This is the transcript of my podcast interview with volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon (the transcript has been edited for clarity). You can listen to the full episode here. Follow Hugh on Twitter @McCutcheonMN.
Kate: Hello! Today I’m talking with Hugh McCutcheon, head coach of the women’s volleyball team at the University of Minnesota. He’s taken the Gophers to three NCAA final four appearances and has coached 11 team members to 18 All-American certificates. He’s also coached the U.S. men’s Olympic volleyball team to a gold medal win and the U S women’s Olympic team to a silver. He’s been inducted into the International Volleyball Hall of Fame.
Hugh, it is such a pleasure to have you here.
Hugh: Okay, thanks for having me. Great to be here with you.
Kate: I’m going to start off with just a few opening questions to help people get to know you. So first off, where did you grow up?
Hugh: I hailed from New Zealand and was born and raised there and came to the States in the early nineties to play college volleyball and went and meandered around the world for a few years after I graduated and came back and got into coaching.
And here we are.
Kate: I’ve always wanted to go to New Zealand. It looks like an incredibly beautiful place.
Hugh: It’s a nice corner of the world. Yeah, I’d recommend it. If you get the chance you should go.
Kate: And you now live in Minnesota, right?
Hugh: Yup. We’re here in Minni and it’s been great. My wife and I have a couple of kids and, I was coaching in the international arena as you spoke to earlier and, and that was great, the Olympic world and all that stuff is wonderful. But the goal for me was always to try to be number one dad, not number one coach. And I felt with all the travel, it was just hard for me to feel like I was honoring my commitment to being a dad, if I was on the road for, you know, 130, 150 days a year. The opportunity came up to work here and it’s been great. Yeah, we’re really fortunate.
Kate: What was your first job ever?
Hugh: First job ever was when I first started going to university in New Zealand. I had a job in the summers working for the Christchurch City Council. So I was digging ditches and pouring concrete and putting asphalt on the road and weed spraying along the, in parks and stuff. And it was awesome. It was one of the best educations you could get working with a lot of different people who’ve had a ton of different experiences and it made you realize how connected people are. And, you know, even though we want to see, well, the media maybe, or I don’t know, generally, there’s the view that everyone’s quite different, that’s where you learn that everyone’s pretty much the same and in a lot of really important ways. And yeah, there are differences, no question, but the people are people.
Kate: That’s a great lesson to absorb at the beginning of your career. All right. I’m going to ask about your current job, but what I want you to do is describe your current job in three verbs.
Hugh: Coaching. Teaching. And I want to say mentoring, but I also understand that administration is a big part of what I do. So, uh, can you give me four?
[00:03:00] Kate: Absolutely. That’s great. Thank you. And then just for something fun, what’s something that you’ve enjoyed lately, like a movie or a book or a TV show, or even a hobby? Something that’s making you happy these days?
Hugh: You know, the biggest thing for me lately, and it’s the silver lining in all of the, the COVID stuff that we’re all in amongst is just more time with my family. I honestly don’t remember a time in the last 25 years where I’ve slept in my own bed for six months in a row. So, it’s been a remarkable, bonus for us to hang out more.
Kate: Yeah, I love that. That’s something I’ve felt too, that, this time has given me the opportunity to get closer to the people I love the most. Alright, great. So I’d love to get into it a little bit. And first, could you talk a bit about your coaching philosophy?
Hugh: Sure. You know, coaching’s an interesting vocation, because it’s maybe the perception is that you roll up to practice and you throw the ball out and magic happens and that’s it for the day. And, that would be great if that was the job, but it’s so far from the reality of what this job is to me anyway, which is, basically in the college world currently using sport as a mechanism for teaching life. And there’s a need to have competitive success, no question, but you know, philosophically, in the college space, anyway, we try to take a very holistic approach to what we’re doing, where we want to be about competitive excellence.
And if you want, we can talk about why I’m not telling you that we’re want to be about winning to me. Those are very different things. We want to be about academic excellence, because as much as our athletes aspire to go on and play professionally or play on the national team or whatever, the reality is that their degree, which at this point is probably the plan B is, is absolutely their plan A, so everyone has to graduate. That’s the deal. And then finally we want to be about personal development and this time in their lives, it’s a very interesting and formative time. I think there’s a lot of stuff that can happen that can be profoundly positive and great. And some things that can happen that can be soul crushing and set you on a bad path moving forward.
