SHERRI COALE

>> Craig Gould: Sherri Coale, thank you so much for joining me this week on the podcast. Sherri you were the head coach of University of Oklahoma’s women’s basketball team for 25 years. A, ah, tenure that included 19 straight NCAA tournaments and back to back Final Fours. Your days are now filled with being an author and a public speaker. I recently read your books, Rooted to Rise and the Compost Files. I’ve been reading your blog, Sherri You know, a lot of times, these conversations, you know, there’s so much that I want to dive into, but I like to start these conversations with kind of one common question for folks, and that is, what was your first job?

>> Sherri Coale: Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be on with you today, and I’m excited about the conversation that we’re about to have. my first job was, I’m hesitating because I don’t know that you could call working a basketball camp in Hilton, Oklahoma, really a job. I’m not sure I really got paid. Probably my first paying job was I worked at a record store in Ardmore, which was about 25 miles from, from my home. And, we sold vinyl records at the time, eight track tapes. it was a, it was a music store and a, retail store, and I worked the front. That’s what I did.

>> Craig Gould: Did you learn any lessons at that job that carried over, or was it just an opportunity to get discounts on music?

>> Sherri Coale: Well, I learned a lot of things. I learned to appreciate A wide genre of, music. I was a country music girl. And I learned to appreciate a little rat out of the cellar and, some crazy kinds of stuff. But, no, interestingly enough. And no one’s ever asked me this question before, Craig. So I’ve never really talked about this, but I had. There was a young man who I knew. I didn’t know him well, and he wasn’t from the town I was from, but who from the area. And I knew him a little bit. He came in all the time, all the time and would buy this, that and the other. And he bought, I remember him buying a, cassette carrier, like those little. Those cases that you could put cassette tapes in. And I thought, well, that’s not really like him. That’s a little bit strange. But whatever. He bought it. And then the following week he bought another one. And I thought, well, that’s really weird. He said he was going to give it as a gift. I didn’t think anything about it beyond that. And a couple of weeks later, the owner of the store set me down and he said, when people come in and buy these cassette cases, these carriers, make sure you look inside of them. And the young man had been stealing cassette tapes inside of, the. The carriers. And I was so shocked. I was so naive. I was just. I could not believe that someone, especially someone that I know would have done that. And so it was a. It was sort of a, I guess kind of set the stage to check and double check and don’t assume anything in the workplace. But, I haven’t thought of that in years. So I guess. Thank you for asking.

>> Craig Gould: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I think it’s interesting. I feel like our human nature is that we assume in others what we assume about ourselves. Right. And so I think it says something about you that, you know, not that you were naive, it’s that you’re of nature that you wouldn’t think of sticking, you know, a couple of dozen cassettes in something and trying to walk out the door with it.

>> Sherri Coale: I remember feeling really dumb. I was embarrassed. And I remember feeling inept. And, I guess probably as much as anything I learned from the owner of the store, my boss, how to handle a situation like that. He. He was incredible. He was incredible. And, he could have not been, you know, looking back on it. And so I think probably without even realizing it, I understood a few things about how to treat people when they fail.

Both coaching and teaching at the high school level are equally exhausting

>> Craig Gould: Well, I imagine that in between the record store and ou women’s basketball you work at the, at the high school level?

>> Sherri Coale: Oh, yes.

>> Craig Gould: And when you’re at the high school level, you’re not just a coach. Were you also teaching in the classroom?

>> Sherri Coale: My first job out of college was at Edmond Memorial High School, and I taught six hours of senior English and then went straight to basketball. The final period of the day. I didn’t even have a planning period. So I had six sets of, term papers, research papers to grade, my first year out. So, yeah, I, spent a lot of time in the classroom, took home a huge bag of papers to grade every single day. Because in a subject like English, that there’s no one that can grade those but me. Nobody else can have a key and go through and say abcd. I had to read everything that was written. And so, there was a lot of evening work and a lot of weekend work and I loved it. I, I love teaching literature. I loved helping kids learn how to write. It was a passion.

>> Craig Gould: You know, if you spend any time around teachers, you’ll see that English teachers have a tendency to be a little cranky and it’s because they’re just drowning in stuff to grade and read and, and being a, being a coach is just one of those nonstop, 247 job. I mean, it, it just, it sounds exhausting. Sherri is, is that more exhausting or is trying to be on the recruiting trail in the off season, which, which is more exhausting?

>> Sherri Coale: You know, I think this is true for most things. When you really, really love what you do, you gain energy by doing it. I, I have, I used to ask my players, my freshman players at Oklahoma, what makes your heart sing. I had a picture framed, calligraphy of those words on an end table in my office. And I would ask them what makes your heart sing? And most of the time they didn’t want to answer it all. They wanted to crawl under the couch and, you know, not think about stuff like that. Or their answer was basketball. And I know you love basketball, but beyond that, and, and we would talk about, you know, when something makes your heart sing. When you work, work, work, work, work. And your body or mind may be exhausted and yet you have this influx of energy because you love what you’re doing so much. And writing does that for me. I can stay up really late writing and if it’s a piece that I’m really into and, and excited about, go to sleep and sleep for a few hours and get up as if I had an eight hour night. so I think what fuels you, you have to figure out, you know, where your strengths are and what fuels you. both teaching at the high school level and coaching and coaching at the college level and recruiting, both were equally exhausting. I think that, the recruiting was probably harder on me, because I didn’t enjoy it the way I enjoyed helping kids figure out how to write better.

