🏀 How a phone call from a college football legend reset Sean McVay’s coaching career
“What is the culture you’re trying to build—and how do your daily behaviors support or destroy that?”
Welcome to The Basketball Academy. 🏛️
Here’s what we’re serving up:
🏀 Struggles as a coach 💭
🏀 A coach’s guidance 📝
🏀 Being in the arena 🏟️
🏀 Reflecting on what matters🪞
🏀 Must Add Action 🎥
LET’S DIVE IN ⬇️
🏀 THE STORM 💭
In this article, McVay had just come off of a REALLY tough 2022 season. Coach Petersen, who had just stepped away from coaching, gave McVay a ring.
That voicemail was an outstretched hand to a broken man. Petersen, who in 2019 suddenly stepped away from his career as one of the most successful coaches in college football history, has become a mentor, confidant, friend, and adviser to McVay as the young coach worked his way out of what he calls the hardest year of his life.
“You’re in the middle of a storm. It’s real gray; things are cloudy,” McVay said. “He saw that press conference. I was crying out for help, I just didn’t realize I was.”
As Seneca says, “We struggle more in imagination than we do in reality.”
Many coaches struggle as they feel isolated.
🏀 Coach Petersen’s STYLE 📝
Chris Petersen was the head coach of Boise State from 2006 to 2013 and Washington from 2014 to 2019; the 60-year-old Petersen is a college football legend. His teams were “energetic, creative, and daring.”
Petersen’s staff meetings often wouldn’t cover football at all. Instead, “it was all about life lessons,”
“It would really pour into our staff, and it helped me become a better father, a better husband, a better friend. The way that it was presented it was really all-encompassing of life. Of course, you could also then use those examples to help you in coaching your players.”
The Litmus Test of a great leader is when you ask how someone's day is going. You actually care about the response. Coach Petersen’s staff took pride in greeting each other in the halls, as well as completing work together as opposed to in isolation.
“First and foremost, for Chris Petersen, it was making sure the culture and the connections were right. That said a lot. Then all the X’s and O’s fell into place.”
🏀 THE ARENA 🏟️
Coach Petersen had incredible success- went to the University of Washington, made it to the College Football Final Four, and still felt like he wasn’t himself.
He said he could hide his struggles well- but he was in the Arena.
“The arena can squeeze you and narrow you so quickly to certainly a lesser version—or the worst version—of yourself extremely easily,” he said. “You have to have a plan. You have to be almost counter-culture. Like, you have to work against everything society is telling you and rewarding you for.”
This closely relates to The Man in the Arena speech by Teddy Roosevelt.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better…
🏀 McVay 🪞
Coach McVay had become one of the youngest coaches in NFL History, won a Super Bowl pretty early in his career, and had the feeling of “so this is it?”
He said all the right things in team meetings, but closed his office door afterward. He even gave up play-calling for a short time. He considered giving up coaching altogether, which he acknowledged in a news conference with local reporters on a rainy, gray afternoon as the Rams’ 2022 season ended.
Daily, McVay repeated three things Petersen once said to him: Stay present. Stay grateful. Keep doing hard things. His team started to show a new kind of resilience that inspired him. Petersen believes it was also a reflection of McVay’s internal progress.
“Who we are as people should come out in our coaching.”
FAVORITE PART OF THE ARTICLE IS THE CONCLUSION BY COACH PETERSEN….
“(Petersen) always tells me that if he had one sign in his office, if he ever got back into coaching, it would say, ‘Who am I becoming as a result of this chase?'” McVay said. “I think about that all the time.”
BONUS Questions for Self-Reflection:
“What are the core values that guide your decisions?”
“What is your coaching philosophy, and where did it come from?”
“What is the culture you’re trying to build—and how do your daily behaviors support or destroy that?”
🏀 Must Add Action 🎥
UCONN Drag Flash
A great way to hunt teams that switch, or to force a switch and hunt for the advantage before the scramble.