So we’re trying to teach life skills through sport where the beauty of that is you can make mistakes in our gym and you can make mistakes in sport, and the collateral damage is not nearly as significant if you make those mistakes out in the real world. And so teaching skills like how to learn, how to work, you know, self-discipline, how to be a good teammate, how to work with others, how to communicate, how to connect in authentic ways. All of those are really important things that are so transferable beyond whatever we’re doing on the court.
Kate: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about things that you do that build trust, both among the team and the team trusting you and the coaching staff?
Hugh: Sure. Yeah. I think trust is manifested in teams in three different ways and certainly, trust is the currency that makes all high functioning teams work. No doubt. So to that end first, the athletes have to be able to trust themselves, and I say that from a position of being able to execute the skills of the game, that they know standing up out there, that they can do what they have to do to win the next point versus hoping, because those are very different positions to be competing from.
So our job as coaches is to help equip them with a fundamental mastery that they can, they’ve got some repeatability that they don’t have to worry so much about outcomes. They can just focus on process and do it right. And when you do it right, generally the outcome works out really well.
We need athletes to build trust within the team. And to that end, we have a very strong expectation about how those teammate interactions go. I think, especially on women’s teams, there tends to be, a very, I think, a false expectation of an almost kind of sorority like, feel that we’re all going to be best friends forever. You know that we’re going to put our arms around each other in the timeout or hold hands or do something. And, you know, my experience is that’s just been really far from the truth and seldom is that expectation of, I guess we’ll call it faux friendship. Does that ever lead to real authentic connection?
I think if we’re going to get into trouble, which you do in sports, at some point, it’s going to get big and there’s going to be something significant on the line. You want to look people in the eye and feel connected to them in a real sense, not just in a fake way. So to that end, as a teammate, there’s an expectation of what that behavior should look like. And there are certainly some boundaries about what those interactions should be, but they’re things like treat each other with respect, be honest, be loyal and not blindly loyal, but have each other’s backs, be inclusive, we’re not here to divide and conquer. We’re all in it together. But things like that behavioral expectations that make it very clear about how these things should go because we understand that life is gonna throw us enough curve balls as it is, but we’re not interested in a culture that promotes anything other than people being on task and committed and working towards the collective goal of the group. So that teammate thing is really important.
And lastly, they’ve got to trust us as coaches. And so, I think coaching comes with a huge responsibility. People are investing the most precious resource they have in your endeavor and that’s their lives. And so to that end as a coach, you have to be consistent and you have to operate from a position of ethical integrity and all that stuff, but the biggest question as a coach is are you trustworthy. You know what I mean? Should people trust you? And absolutely, if you can get the buy-in, you know, I tell people all the time that coaches, we’re salespeople, and then we get to be change agents, but if we can’t get the buy-in, if we can’t sell it, then we’re not going to change anything. But if you can get the buy-in and you can be a source of consistent action, consistent emotion, and consistent value add knowledge, then it’s probably gonna work out pretty well.
Kate: Yeah. I love that. I find that to be very true, that clear and consistent communication seems to be the key to making people feel like they understand what the goals are and they can trust you.
Hugh: And, just to add to this, I mean, if the athlete and walks into the gym and their first thought is, well, how, how is the coach going to be today? Are they going to be angry or are they going to be giddy or happy or sad, or they have to get the temperature in the room first, before they can even decide to engage in the task at hand, then that’s a lot of energy spent on stuff that isn’t helping us get better.
Kate: Yeah, I’ve never played at the level that you’re coaching, but I grew up playing sports, field hockey and soccer, and then I played rugby and I had some coaches who were more along the lines of what you’re saying. You know, my goal here is to serve you, help you be stronger and become a better player. And then I had some that were the lead by fear, including for just little kids. I mean, I can remember being screamed at as a second grader on the soccer field and I think there is that tenor sometimes in coaching that they think this is the way to get good behavior, to get people to try their hardest. If they are afraid of me, they are going to push themselves harder. I know there are Olympic coaches who are doing that kind of fear based coaching as well. So I just love to hear your reactions to that–what you’ve seen and what you’ve experienced, in terms of those different coaching styles.