>> Craig Gould: I’m sure we could spend an hour talking about the difference in coaching at the high school level versus at the college. But, I mean, I. One of the obvious differences is that when you’re. When you’re planted at Norman High School, there is no recruiting trail. There is no finding talent and bringing it in. You have these girls that live in the community. They want to play basketball, and it’s up to you to get the most out of them. I would assume that you learn lessons there in terms of getting the most out of people, regardless of going out and evaluating and finding talent. Correct.

>> Sherri Coale: What’s interesting is that Norman is a very large school district, and at the time, the seven years that I spent there, it was the only school in our community. Now there are two high schools, and they’re both very large. But, it was the second largest school in the state of Oklahoma at the time. And when I got hired as the head high school girls basketball Coach, I was 25 years old, 24 years old, excuse me. And, most of the great athletes in the Norman public school system were not playing basketball. I remember going to the first meeting after I was hired as coach. Go meet your team. And I’m, walking down the hallway, and I’m like, oh, wow, there are athletes everywhere. And I walk into the classroom where we’re having the meeting, and none of those people I passed in the hallway were in the classroom. They weren’t signed up for basketball. They were volleyball players, or they were soccer players, or they were on the cheer and palm squads. They were great athletes, but they weren’t out for basketball. So in a. In a sort of serendipitous kind of way, I recruited at the high school level because I went and watched 7th, 8th, 9th grade games throughout our community. We had a number of middle schools. I would go watch those games. I would write those kids notes after games. I would go in the locker room and. And congratulate them when they won. I would stay in touch with their coaches. So I was, in essence, recruiting within our school district for my sport. Not to say don’t play volleyball or don’t play soccer, but also play basketball. We need you to play basketball. So I Kind of got my feet wet in terms of recruiting while I was at the high school level. The process itself, obviously, not the flying across the country and sitting down with parents and all those things. But I did recruit, and that’s how we built our program.

Can we talk about making that jump from high school to D1

>> Craig Gould: Can we talk about making that jump from high school to D1? Because, I mean, there are just a handful of names that I can think of that try to do that. And I’m not sure if there’s anyone who had the success that you had going from high school to D1. I have lots of questions about how. I don’t want to throw all of these at you at once, but how did you convince the program that you were equipped once you arrived? Did you feel like any imposter syndrome? And I guess the third question is, did you communicate up front that you needed a certain amount of time to accomplish what you had in mind? Because the program, you know, they often talk about, well, you inherited a program that was in disarray, but things didn’t get better right away. Right. Can you talk about that transition? Who had faith in you and what that turned into?

>> Sherri Coale: Absolutely. So I’ll go back to. First of all, I, was in the right place at the right time, doing the right things, and all three of those things had to happen for me to have a shot at this. I was in the community of Norman here. So the people at the university were well aware of what we had built at Norman High. We had won two state championships. We had standing room only in our gym for games. Every kid in Norman wanted to play high school basketball. Every girl wanted to grow up and play high school basketball. It was a really, We had built an identity, and it stood for something in this community. Everybody was aware of it. It was the right time. Because women’s sports, and in particular women’s basketball, was just at the cusp. Connecticut had just won their first national championship. They were right there next to Bristol, where ESPN was housed up until their arrival. You would see Texas on TV occasionally. You would see Tennessee on TV occasionally. You didn’t see a lot of women’s basketball. There would be three or four games a year. And you, you know, set your calendar by it. There’s going to be a women’s game on tonight, and then Connecticut comes on the scene and that starts to expand. And I was just. This was right at the Runway of that. So the salaries weren’t exorbitant, the platforms weren’t enormous. It was about to explode, but it wasn’t yet. So timing was really important. Spacing, timing, and then that last part, doing the right things. I was running the program at the highest possible level that I could. And even though I didn’t really know it, I was running it a lot like a college program. It was all I knew. I had built it to be like the college program I had played for and like the men’s college program at Oklahoma Christian where I played. So I had fashioned what we did at Norman High School after that. So it was very much a collegiate sort of, all encompassing program. We didn’t just go to practice every day, we did community service. We we had, we wrote letters to our administrators, inviting them to practice. we did all kinds of things like most high school teams probably don’t do. Ah, ah, honestly. And we went out and used my players to help me recruit those kids in seventh, eighth and ninth grades to come up and keep playing basketball. We had huge summer camps. we had a really unique culture. So we were doing the right things and it was impossible for people at the university to not know about what we did. But the interesting part of this is, while I was a very goal oriented kid, like I wrote, go to state, be an allstater, get a full ride and put it on a paper in the back of my locker in high school and kept it with me for four years. I mean, I was that kid, you know, this is what I’m going to do. I walked onto my college campus as a freshman, said I want to be a teacher and a coach. Never changed my mind. Four years later, had two degrees that said I could go do that. That was me. But I had never wanted to be a college coach. I did not have a goal to be a college coach. So when the job opened up, there were a group of business people from town who came to my office at Norman High one day and said, we think you should be the next coach at Oklahoma. And I just looked at them, I’m like, are, it’s 3:00 in the afternoon. Are you guys day drinking? What in the world? Why would they hire me? I don’t have any experience. And they tried to explain to me why I should want to do it and why it would be a perfect fit. And it was just beyond my comprehension level. They came back a couple weeks later and said, seriously, we think you should apply. We’ve talked to the people there on the committee. You don’t have to have previous college experience. They’re going to consider everybody. I was eight months pregnant. I had a three Year old son and I was eight months pregnant with my daughter and I was living the life I wanted to live. I had a great program and we were going to be so good the following year. We had won a state championship that year and there were most of them juniors coming back. And I wasn’t living a nomadic lifestyle, which is one of the reasons I’d never really aspired to be a college coach. I wanted my kids to grow up in one town. And while there’s nothing, I guess, special or magical about that, I know a lot of people who’ve moved their entire lives and are amazing people and they’ve had these rich, experiences and the things that they’ve seen and done and been exposed to are extraordinary. But I grew up in a town, one town, and I wanted my kids to grow up in one town. So I didn’t want to be changing jobs every two years. All of a sudden this job in this town where I lived and had lived for seven years comes open. And so, I considered it and literally went into the interview with the committee, with a little. Now it’s a really vogue thing to do. I didn’t know anyone who had done it at the time, but I made a little pamphlet, a little book of, this is, this is what I know to be true. I didn’t make the pamphlet for the people in the interview. I made it to decide whether or not I could or wanted to do the job. When I explored, what do I know about recruiting? What’s the learning curve look like? What are my philosophies? What will I stand on? What will it look like to, to travel with the team at the level that you travel at University of Oklahoma? Da da da da. But hire staff all the way down.

