RISING ABOVE: How to Build Your Team So You Can Breakthrough to the Elite Level
Jeff Janssen, M.S., Janssen Sports Leadership Center
Looking to climb the mountain of success and take your team to an Elite level? In our previous article, I introduced you to the 5 Stages of Program Development: Rising, Elite, Plateauing, Declining, and Problematic. (Click on the link above for an overview of each of the stages.) Building off of that article, this article focuses specifically on the characteristics, challenges, and goals of the Rising Program. (Future articles will explore the Elite, Plateauing, Declining, and Problematic stages as well.) A Rising Program is one that is focused on moving up the ladder of success. The record is improving and the program is making progress and clearly climbing up the conference, state, and/or national standings. In reality, the Rising Program can further be broken down into two stages depending on how well developed it is: Building and Breakthrough. Let's take an in-depth look at the characteristics and challenges of the Building and Breakthrough programs.
CHARACTERISTICS OF RISING PROGRAMS Building Program
A Building program is a subset of a Rising Program that has recently been in the Declining or Problematic stage. This is a program that has been struggling and there is usually significant work that needs to be done to turn things around and get it going in the right direction. Most often the work is entrusted to (or dumped in the lap of) a new coach. With a Building (or rebuilding) program, there will likely be some mental, social, and organizational dysfunction and baggage that will need to be unpacked, dealt with, and often discarded to fully begin moving up. Despite the fact that the program is typically winning only 20-40% of its contests, the primary focus of the Building program is to put in the proper people, principles, and foundation necessary to make both short and long-term progress.
Breakthrough Program
A Breakthrough program is a more advanced version of a Rising Program and has ascended to a higher level of development than the Building program, likely winning around 50-60% of its contests. However, the program still has a little ways to go to breakthrough to the elite level. As a Top 50 to Top 25 team it is on the cusp of greatness and can see it in the distance, but it still has a few more critical steps to take to achieve Elite Program status.
CHALLENGES OF RISING PROGRAMS Building Program Challenges
Because it was recently in the Declining or Problematic stage, the Building program usually has a variety of challenges holding it down. Much like the strong and ever-present pull of gravity, coaches of Building programs must figure out how to overcome all the negatives of low talent, poor chemistry, pessimism, selfishness, apathy, destructive or non-existent team leadership, deadwood, and naysayers holding down the team. Often referred to as reaching "Escape Velocity" in the scientific world, coaches must figure out how to overcome the numerous negative gravitational pulls to generate enough positive energy, optimism, and momentum in their programs. As a similar analogy, the Space Shuttle and other rockets must use significantly more fuel in the first few minutes of their launches than they do their entire trip around the Earth. Similarly, coaches of Building programs must be willing and prepared to initially invest enormous amounts of energy and effort to get these programs off the ground and achieve the necessary Escape Velocity with their teams.
Breakthrough Program Challenges The challenges with a Breakthrough Program can also be frustrating, but usually are of a different kind. In the Breakthrough program, you have established a decent foundation and a achieved a reasonable level of success with your program. You have made noticeable progress and built your program to a certain point. But then you bump up against the Elite Programs that typically have a little more talent, tradition, and confidence working in their favor and your team struggles to get over the hump. It's hard to convince your Rising team that they have what it takes to dethrone the perennial conference, state, and/or national champion. And it's hard to recruit blue-chip athletes to join your team when they see the past success, tradition, glitz, and glamour of the Elite Program that wants them too.
EXAMPLES OF RISING PROGRAMS
Some recent examples of Rising Programs include the San Francisco 49ers under Jim Harbaugh at the professional level, the North Carolina men's lacrosse program at the collegiate level, and the Firelands High School Football team. I have linked some articles and a video so that you can see what these teams did to build their programs and breakthrough to the higher levels. San Francisco 49ers link -
Harbaugh has San Francisco 49ers believing in themselves
UNC Men's Lacrosse link -
UNC Lacrosse
Firelands High School Football link -
Coach Points Firelands football team in a new direction
The second part of this article focuses on 8 Sure-Fire Strategies you can use to transform a Declining or Problematic Program into a Rising Program and is available exclusively for our Championship Coaches Network members. Click below to discover these strategies. Then on December 14, we'll release the next article in our series focused on Strategies that Breakthrough programs can use to get to the Elite Level.
| 
Inspire Your Team
del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
GoogleBookmark
Technorati
Furl