Hugh: [00:10:26] Yeah. I mean, I only know what I know relative to the method that I believe in, but I also had experiences growing up with coaches that were yellers and screamers and I’ve also seen teams that have been, driven by more fear based or, you know, leadership by rule versus leadership by empowerment. And I think just philosophically for me, our job is to empower our athletes, to be able to make the right choice at the right time, to give them the tools and the mental capacities to be able to take information and figure out what to do. When you lead by rule, really all you’re developing is a bunch of rule followers. And for me, I want our athletes to choose to do the right thing because it’s the right thing on and off the court versus feeling like they’re just doing it for fear of a consequence, you know, they’re not looking at, Why am I doing this? So why should I not do it? They’re just doing it because it’s a rule and a rule book, that seems to absolve them of any real responsibility in that decision. And I don’t think life tends to work out like that, you know, when you’re outside of the team, at some point you’ve got to choose to do the right thing on your own.
And we’d like people to be able to do that. Just generally that’s how I see it versus, you know, empowerment and rules and control. When we’re talking about the yelling, the screaming, I mean, there’s times where you got to raise your voice. You got to get people’s attention, but I tend to find that if you’re yelling all the time, people just tune it out. It’s just noise. And more importantly, you’re speaking to me about an experience you had as a second grader that you remember quite clearly about someone that was yelling at you. And I think about youth sport in particular as the introduction that our young people have to this wonderful thing of sport exercise competition, we could be developing all kinds of wonderful lifelong habits here, and yet it’s reduced to this outcome-based activity where it becomes about wins and losses and yelling and screaming and all of this stuff, which just seems like you can potentially do so much damage to young people in this very formative time in their lives that can last lifetime. So I think especially when we talk about the youth piece, we should be a lot about inclusion and instruction. That should be a positive space. They need to learn how to make mistakes. They learn what they need to learn, how to learn from them, and the idea of getting berated seems a little bit crazy. It seems like you’re probably making it more about the coach than it ever was about the team. And it shouldn’t be about the coach. It’s up to us as coaches, but it’s not about us.
Kate: You’re in a unique [00:13:00] position in that you’ve coached both men and women and at the college level and at the Olympic level. Do you find it different in coaching men versus women?
Hugh: There are differences, certainly. And I’ll preface all of this by saying that I, in no way, am I saying that I’m the, you know, world’s leading expert in gender differences in sport or anything, but certainly there are way more similarities than there were differences. Volleyball in particular is one where they change the actual physical constraints of the game to allow for the difference in height and power so that the man are playing on an eight-foot net or approximately eight feet, and they’re touching, you know, at the Olympic level the guys were touching over 12 feet, so that jumping and touching and so we could play and hit it high and hard and, and it was great. And the women’s net is around seven four. You know, on the national team, we had athletes that were touching over 11 feet, so they could, jump high and hit hard too. So tactically, there were a few differences, but men and women are prone to the effects of gravity and the forces of the laws of physics like everyone else. So the idea of the constructs for skills and the systems that were playing weren’t that different.
The biggest shifts for me were in terms of communication and connection and, you know, that was a pretty good learning curve for me about how to interact and how to engage and how to connect with everybody. And again, these are very sweeping, broad strokes that we’re talking about here, but with the men, it was much more about managing the ego and trying to chip through the armor to get them to be vulnerable enough to want to make change. With women, it was more trying to help them overcome any spaces in terms of fears or insecurities or anything like that, to allow them to understand just how good they were. And, so if we had a time out, for example, Kate, and I was somehow concerned about the lack of defensive effort, if I’m coaching a guy’s team and I make a statement about how we’ve got to play better defense, most of the guys in that timeout are looking at the guy next to him and thinking, Oh yeah, he’s talking about that guy. If you have that same time out with the women, they’re all thinking, he’s talking about me. So just being able to adapt your communication style for situations like that is something that I found to be pretty interesting, but also really impactful.
Kate: [00:15:19] Yeah, that’s fascinating. One of the things we’ve sort of talked about, but I want to address more directly is, we’ve talked about the different coaching styles and you have a coaching style that it sounds like driven in part by what you talked about at the beginning, which is the idea that you’re coaching for life.
Hugh: It’s more about how we live our lives and not necessarily how we get through this one game. Right.
Kate: But people are coming to you from all different backgrounds. And some people are more used to a more fear-based coaching style. From my own experience of sports, I know there are plenty of athletes who are showboats. They want the game to be all about them. And they’re used to having had that amplified through the way they’ve been spoken to and coached. So how do you address those kinds of differences when you’re trying to get everybody to be on the same level.