The first year we only won five games and we lost 19

And by the time I went through all this and finished producing it, I decided, I think I might want to do this. I really might. I think I maybe can, and I think I might want to. And so I went through the interview process and had, an opportunity. And, they offered me the job. And I remember walking out and I was nine months pregnant, literally. I had my daughter two weeks after the press conference. I remember going down the hallway and we didn’t have cell phones then. And I was trying to get to my car to get home to tell my husband that I’ve been offered this job like they offered it to me. And I’m walking down the hallway and the senior associate athletic director stuck his head out of the door and he said, hey, coach, would you like to know what your salary would be. And I was like, oh, sure. I don’t know. I was making, I don’t know, $35,000 teaching public school. And he said, how does 80 sound? And I said, thousand dollars? And he said, yes, ma’am. After, he laughed a bit and I said, it sounds great. And then I ran down the hallway to get to the car to drive home and tell my husband.

>> Craig Gould: About nine months pregnant. Running down the hallway, yes.

>> Sherri Coale: Holding the baby inside of me. so it was a, ah, it was sort of a surreal experience. But Gino Auriemma is a good friend of mine, has been a close friend of mine for 30 years, and he had recruited Stacey Hansmeier off my high school team. So he and I developed a friendship before this opportunity ever even was thought about, before the university’s job was ever even open. We had become friends. And so he was, a great mentor through that process. And I remember him telling me before the press conference to not fence myself in. He said, there will be people who are going to want to know, how long is it going to take to turn this thing around? How many games are you going to win next year? They’re going to want you to, make some prognostications and don’t do it. Don’t. Because you don’t know. You don’t know what you’re getting into. So tell them it’ll take, how long it’ll take. And that’s what I did. And, to your point about how it didn’t happen fast, the first year we won five games, we were 5 and 22. The second year we were markedly better. We won 8, 8 and 19. but the second year we were so much better. We just didn’t know how to win yet. And our two sayings, the first year was, continued acts of sincerity. That was the axis that we turned around. We were changing perception on our campus. We were changing perception of the program within the community, across the state, within the conference. It’s sort of been a laughingstock. And we were changing perception everywhere. So our mantra was continued acts of sincerity. Say what you’re going to do, do what you said you were going to do, and then do it again. And that’s really what we did. One foot in front of the other, plotting that first year. The second year was private victories precede public ones because we figured out how to practice really well. And we played for the majority of our games. We had stretches where we played really well. We just didn’t know how to do it for 40 minutes yet, and we didn’t know how to complete a thing that we started. So we only won eight games and we lost 19. But the following year we got a whole lot better. And the year after that we got a whole lot better and won a Big 12 championship. And then it was off to the races from there.

>> Craig Gould: I see in lots of teams that transition involves, you know, you can sort of start seeing teams as they are transitioning, they are losing lots of close games, and then the following season they start figuring out how to win close games. And then, you know, that next tier is, you know, really flexing your dominance. Right?

