his players.
• The best leaders must follow before they can lead - the best leaders in this world had to learn from experience in order to build up convictions and values that they lead their life with in order to rub off on others.
• Finally - choose your leaders wisely, being careful of who you follow is important - choosing your friends, coaches, and mentors make a big difference. Although sometimes you are thrown into situations, it's important to pick and choose the right people to associate with and learn from.

Coach Woodworth then came in and for those of you who don't know - the Wesleyan baseball team won 19 games two years ago and last year broke the 20 win barrier with 22 wins. They've made the NESCAC playoffs two years in a row and are looking to take it to the promised land this season. Coach's philosophies are catching on with his players and they're ultimately buying in. He's been an influential figure in my own life and playing career here at Wes and I'm looking forward to learning even more this season. Coach is the type of person that you could sit in an office for hours with and be captivated by his ideas. He's big on the mental side of baseball and we could spend days discussing that.

One of coach's most interesting tactics is his use of the plan. It's a plan for what we envision doing this season as an individual and we do it for the team too. We state a goal - and that goal can be anything from striking out less to throwing more strikes as a pitcher. And he'll ask how we're going to achieve that. It really gets you to think about what you have to do in order to achieve a goal. It's about what you'll work on mechanically and mentally in order to believe that you'll accomplish a goal. It's a vision statement and in many ways he's teaching us to be our own, individual leader. We're establishing a vision for what we want to be and we're setting out to accomplish this vision in the off-season and during the season - the journey if you will.

Coach then introduced his idea that a leader or coach is a CEO. What does a CEO do - they oversee and manage a company. Coaches need to be CEOs and CEOs need to be coaches - it's about getting people to do what they need to do. It's as simple as that. The CEO implements a vision, has a set of convictions and morals that guide an organization. A coach implements a vision for his team, has a set of convictions and morals that guide his/her players. It's an interesting concept and something that we talked for a long time about.

Coach then introduced some really interesting people including Frosty Westering and John Gagliardi . Coach Woodworth wanted to introduce some people we never heard of that have some interesting philosophies. Frosty Westering became famous as the head football coach of Pacific Lutheran. His teams were known as some of the nicest football teams ever, but who were very successful. Frosty instituted the After Glow, in which he would gather the team in front of fans and family to celebrate something that someone did good in the game today whether it was a win or loss. He created a culture that was extremely positive and it's one of the many reasons his teams won. John Gagliardi, whom the Division 3 version of the Heisman Trophy is named after, is the head football coach at Saint John's University in Minnesota. They are perennial powers, but they never practice in pads, don't do sprints, they practice for only 90 minutes, they don't do any drills in practice and instead just run plays 11 vs. 11. These are two unconventional methods that coach wanted us to look at, he even introduced a coach named George Davis who had his players vote on the starting lineups.

I think that what's great about having guest speakers in class is that you can learn so much from people who've been through it and who are real world leaders. The key word is learning - learning something new every day is what makes life so beautiful. I think that being open minded and willing to learn is in fact one of the keys to making people great leaders.

All the love,

JG