Hugh: First of all, in college, I think we have a responsibility to define success for our program. A lot of different ways when you’re in the Olympic space, it’s a little bit different. Your athletes are professionals, the USC or or USA volleyball, whoever was there, they’re investing a lot of money into your program, and essentially it’s four years to be good for the last two weeks to hope to be good for the last two hours. it’s a very unique space to operate in, and there’s no doubt that the expectation or the hope is to get on the podium and come away with some hardware. So it’s a different space to operating, but the outcome is really important in that world, and that’s what it’s all about. I still think the commitment to process is critical and the personal [00:17:00] development piece, obviously the academic thing isn’t an issue, but the personal development piece, there’s something there relative to the idea that character off the court tends to lead to character on the court.
For many of athletes there, they were longer in the tooth, and so the die was pretty much cast in that regard. So this idea of holistic teaching or mentoring across all these different spaces is much more a collegiate thing than it was an Olympic thing. That being said, people are different and teams are full of people and everyone has baggage. It’s just that some people’s suitcases a bigger than others. So it gets to be a bit of a, I dunno, a balancing act, but that it’s important to, one, as the coach, get to know your athletes, and, equally, if not more importantly, for them to get to know you, but also that they have to spend some time trying to get to know each other, which can be difficult, but having an essential understanding of someone’s background story or their motives, or why they’re doing what they’re doing, really helps to [00:18:00] build some understanding for some on-court behavior. Now you might not necessarily agree with it or like it, but at least you have some empathy, which I think is very critical for teams. They have to have some basic understanding of one another and hopefully that builds into something more significant. But that’s a good place to start.
Now, as you say, other people come in with different experiences of fear-based or control-based coaching. They have, maybe, being given the green light to be the star and all that kind of stuff. One of the things that we all know about behavior is you get what you tolerate, right? And so when they come into our program, first of all, when we recruit athletes to come here, we’re very clear what it’s about. For example we talk to them about the three things we discussed earlier: academic excellence, competitive excellence, and this personal development piece, but then within the volleyball constructs, we say, Hey, we need people that can work hard. And work hard, it’s easy to talk about, it’s a little bit more difficult to do. And lots of [00:19:00] people say they can work hard, but I don’t think everybody has that capacity or maybe not everyone wants to develop that capacity.
Second of all, they have to be able to learn and make change. We’re very clear about the fact that teaching is what we’re about and what got them to us isn’t enough to get us to where we want to go. So they’re going to have to make some changes. We talked to them about the fact that we want to compete. We’re going to keep score on the weekends, so we surely need to keep score during the week.
And we don’t promise anyone a starting job, and we don’t promise anyone playing time. What we do promise is that we’re going to invest completely in everybody’s development, but it’s a meritocracy and you can earn the right to play. If you and I are in the gym today, Kate, and you know you’re going to start this weekend and I know I’m not going to start this weekend, well, then there’s no real incentive for you to work hard today. And there certainly isn’t any incentive for me to work hard today. But if you know that you’ve got to earn it, and I know that if I work hard enough and I can get it a little bit better today, maybe I can have an opportunity to earn the right to play as well. I keep you honest. And all of a sudden the gym is working at a much higher level and our commitment to the process is increased significantly. So yeah, we said work hard, learn, compete. And then the last thing is this idea of being a teammate, a lot of teams will talk to you about, we’re a family. And I understand where they’re going with that, and I understand the idea of that, but we’re not a family. We’re trying to be a high functioning team. And what I mean by that is that there’s a level of dysfunction that comes with families that you’ve got to tolerate because you’re all genetically connected, if it’s the fifth set and we’re in a hole and I’m looking back and you know, I’ve got my drunk uncle, my crazy aunt to side us out, I’m not going to feel good about that. But if I’ve got a teammate who I know it has earned the right to be there, who works hard every day, who I can trust is going to come out and make a good play then, yeah, let’s go. So the idea that we’re families, I think is it’s a little bit warm and fuzzy, but I don’t think that’s accurate. So anyway, within all of that, you’re right–asking, how do you deal with the differences? Well, we’re very clear on expectations. We have a very clear, clearly defined culture and we’re consistent about how it gets applied.
And obviously when people don’t get what they want, they’ll interpret everything however it best suits their needs. But I think we do a pretty good job of being who we are.