>> Sherri Coale: Yeah. I think what you’re alluding to there is that, that learning how to win is as much a skill as learning how to run an inbounds play or learning how to defend a, pick and roll. It’s a skill. And if you’ve never won, and some of the kids we had in our program had never won at the high school level, their teams weren’t especially successful. they didn’t know, and they sure didn’t know what it felt like to win at this level. So the only way you gain confidence is through demonstrated ability. That takes time. So they had to grow confidence in terms of their skill set. Can they guard a pick and roll? Can they run an imbalance play? They had to do it over and over and over in practice before they would. Could believe that they could do it in a game. And then they had to do it over and over and over in a game and have success with it so that they could believe that they could ultimately do that enough to win. And so that’s just a. It’s an uphill climb that does not happen swiftly. And in those days there was no transfer portal. changes you couldn’t go by your team. changes happened the way learning happened. Slow and ugly and messy. And yet they were changes that lasted and, you know, confidence floors at all. When you talk about my jump from, the high school level to the, Division 1 level in a conference like the Big 12, at a place like OU, I was asked, the summer after I retired, I was doing a speaking engagement and did a Q and A at the end. And the guy in the back stood up and he kind of was standing there like Superman and he folded his arms and he said, what made you think that you could go from coaching at Norman High School to being the head coach at Oklahoma? And I’d never really been asked that, certainly not in that way before. and I took a second And I thought about it, and I so appreciated the question because I. I had to kind of unpack. What did make me think I could do that? I mean, that’s. That’s pretty bold. That’s a. That’s a pretty big chasm to soar across. And I honestly trace it back to the place where I grew up. I grew up in Hilton, Oklahoma. And here’s what happened there. I was a really good basketball player. I was the leading scorer.

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I needed to play well for us to win. Carried all that weight. That’s great. Fine. I was also on the track team. I was not the fastest runner on the track team. I ran the lead off leg on the relay. I hated track. I loved going to the gym, practicing basketball. I hated track. I did both. Was the best at one, not quite the best at the other. I sang in the choir. Not with this voice today. That’s a little crazy. But, I started in the school play. I went to curriculum contest. We painted fire hydrants in town. When it was time to do that, there was not a thing that I didn’t do. Because in a town like Hilton, there weren’t enough people to go around. And if you didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. So I played all these different roles. The one that’s depended on all the time, the one that just needs to show up, the one that’s not quite as good as everybody else. I did things that I loved, like playing ball. I did things that I didn’t love, like the school play. Ah. But when I left Hilton, I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t do. I thought, whatever it is, I’ll figure it out. I’ll be able to do it, whatever it is. And that has sort of framed my entire life. Whatever’s next, whether I understand it or not, I can figure it out. And I give credit to that, to the place that raised me.

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Some of your most legendary players weren’t on other programs recruiting radar

Now, back to our conversation.

>> Craig Gould: You spoke about learning how to win and how some of the girls didn’t come from programs where they knew how to win. Some of your most legendary players weren’t on other programs recruiting radar. You know, I guess my question is, you know, how do you recognize potential? I mean, is it as simple as making a judgment call on, whether someone is going to be willing to do what it takes to be great?

>> Sherri Coale: Well, I think you hit a key word right there. Willing. I think that’s a huge part of it. I’ll tell you, there’s also some luck involved. It’s not an exact science. there are Mrs. Kids you miss on that go somewhere else that you didn’t recruit, kids that you think have it that end up not having it. it’s not a. You don’t bat a thousand, that’s for sure. But for us, there were certain things that mattered. a sense of exuberance or joy when they played. I wanted kids who played light, not kids who played heavy. confidence was a big deal. How did they handle themselves? How do you ascertain confidence? Well, you don’t ascertain confidence when you watch them and they score 43 and their team wins by 62. You ascertain confidence when they go over seven in the first half. What, do they look like? How do they play in the second half? So watching them handle, failure, recover, that would give you a good, a good piece of insight into their confidence level. Home visits were a big deal to me. On. On campus visits, meaning high school visits were a big deal to me because I could talk to the school secretary and find out what this kid’s like on a daily basis. Every coach I ever recruited a kid from told me that the kid I was recruiting was the hardest worker they ever had. That doesn’t really help a whole lot. That can’t possibly be the case. But the school secretary has no dog in the fight. She’ll tell you the truth. talk to teachers on campus and home visits. I would watch the way a player would interact with her parents. was she respectful? did she look them in the eye? how did she handle herself with authority figures? Because I was going to be an authority figure when she came to play for me. I could get a pretty good idea of what that might be like. Ahead, of time. And then it’s the questions that you ask. getting kids to talk about what matters most to them, about what they value, listening to their voice rise and fall as they tell you about people who are important to them and what their, vision is for the future and what their favorite thing is about going to the gym. And you go through all these things, asking them questions about team and about work and about, aspiration, and they’ll tell you you’ll get to see glimpses of their souls. Now, later in the recruiting process, when so much of it happened early, like before kids were 16, 17 years old, so much of it happened on a phone where you can type anything you want. there were. There was a lot. It got harder and harder because there was more and more stuff between you and the kid that you’re recruiting. And so you didn’t always get the. The little peephole into the soul of a kid. And so it got more challenging. But those were some of the things. The more time you could spend with the kid easily, the more accurate you could be in your, evaluation of what they might be able to do or be.

