Game-Changing Strategies from Top Coaches

Unlock the secrets to transforming athletic culture and achieving game-changing performance with insights from top coaches nationwide. An overview of the Universal Speed Rating Summit in Dallas, Texas.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:28

What is cracking. So today I'm going to go over man a few things with you guys. On the universal speed rating summit that I went to in Dallas, texas, there were some killer speakers, great coaches probably you know 70, 75 coaches from around the country that all have their own facilities and work with athletes every day. So, as you can imagine, there are some great conversations, brainstorming, as well as presentations. So today I'm going to dive into a couple of my favorite bullet points from the presentations I took notes on to give you guys some insight. If you weren't able to be there definitely can find some value in this. Or if you're just a coach or an athlete looking to improve your facility or your performance there'll be little tidbits in this as well. So, number one, alex gibson, great coach out of tennessee. She owns a facility out there. We had the blessing of working with her as she was getting her facility off the ground and we love what they do over there at APG Strength. What her topic was was culture development and how that pertains to the athletes as well as your coaches. And a couple of my favorite points involved the athlete daily engagement. So finding ways every day when the athlete comes in, whether it's little tweaks to the warm up or games that you put into the session, or even what we call find your mini hoop, or what I wrote down. What this means is you know what's that thing? That the athletes come in, that you don't have to say anything to them and they're going to want to start playing around with it, start warming up and start to engage with the gym and the other members. That day and what alex has is a mini hoop at her gym that the athletes will start to warm up and dunk on and try to just come up with the coolest stuff they can do. So love that idea. I went and got a game called halo ball, hung it up in the pillars in our gym and now we have hoops as well. That every day when we come in, athletes are starting to warm up and starting to try to do dunks on there and see who can do the coolest dunk. So something that's going to engage the athletes, get them turned on mentally, get them ready to go and prepared for the work ahead.

Speaker 1: 2:49

Another topic she talked about was rewarding behaviors, prs. Obviously, everybody wants to reward successes, right, but the importance of rewarding high effort failures. What do we mean by that? We mean an athlete getting out of their comfort zone, trying their best to perform the movement but failing. Typically, what you find is a lot of athletes are uncomfortable doing something that they're not sure they can succeed, especially in front of their peers. So having positive feedback and positive reinforcement when they have those high effort failures, to give them the stimulus to continue to try things that are hard, because that's really going to separate them over time and consistency in sport, but we can get into even how that's going to help them throughout their lives. So it's, long standing, very impactful behavior for athletes or humans to figure out at a young age. And then, lastly, one of my favorite bullet points as well was communication with parents and clients. So make sure to stay on top of communicating, reaching out, touching bases, updating parents, engaging athletes, whether they're, you know, taking a break from the facility or they're in the facility. It's a very overwhelming task but something that's very important when it comes to building those relationships and building that trust with the athlete.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Next up, we had tony valani man. If you don't follow this guy on instagram, he's worked with some of the top nfl players ever do. It has the the ridiculous amount of the top 40, 40 times ever in the combine. So he, you know, not only trains athletes but prepares athletes for the NFL combine, has a combine class. So that's part of his business, but not the whole business. He also is the founder and inventor of Shred Mill, which is a piece of equipment that we have at our facility as well, and what he talks about is really groundbreaking. It's all about, you know, game speed. So an athlete can get fast, right, so you can get athletes faster, they can hit higher top speeds. But how does that translate to the game? Because we have all the data needed GPS data.

Speaker 1: 5:03

Talking about, you know, this is where sports played at, let's say, 14 to 17 miles per hour. You need to have sessions built into your training that get the athletes comfortable with that speed and improve their ability to change directions, decelerate and move athletically within those speed categories, and it can be a little different based on each sport. But for this example football, I believe, is 14 to 17 miles an hour, and that 17 miles an hour is more in your higher tier. So think, like high-level college, think, nfl type of players miles an hour, and that 17 miles an hour is more in your higher tier. So think like high level college think uh, you know, nfl type type of players. So getting the athletes the ability and understanding of how to cut, how to change direction and do all those things in that time, in that frame, as well as skillfully breaking down what change direction should look like, and the footwork involved.

Speaker 1: 5:51

And no, I'm not talking about speed ladders, you know, not the icky shuffle or moving your feet as fast as you can, but very purposeful, calculated steps to make sure that you can create separation between you and your competitors. So that's kind of what tony's talk was all about. It was amazing. There's so much information and resources he has out there. I won't go too much deeper into that, so you guys can just check that out. Look up tony villani, look up shredmill and you can start to dive into that.

Speaker 1: 6:20

One of my favorites from mo wells and brian mccall. They are resident trainers there at the sports academy in Dallas or, sorry, in Frisco and man. They've worked with a lot of high-level athletes also do combine all that type of stuff. But you know they really talked about some awesome points and number one was read your athlete. So flexibility within rigidity. What does that mean? Being able to have a rigid program or a very structured program on what you need to do and what you want to get done with the athletes and the stimulus you're looking for, but then also having flexibility within that.