Kate: [00:21:25] You talked earlier about the importance of empathy and that people understand each other and where they’ve come from. As part of building trust among the team members, are there activities or exercises you do to help with that, to help people learn about each other and trust each other?
Hugh: Yeah. nothing too structured. we’re, we’re not, spending a whole lot of time going to ropes courses, doing trust falls, we’re more interested in authentic interaction and communication. So, everybody needs to grab a cup of coffee or whatever with everybody else, making sure that they take some time to engage. And what we’ve found over the years is the more structure you try to give that, not that it becomes disingenuous, but there’s, there’s something about everybody understanding that it’s important and figuring out how they’re going to do it on their terms. Versus me or our program dictating how those interactions need to take place. All we know is that those interactions need to take place.
So we try not to give it too much structure. We just have got to the point where everybody understands how important, having that empathy is. And they generally figure out what works best for them and how that’s going to occur. But yeah, you need it.
Kate: So you’re sort of setting the expectation of it.
Hugh: Yeah, I don’t think it’s right to really force that. Versus just letting it evolve. Now, if, we kind of do it on our own, then yeah. I’ll step in. And you know, we’ll, change the rules of the game a little bit, but if they can figure it out on their own and do it in a way that works for them, I’m fine with that.
Kate: [00:23:05] I’d love to hear more on that topic because we’re in this really challenging time with the coronavirus. There’s a lot of fear and people are concerned about family members. I mean, a lot of people are having financial worries right now. There’s a lot up in the air in higher ed in general. But the idea of things they come out of nowhere and knock us off course, is not unique to this time. certainly over the years, I’m sure you’ve had team members who have lost loved ones or have had, you know, other kinds of difficulties. So how do you handle the hard stuff outside of the team? You know, when do you sort of realize it needs to be addressed. And then how do you address it?
Hugh: Well, there’s a duality to team leadership that you have to be able to figure out. And that is you have a responsibility to every individual on the team, no question, but you also have a responsibility to the team. So to that end, you know, when personal tragedy does occur and, you figure out how to help them as best you can. And this is a very human moment and it has to be treated as such, you know, we’re dealing with volleyball, it’s six people in a bowl, right. It matters, and we care about it, and so we have to be very human and very compassionate. No question. Now on the flip side of that, we also have to get back to the team. And so, okay. Our team member is dealing with this, that’s her issue and we’ve got to be supportive of her, but we also have to make sure that it’s not our issue, that we have to still take care of the task at hand.
And so on the one hand with the athlete that’s grieving, for example, we gotta be really connected and help and be very human. And then on the other side of it, we’ve gotta be able to say, Hey, we’ve still got to go out and play tomorrow. And, here’s the plan and we got to get back to work and, the athlete is being taken care of.
That’s the duality as I described it to it, that I think you have to be able to pull off. You have to be able to do both.
Kate: And how are you talking to your team these days when there’s so much turmoil going on?
Hugh: [00:25:12] it’s incredibly challenging times, for everybody from, as you spoke to the fears and the unknowns, I think everybody was probably expecting by now that we’d have a few more certainties, but we still have way more questions than we do answers. And so to that end, really trying to manage this on a day to day basis is the best strategy that we’ve found to somehow get through all of the concern, all of the unknowns and with the idea that if we can have enough good days, then all of a sudden we’ve had good week. And if we have enough good weeks, we’ve had a good month. And then, you know, away we go, it seems like we’re on a good path. But if we spend too much of today worrying about tomorrow or worrying about yesterday, it probably doesn’t help us to be at our best. For me personally, regular check-ins with our athletes. I meet with everybody every week. We talk about families, a little bit about volleyball, see how school’s going. If there are any issues in terms of the mental health side of things, be that volleyball related or just general, if they need to vent, they can vent. We just sit there and shoot the breeze.
And I understand as, probably all leaders do, there’s some space that gets created, I would imagine relative to how much they’re willing to share with me, because ultimately I get to be a decision maker in this important part of their life. So I do think that we operate in truth, but you know, I’m not there to be a counselor. I’m not, I can’t, that’s beyond the scope of my professional expertise. However, the idea that I am there and that we chat and that these conversations get easier and they get more fulfilling or that they get more substance to it. As we continue to go, that consistency has really paid good dividends.