>> Craig Gould: You know, Sherri before I read your books, I assumed that it was going to be structured in a way where there was going to be like, five big points, like any good sermon, and maybe an acronym thrown in there to help me remember. But what I was surprised to find was that you really don’t preach a framework. You know, in your books. I feel like you kind of reveal this emotional, intuitive, relational foundations for leadership. And it’s. It’s almost like you help us understand how to live our lives, like emotion, offense.

>> Sherri Coale: Well, first of all, thank you. You couldn’t have given me a bigger compliment. You really couldn’t have. I sincerely mean that. the type of writing I do is observational, nonfiction. it’s very important to me to not preach. There are so many ways to do things. I don’t have the market cornered on anything. I did not want to write a book about the five pillars of leadership or this is how you build a basketball program or any of those kinds of things. I didn’t want it to be prescriptive. I wanted it, to be fodder for thinking and feeling. And in that way, the pieces of writing become like chameleons, because wherever you are at your. In whatever point in your journey you’re in, it’s going to land on you a little differently than another person. what you’ve been through, where you’re headed is going to all play into how that story affects you and what you take away from it. So, that’s an incredible compliment to me, and you didn’t know any of that. but to say that, that it felt like something that you could glean from, and I want it to be very personal and very individual and up for interpretation. I enjoy paying attention.

Awareness is a core value of mine, and I’m just sharing

Awareness is a core value of mine, and I’m just sort of conveying what I see or feel or experience and sharing it with others.

>> Craig Gould: I have a real passion for fine art. And, you know, I have a background. I have another podcast, like 160 episodes, where I interview some of the world’s leading fine artists and art directors and critics and museum curators. And I also have a background in teaching art and art theory. And one of the things that, you know, I would tell students is, and what I hear from great artists is being willing to be vulnerable. Your willingness to put yourself out there in your art. In your case, it’s writing that whenever somebody consumes that artwork, whenever they consume your writing, that they aren’t going to judge, you know, you on your vulnerabilities. They’re going to see their own story inside of what you’ve shared. And that. That was probably the biggest surprise. When I started reading, you know, Rooted Arise was you start telling these stories about Granny. And, yeah, it’s a. It’s a great story that’s personal to you, but it started unlocking things, memories that I had, that, you know, really triggered an emotional response because it was, you know, it was tapping into something. For me personally, the most consistent and.

>> Sherri Coale: my favorite feedback from Rooted to Rise would be when people would say, I finished it. And I would find myself two weeks later driving to work and thinking about my grandpa and how he cleaned out the garage. And I think I clean out the garage like I do because that’s how he did it. And then that made me think about my great aunt. And that’s sort of the point of it all, is to, these. The stories are about my people, but everybody has some. And so if they can trigger you to think about your own and then hopefully reach out and express gratitude to those people who’ve impacted your life, that would be the ultimate takeaway from that book.

You write a lot about presence, being grounded, being where you are

>> Craig Gould: You write a lot about presence, being grounded, being where you are. In one of your books, I think it was rooted Rise. You tell this great story. There are a lot of anecdotes that come back to you and your girls spending time at Children’s Hospital with the children in the cancer ward. And I remember this one story you told about playing duck duck goose with this one child that had cancer and watching him decide to allow other people to play and him just be in the moment and just be present. And I, I feel like that’s not necessarily a thing that our society promotes or enables, but it’s something that going to some place like that where someone is just trying to drink in every moment left in their life provides perspective on how to be present where we are. And being present allows us. maybe you can speak to this, you know, being present, what, what does that open us up to? Because in my mind it opens us up to not missing opportunities and trying to understand and see and relate to people where they are in this moment.

>> Sherri Coale: Well, the only thing we have is the moment that we’re in, that’s for sure. And I think that the children at Children’s Hospital had such an absence of pretense. I think that especially when you’re in the world of college athletics, there’s just such posturing that goes on. And for players who have this high profile on this enormous platform, it’s a constant battle to not try to be something that you’re not. And, and it felt like when we went to Children’s that we were taught and shown how to just strip down, to strip all the non essential crap out of the way, get it off, lay it down and be you. And it was some of the most joyful experiences we ever had individually or collectively. Which is, seems so ironic that in a place of such horrific suffering and sadness, you also find such joy. And it was therapeutic for our teams, it was educational for our teams. I feel like we grew from being there and hopefully what we took away was the ability to be wherever our feet are. And we talked about that all the time as, as basketball players in the middle of a game, momentum, swings and this happens. You can’t do anything about that. You can’t do anything about what’s going to happen next. You can only affect this play. Be where your feet are. Be where your feet are. It’s one thing to talk about it, it’s another thing to see it being lived, especially by people who are making a choice to be in a place that’s scary. And for most of those kids and those parents, it was scary. And so I have such gratitude to those families and still have relationships with so many families who lost their children, to cancer, but who taught me and our team and staff how to live a little bit better, how to live a little bit deeper, how to do it more completely. And those lessons don’t ever leave you. that, that’s one of the great things, Craig, that, writing this blog has done for me. You know, I don’t, I don’t have a boss telling me every Tuesday I need to post a blog. Nobody tells me I have to do that. I made a decision that Every Tuesday at 10:00 I’m going to post a blog. I made that decision almost four years ago. And so there are over 200 blogs that have been flown out there into the world. But what writing the blog has done is it has forced me to keep an eye out for substance, and keeping an eye out for substance has helped me live absent of superficiality. And it’s just been so great. I didn’t set out for that to be the case. But to write the blog, I need to be aware of things that matter. And so by doing that, I’m constantly aware of things that matter, which means I’m not so much aware of the stuff that doesn’t matter, which is just, What a gift. What a blessing.

