Anson Dorrance is an elite soccer coach at the University of North Carolina. His teams have won 22 NCAA championships and he coached the USA Women to a World Championship. His tenure has not been devoid of controversy.
When I think of Coach Dorrance, key phrases emerge, "competitive fury", "competitive cauldron", and "core values". And, of course, his teams win...a lot.
In this interview he discusses core values, competition, playing time, psychology, motivation, and the very real differences between coaching men and women. His teams have won 22 NCAA championships and he has coached the USA Women to a world championship. It's lengthy but worth it.
I share excerpts without commentary:
- We don’t whine.
- We work hard.
- The truly extraordinary do something every day.
- We choose to be positive.
- When we don’t play as much as we would like we are noble and still support the team and its mission.
- We don’t freak out over ridiculous issues or live in fragile states of emotional catharsis or create crises where none should exist.
- We are well led.
- We care about each other as teammates and as human beings.
- We play for each other.
- We want our lives (and not just in soccer) to be never ending ascensions but for that to happen properly our fundamental attitude about life and our appreciation for it is critical.
- And we want these four years of college to be rich, valuable and deep.
"I’m very big on playing for each other. And so the psychology is, the players support one another and obviously it’s a huge challenge for a reserve to support a starter."
"They’d much rather have the reason for them not playing is that the coach doesn’t like them. They would hate to have that the reason for them not being able to play is that they’re lazy or they don’t play with intensity or they have no self-discipline or they don’t compete or they don’t have any self-belief."
"The most critical thing is to have a competitive fire. The great ones I've seen have the most extraordinary competitive fire, it's an issue in their lives, and it can be a problem. I mean, this is a very hard thing, and I'm talking about the ones with that hell-bent "I'm going to carve you up" mentality. It's actually very hard to corral and leave on the field. It almost becomes a chip on their shoulders, and the way they conduct their lives. Or it becomes such a stress, it's not an easy horse to ride."
"So a huge challenge in women's athletics is to get them to compete against their teammates and friends in practice with the same intensity they compete with their bitter rivals."
"I think with women you've got to be overwhelmingly positive. You can't afford to criticize any of them until they trust you. And then a part of the criticism has to be constructed in a way where they have to feel like you care about them at the end of it some way, otherwise they're not going to be listening to it."
"With women the overwhelming majority of tape has to be positive, otherwise it's going to shatter their confidence. They're not going to look at it and try to correct it, they're going to look at it and say "oh my gosh, I suck."
His note to Mia Hamm appeared in her book, "A vision of a champion is someone who bends over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching." He had seen her running sprints, alone, in a park on a day off.