I think it’s kept our team connected. It’s kept me engaged with our athletes. We can talk about a much broader variety of topics than just side out and rotation one. They know, at least, even though I may not have all the answers to any of their problems, at least I’m there. You know, I care enough to be on the call and chat with them, and that’s genuine. I mean, I’m not doing that because I feel like I’ve got to check that off of a list. I do that because I think this is a weird time and my job should be to at least help them navigate it.
Kate: [00:27:31] I want to talk for a second, too, about how you are keeping your own equilibrium now. I’m sure you also have had really challenging times in your life and as the team leader, you’re setting the tone and people are looking to you. What are you doing to help yourself stay on balance now, and in the past, through other hard times?
Hugh: Yeah, you’re right. We as the leaders of these endeavors set the temperature in the room often, the place I start from for my own wellbeing would be to, you know, we’re going to eat the elephant one bite at a time. We’re going to go day to day, but trying to do the best I can with today. Yeah. And being able to, I guess, I’ll use the word forgive, but to just be okay if we didn’t get it all right today. We’ll have another crack tomorrow, but not to feel like I need to beat myself up too much if somehow mistakes were made. Within that also, I think just trying to feel like personally, if I can get a little exercise in a few times a week, that’s great. If I’m spending some quality time with my family, if I can honor all the different commitments in my life, I mean, coaching’s what I do, but it’s not who I am and what I try to be as, you know, a good husband, a good father, and a good son, and I try to be a good coach, but I’m trying to honor all these different things.
So just doing the best I can and all these facets of my life and when it gets hard, as I see it, now that I’ve been around the block a few times, being able to just take a breath and get back to where I need to be. The idea that if we can control ourselves that we can somehow control our performance is a real thing. Whenever I start getting into concerns or, or worries, or about unknowns, just being able to kind of re-focus or re-center and get back to, Hey, here’s what we do know. And here’s the things that we can control. So let’s worry about those things. Doing that, I think, sets an example for those around me, but more importantly helps me to be better at my job.
Kate: Yeah, that’s great. I’d love to hear a story from you about a player who surprised you, and the change, the transition that you observed through your time, coaching that player or about a time when the team was facing something challenging and the way they got through it, whether the outcome was a positive one or a negative one.
Hugh: [00:32:00] Sure. One of the things that we talk about within our program often is this idea of making the decision, where the decision is, you go all in on. Making change and trying to become the best version of yourself on and off the court. Relative to our sphere of influence, you know, that we see that mainly manifested in terms of on-court behaviors.
We had a couple of different athletes along the way that have been great examples of that. One in particular, as a freshmen, came into the program and didn’t play very much, was it a good player coming out of club in high school that showed moments of really strong performance, those flashes of brilliance. We’re often mired in large chunks of mediocrity, and then, you know, the next year, a little bit better, the next year, a little bit better, but by the time, she became a senior, there were unbelievable performances night after night after night that led her to become the conference player of the year and the national player of the year.
And that was such an unexpected outcomes or her relative to her starting position, to see that journey for her, to see her grow mentally, emotionally, and obviously physically was really, profoundly satisfying and so much of her decision came from an ability to overcome or to reconcile the doubts and fears and insecurities that she was dealing with in her first, at least couple of years of her university career.
And so that was just extremely gratifying to see someone overcome that because as you know, fear is just such a limiting emotion and, so many of us live in that space, but that fear is the curse, you know. A life in fear is never going to be a life in full. So you really need to figure that out. And it was just great to see her do that.
Another player we had, had a similar kind of path. Although she played all the time from her freshman year to her senior year, but her journey was way more about learning to control her emotions in her performance from you know, she would just go up there and was a bit of a blunt instrument, really, when she first got to us. I mean, her journey to learn how to play the whole game and to be defined by things other than just hitting it hard was also really cool.
She ended up being the big 10 player of the year for her senior year. But, you know, she went on and got to go to the Olympics and has had a wonderful professional career. These things are really unique to the individual, but like I said, at the beginning, right, we all have baggage. The suitcase is different. Each person when they come through the program, they have probably a thing that they need to get over or they need to reconcile. They need to figure out what’s going to allow them to have the best chance of becoming the best they can be. And that idea of self actualization, too, to have a chance to realize your potential is really easy to talk about, but it’s so difficult to do.
It stretches you to grow in ways that you’re probably really uncomfortable doing, especially, you know, when you think about the athletes that are getting recruited have been really successful already, they’re not used to feeling inadequate or like they’re coming up short.