Motion offense provides a fertile teaching curriculum for a coach, you know

>> Craig Gould: Earlier, when you were talking about that transition from high school to college, you actually used the words timing and spacing, right? And again, this is, you know, going back to this motion offense sort of thing. I think in the book you even talk about how somebody was like, well, wow, you know, can, can you help me draw up this particular play that, you know, led to the, the winning basket? Like, well, that play doesn’t exist. You know, it’s really a mindset. Right. And it’s, it’s very relational. Can you, can you talk about some of those core concepts from that offense that would apply off the court to how somebody manages a team or manages really opportunities and relationships with the people around them?

>> Sherri Coale: Yeah, one of the most incredible things about basketball, which is probably what made me fall for it at the level that I fell for it from a teaching standpoint and understanding standpoint. When I was in college, I’d long love to play. Since I was in the fifth grade, I’d love to play. But understanding the intricacies of the game and why things happen didn’t come to me until college. And what I love about it is almost everything is transferable outside the lines of the court. So many core concepts can just be metaphors for how we’re supposed to live. And it provides this amazingly fertile teaching curriculum for a coach, you know, for. Yes, we’re trying to Win games by playing this way, but by playing this way, you can also win when you’re finished competing, finished wearing a jersey. And so in motion. Offense, particularly, it’s built on fundamental skills. If you don’t have the ability to dribble, pass, catch and shoot, it’s not going to work. You’re not going to be good at it. Most offenses can say that it’s typically the case. But a fundamental, a fundamental skill set undergirds it. From there, it’s conceptual. It’s understanding how to handle certain situations. So if the defender is denying high on the wing, you run a back cut. Well, in order to run a back cut, the person with the ball has to know that you’re going to do that. So instead of holding an open hand, you hold a closed fist. That’s a communicative piece of it. So you not only have to understand the situation, you have to make sure that everybody involved in the situation understands it together. So there’s a communication piece. It’s all about spacing and timing. You can do the right things, but if you’re too close together, they don’t work. If you do two things at the same time, it’s not going to work. And so the beauty of motion is that it has no lid. There’s no such thing as running it perfectly because it can continue to extrapolate depending on the understanding of the players in it. So the greater their imagination, the greater their skill sets, the greater their communicative ability, the more and more and more and more things you can do. The particular instance that you were speaking about, was in a game where the play that I called didn’t work because the defense didn’t switch the screen, which was what we had designed it to do. We were going to get a bigger guard at the block, posted up against a smaller guard, and get a bucket. And it didn’t work. And so what my savvy point guard did was she took the ball to the middle of the floor, which is a core foundational principle of motion offense. Get the ball in the middle so it can see everything that’s happening. And, when she did that, our players, let the ball breathe, which is another concept we use. They created the space. And, then she noticed her teammate was being denied on the wing, and she took a dribble at her, which is how. That’s the key to releasing that. And her teammate showed a fist, ran a back cut, she laid down a bounce pass, and we get fouled and goes to the free throw line. And win the game. We go the sweet 16. And that’s the play that everybody wanted, but I didn’t draw it up. I didn’t tell them to run it. They didn’t leave the huddle thinking, this is what we’re going to do. They left the huddle aware of their surroundings and what was happening, told them how to handle it. And so it’s a, a, ah, thinking person’s way to play. But more than anything, it’s an awareness. As I used to tell them, this is what a great basket cut looks like. This is how you set it up, this is how you run it. You have a big target, this is what you do. I can tell you what this is, and I can show you how to do it. But it’s only going to work if you know when to do it. And I can’t ever tell you that because it’s going to happen based on what your teammates do, what the defense does, and it’s going to happen quickly, and you’re going to have to be aware of it. And when there is an opening, then you run that cut. So that’s on you. So a great part of motion offense is. Is giving, helping. Not giving, but helping kids develop skills and knowledge and then letting them use it. Hands off, Let them use it. The very best stuff we ever did offensively was stuff that I saw as the person on the 15th row saw it. And many times in my coaching career, I would stand up and start to clap before the shot was ever taken because I was applauding what they were doing in the moment, which was exactly what the situation called for. So it was just a, super fun way to teach the game, but also to teach beyond the game.

>> Craig Gould: It sounds like selflessness is also important there. Right? You need to be working off ball. You need to be willing to enable other people to. It’s not about your own individual wool highlight reel. It’s a strong sense of team. Everyone’s working together and there’s communication and selflessness, right?