Speaker 1: 6:54

So when an athlete walks in and they're blasted um, you know giving them room to perform well that day and to take a step towards. You know either if it's recovery that day, if it's performance, whatever makes sense for that athlete and I have talked about this a couple times in the past about how this is. You know how you can build trust with your athletes. So an athlete, you're going to have a hard time getting to come in in season if you're beating them up all the time and they're you know they're already beat up from sport, from practice. They need to trust that when they come in you're going to make modifications and make sure that the training that day fits their goals and what they need.

Speaker 1: 7:33

Second point I really love from them is that perspective as a coach of is this for me or is it for my athlete? I think this can go obviously in our field, in strength conditioning, speed coaches this goes for sport coaches Stay true to who it's about and what it's for, and making sure that your decisions, your actions, your statements are all pushed towards helping the athlete and not necessarily so focused on pushing your career or making you look good. It needs to be about the athlete and it's going to be a much healthier relationship and you're going to get a lot better results if you can dial in on that and keep focused on that. And then one of my last favorite points is keep it simple and stay within the scope of practice. Keep training simple.

Speaker 1: 8:14

Again, it's really easy with social media and the internet to get caught up in all kinds of crazy stuff. We know it's successful. We know that the athletes need to master the basics, particularly in our demographic middle school, high school. We really just need to help prepare them to be an all-around great athlete so they can step into a collegiate setting or further in life, whether they play sports or not, and be able to take what they learned and build upon that in whatever direction they want to go. And then the last part of that scope of practice building a team of individuals around you that can help if it's outside of your wheelhouse. So that's why we work to get a physical therapist on site at our facility so that we can send athletes with pain or need pain management or just need another set of eyes over to them so that we can start to dive into that and rely on their expertise as well. Implementation on those points from those guys is kind of reflect on your why and your athletes why. So make sure you understand your athletes, why through conversations, through building relationships, and then understand what motivates you and make sure that that energy is pointed towards you. You know, helping those athletes.

Speaker 1: 9:26

Cc murray she talked about intelligent loading throughout the season. So making sure to dose and continue to prescribe top, top few sprints for your athletes in season, potentially cutting out a lot of that conditioning crap. There's a lot to be said about that but from her results with multiple high schools in the california area is implementing speed one time, just one time a week. Top speed helped with 76 of soft tissue injuries from season to season. So keeping those athletes ready to meet the demands of high speed sprinting or breakout plays or whatever. So that tissue load needs to be right so those athletes are ready to go and they don't have as many injuries.

Speaker 1: 10:13

And then Graham Wilkerson he's a business pro, I won't get too much into his, again, his was all structured toward business, but he made a lot of great points about developing your facility, different types of marketing strategies, different ideas on how to get leads to come into your facility and, once they're in there, making sure that you're delivering the best product possible, as well as a lot of good insights into you know, staff training and making sure your staff is dialed in on point. Everybody's on the same page. So for Graham, I would just say I definitely recommend there's a business course through universal speed rating. I would recommend that course, um, as there was a lot of details that are kind of individualized based on your situation or your, your business. And again, I truly believe I'm in this business course right now that this business course can be helpful for you know, for those listening that maybe own a business, that's outside of this, the strength conditioning realm, a hundred percent, uh, something that could be beneficial in the concepts that are within it.

Speaker 1: 11:13

And then, lastly, les Spellman. He spoke obviously as his event, um, he just kind of talked about the future of speed, where we're at and how it can feel like everybody's doing it in terms of starting to dial in on speed training but in reality, on social media, whatever our algorithm, is just showing us what we're interested in and there's still not a lot of coaches that are really diving into this or understand how to teach speed. So one of his presentations on that his second was profiling athletes and creating programming for them based off their results. So, again, not something that you probably need to like dial in as much with, like middle school, high school, it can be beneficial and give you an idea of just generally where they're weak. But a lot of times with those athletes you can see it right away. You can just see it once you have some experience, just as the athlete's doing their normal work, once you have some experience just as the athletes doing their normal work. But definitely as you get into the college, as you get into the pro setting, being able to really break down an athlete, reverse, engineer and then build them back up better than they were before Using technology pieces. That's what Les' presentation was on and key takeaways from that was number one invest in technology so you can track and rank and record and you can show that progress. And number two continue to master your craft and bring in as much information as you can and push the envelope, despite it looking like there's a lot of people doing this, there's not, and there's a lot of room to become a professional in the space. So hopefully you guys enjoyed it.

Speaker 1: 12:41

Again, just a quick breakdown of some of the points and things that we learned. Uh, at the universal speed rating summit. Uh, one of the best events I've ever been to. I can't wait to go to it, um, in 2025,. Again, appreciate you guys listening and diving into this podcast. This is kind of like a personal project for me and uh, you know, every time I see that we got some people listening to this and engaging with this, really, uh, you know, every time I see that we've got some people listening to this and engaging with this, it really gives me a smile and brightens my day. So I appreciate you guys. Share the show if you know someone that might be interested in it. We've got a lot of cool episodes on here. We're going to be coming up on 100 here pretty soon and again, appreciate your time. Have a good day.