They used to being, you know, the stud, but the problem is as you get further up the food chain, being taller or stronger or jumping higher, it’s not a differentiating factor. Everyone’s a stud, so this idea of fundamental mastery, again, becomes this ability to differentiate yourself.
And that takes some time to get those skills in place. So to see these athletes that worked on their mental game, their emotional control, their physical skills, and then, came out at the end of it, with some tangible outcomes that, that validated the amount of work they put in was really cool.
Kate: That’s amazing. And I’m just, thinking as a parent, I’ve got three kids and I’m so aware of how those mental tapes can affect them. I see my kids who, some days they’re doing great and other days it’s just, they’ve told themselves a story and they walk into that test and everything collapses.
What advice do you have and what do you tell your players to deal with that?
Hugh: Well, we start with the very real fact that at some point it’s going to get big. And we talk about that from day one, so that the idea that adversity is seen as something that’s going to happen and that we’re going to have to deal with rather than seeing it as an exception. I think that’s a good one place to start. I mean, that’s the reality of it. Our seasons are going to be defined by a few points and a few key moments in a few key matches and how we respond to those moments really matters. So, within the construct of the mental game, I think that fundamental mastery is actually a really critical component of that.
And what I mean by that is, I spoke to you earlier about this idea of knowing that I’ve got what it takes to make the play versus hoping. So if it’s a big moment and I know that I can do what I need to do, then I don’t have to worry so much about my performance or my outcome. I can really just focus on the task at hand, getting the information that I can and making the right choice at the right time.
To me, skill confidence is linked to skill. Competence is really important. And if I can expand that a little bit, Kate, if we look at it, the mental game and the physical game are separate. For example, in closed loop motor skills, those are activities where we have complete control over everything, like a golf swing or a free throw, for example. But if we’re talking about a free-throw, and we have a little mantra and we bounce it three times and we say a few things or whatever, and then we take a breath and then we shoot it. Great. Right. We can have some nice repeatability in our routine, but if the mechanics of our shot are no good, if we have some biomechanical inefficiencies that are in our shooting action, then it doesn’t matter how good our routine is. We’re still going to throw a brick because our mechanics are off. Right? So, so many people think that the mental stuff is going to be this panacea, this ability to fix everything. And it’s all going to be rainbows and ponies, but it’s not because we need to have the fundamentals in place. Now on top of that, as you spoke to, the narrative really matters. Self-talk is such a huge part of the mental game. And I would say just such a huge part out of life. I mean, whatever the narrative is we saying in our head, it probably ends up being true, right from, quantum physics and quarks and their color or whatever, to the Pygmalion effect in psychological research.
The expectation produces the result. We know this. And so we just really need to pay attention to what we’re saying, because every cell in our body is listening to our thoughts, whether we like it or not. Now within that, can we learn how to take a breath? You know, breathing is a really important part of getting re-centered, just stopping for a minute, pausing, not only breathing in, but finishing it, just finish the breath and get back to being where you are with some oxygen in your lungs and some oxygen in your brain. I mean, it’s real, right? It makes you feel better. So there’s all of these different tools that you could have in the toolkit that are so far beyond being about sport performance. They could be about just life in general. How do we get to feel good? There’s things we can do, but the bigger question, and this comes from a really dear friend of mine who unfortunately passed away a couple of years ago, named Ken Ravizza, who was a legend in the world of sports psychology, and the question he asks is, you know, are you that crummy that you’ve got to feel good to play good? And that’s a wonderful question. You know, if we only can play good when we feel good, then we’re probably not going to play good very often.
Kate: Wow. Yeah, this is just all fascinating to me. I love it. All right. how can people find you if they want to follow you, stay in touch with you. Keep an eye on what you’re doing.
Hugh: [00:41:20] you know, I have a random little university Twitter handle is but I’m not fully engaged in social media, because like I said, I think I’m a service provider. I want it to be about our kids. It’s not about me, it’s about our athletes. But anyone can email me at the University of Minnesota, easy enough. It’s not hard to find me. but yeah, I love to talk to people about what we’re doing and if I can help people, I’m happy to do it. But, yeah, I don’t have this large social media footprint at this point.
Kate: I’m so grateful that I had this opportunity to talk to you.
Hugh: Kate, it was really a pleasure. Thank you so much. Best of luck.