>> Sherri Coale: Well, yes. And you learn that nothing happens in a vacuum. So if you might, I might be open to run a basket cut because my defender has relaxed and turned her head. That’s great. But if there’s a post player at the block and I run a basket cut on top of her, that doesn’t help anyone. And so that knowledge of this is where my teammates are, this is where the defense is, this is what is needed at this moment. And sometimes what is needed is to stay out of the way. Sometimes that’s, one of the best things you can do is just give the ball room so that it can do what it needs to do. One, of the things we talked about all the time with our guards was knowing her, put our post player well enough to know exactly what she needs. Like, where does she like the ball, what kind of pass does she like to receive, when is it best to get it to her? Some needed a second early, some need it after they’ve held their position for a second and can be steady. Knowing one another and being able to supply not just what you’re good at. Well, I’m good at throwing a bullet pass. That’s fantastic. But if she can’t catch it, it means nothing. So that acquiesce, that give and take thing that has to happen, where together the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

>> Craig Gould: Once a program becomes a winner, it seems like it might be a little bit easier to define a culture and have new people come in, buy into the culture, because, well, we’re winners. This is how we do it. There are a lot less questions, but if I’m a new manager trying to establish my team, if I’m a new coach, that’s just come from high school to D1, and I’m trying to establish a culture, and I’m trying to establish buy in.

How do you go about establishing buy in before people see what your culture and plan is capable of

How do you go about establishing buy in before people see what you and the culture and the plan is capable of?

>> Sherri Coale: Well, there are lots of pieces to that. I would start with clarity, of vision. I just think clarity is at the top of the list. You’ve got to be clear about what you expect, about how you decide you’re going to behave together, which is my definition of culture. It’s just how a group of people decide they’re going to behave together, and getting really clear about what matters most and not just what it is, but what it looks like in action. We used to take our standards, we called them for our team, and companies, they’re often core values. and we would say, this is what it looks like. We have a standard of gratitude. This is what it looks like. You say thank you to the bus driver every time you step off the bus. You write endowed, ah, scholarship donors, a letter once a month, and you tell them what you’re studying and how your season’s going and how much you appreciate their generosity. And so gratitude had all these, you know, manager, hand you a water bottle at a timeout, no matter how tired you are, you say thank you. This Is what it looks like to express gratitude. Because, lots of times people have very different definitions of words. Sometimes integrity means something incredibly different to someone to your right and someone to your left. And so getting really clear about in this organization, this is what these words that are important to us mean, and this is what they look like when they’re walking around and talking and breathing every day. So clarity is a big part of that. people get better at things. You reward when, you find people, we called it, catch people doing things right. When you call attention to people who are doing a great job, behaving in the way that, you want to be known for, that is consistent with your identity. Calling that out, letting that be an example to others. I think continually stretching people, holding a really high bar and a consistent standard of this is what you can do and this is what you’re doing, and I’m proud of you, and this is what I know is possible. And just continually stretching them, I think puts people in an active growth period. And people who are in active growth have more energy, and that moves things along a little bit more quickly. But, there’s a certain level of perseverance that is required when you’re setting a culture. When you’re starting a thing that hasn’t been done before. You’re, building an identity. I go back to continued acts of sincerity and private victories precede public ones. There’s a whole lot of that at the beginning. Whether you’re building a team or you’re building a company or building a family for that matter. It’s, not something that you snap your fingers and it happens. It happens over time because it’s hard and it’s important, and those things never happen super quickly.

>> Craig Gould: In the book, you talk about having these, I never heard of coach having this, which is basically like little exit interviews. After the game. You leave a, form for your players to actually kind of self assess. What did you do right? What could be improved? And they’re like, doing that the second they walk off the court, which I think is really valuable.

>> Sherri Coale: And they hated, they hated them. they hated it because they half the time couldn’t find a pen that worked right. No matter how many we gave them. You know, they’re riding in, you know, look like a crayon half the time. Whatever they could find. They’re sweaty, they’re getting on the paper. if we lost, they’re mad, they’re frustrated. If they didn’t get to play, they’re sad. if they play great, they can’t wait to get out of the locker room so they can see their friends and family. They don’t want to take the time to write. So there was never a scenario where they’re like, I can’t wait to go evaluate this game. the good part was they were always held captive for a bit because at the Division 1 level, when I finished a game, I was responsible to go to media. I did on air radio and then I went to the press room. And so there was a, I, don’t know, 15 minute period, maybe a little bit more than that, where they were captive in the locker room because I hadn’t been in to close up the game yet. And so it was a great use of that time. I, called it forced reflection. They didn’t necessarily enjoy doing it or want to do it. I think once they got older, they would go back now and tell you they were glad they did it. maybe even two days later they were glad they did it. But at the moment nobody really enjoyed it. It was very simple. What went well and why, what can you do better and how. Two questions and the directives were very simple. Number one, don’t tell me what happened in the game. I was there, I watched it. I know. Tell me the stuff that somebody who sat in the bleachers and watched couldn’t say or something that I couldn’t ascertain from a stat sheet. Tell me the inside the guts of why did we get out rebounded. What was happening that caused us to get out rebounded. And if you didn’t play, you’re not off the hook, you’re part of the team. And you talk about what happened because you know, because you’ve been at practice and you know how we were supposed to cover that side on wall screen. What was happening that made that ineffective? So look at it through the eyes of whoever plays the position that you would go in and play if, if you had been in the game that night. So everybody had a job to do, everybody had clear directives and expectations. And I learned a lot from those about, we just call them post game thoughts. And I learned a lot about where the holes in our teaching were. So, like, maybe there was a piece of the scout that we thought they understood that clearly they didn’t understand it would tell us what to do the next day in practice. Sometimes it would lead to, something that they had confused or were. one player would see it this way and another would see it that way. And so there Would be some dissonance. And we knew we needed to go clear that up the next day. So it gave me a lesson plan. To use a teacher term, it gave me a lesson plan for the next day immediately. But what I learned that I hadn’t anticipated when I started the practice of reflection was that I could tell where kids were emotionally following a game. Sometime it would be because of how much they wrote or how little they wrote. Sometimes it would be the tone they used. I learned as much about how their words went on the paper as anything. whether it tailed up or it tailed down, whether it was big, whether it was, scrawled and hardly legible. I mean, you could just almost feel where they were internally by what that piece of paper that had scratch all across it said. And I would read them after games and write something on every sheet. If it was not just accurate, agree on all counts, or, if it was too much, maybe come see me tomorrow. I want to explain some things. it might just be little bullet points out beside it, But I felt like if they took the time to write on that piece of paper, then I needed to take the time to respond and get it back to them. And so I always did. Probably, wrote too much sometimes and not enough other times, But I felt like it was very important for me to at least respond to their effort. And I read every word of them after every game.

Craig Pollard: What do you think your superpower was as a coach

>> Craig Gould: So what do you think your superpower was as a coach? I mean, was it that? Was it listening? Was it being flexible? Was it relationships? I don’t want to put words in your mouth. What do you think?

>> Sherri Coale: I think that I, not always, but by and large, could see who someone could become and help paint that picture so that they could believe that it was true. I, think that if. If I had a superpower, that would probably be it. I could see things. I could see situations. I could see potential. I could see what it would look like if they played with great intensity all the time. I could see what it would look like if they put in 30 extra minutes after practice every day. And then I could see what the team could look like if everybody bought into their roles and connected. so probably seeing that and then being able to connect those dots and help them see it too, and connect to each other during the journey, that was probably it. I think it was a good teacher. I think I understood the game and could communicate it very well. But if. If there was a superpower, to use your word, it would probably be the transfer of Vision.

>> Craig Gould: One last question. Bobby Knight or John Wooden?

>> Sherri Coale: John Wooden.

>> Craig Gould: Why?

>> Sherri Coale: Well, he was an English teacher to start with, so he had my heart right there. I had a chance to meet Coach Wooden, actually bought his book, they Call Me Coach when I was in the fifth grade. What a nerd. I was scholastic, ah, book fair. And all my friends are buying comic books and mysteries, and I’m buying They Call me Coach by John Wooden. but I kept that book and I got a chance to meet him years later when I was the head coach at Oklahoma and I got him to sign that little paperback book. It’s one of my most prized possessions. I feel like Coach Wooden was continually coaching for something beyond the game he was playing in. It was always about the minutes after the days, after the years, after the life after. basketball was his vehicle for impacting people. I don’t know that, that it’s that much different for Coach Knight. Coach Knight was very much a builder of men. His tactics were just a little rougher, a little more graphic. but I really believe that, that he wanted humans to be better. And I know that he valued truth and honesty and effort and all those things that John Wooden held dear. so there were more similarities than you would think. Just a, ah, huge personality difference. Coach Wooden was soft spoken and Coach Knight was anything but. probably more similarities than differences between the two.

>> Craig Gould: Well, Sherri I really appreciate the time you’ve given me this afternoon. I encourage people to find your books. I purchased them on Amazon, Rooted to Rise, and the most recent one, the Compost Files. and people can follow you if they wanted to read your blog. Do they go to sherrycole.com?

>> Sherri Coale: Yes, sir.

>> Craig Gould: And that’s Cole with an E on.

>> Sherri Coale: The end and an A in the middle. An A in the middle. That blows everybody’s mind. It’s spelled weird and There are like 67 ways to spell Sherri So, but it’s S H E R R I C O A L E. sherrycolle.com and my blog is free. You can sign up and it comes every Tuesday and then there’s a newsletter once a month. And my books can also be purchased there at my website if you’d like them personalized. will ship directly. So, it’s, it’s rewarding and it’s fun and it is the thing that makes my heart sing. And so I’m having a blast doing it. And Craig, I appreciate the opportunity to, to be on today and to visit, with you. And conversation was great. The time has flown, so thank you for enduring my voice today too.

>> Craig Gould: Well, hopefully the pollen subsides.

>> Sherri Coale: Yeah, I sound like I’ve been coaching for the Final Four right now, but it’s just Springtime Pollen.