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Why Did This Coach Tie His Team Together?
Watch a team lose and you can usually list ten things that went wrong. Fixing all ten feels like the responsible thing to do, and it's often the reason nothing changes. Ray breaks down what happened when his son's 10-year-old basketball team got massacred in the first round of a tournament, and how their coach turned them around in two days by ignoring almost the entire list and drilling one thing — using a rope, not a whiteboard. The same discipline separates sales coaching that sticks from sales coaching that gets nodded at and forgotten.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
- Why a list of ten fixable problems usually produces zero real improvement.
- What a youth basketball coach did with a rope that no amount of explaining could accomplish.
- How to find the single change that makes everything else on the list easier or unnecessary.
- Why drilling one thing until it's permanently installed beats covering everything once.
- What happens when a coaching session ends with ten action items instead of one.
- How compounding one improvement at a time produces outsized returns on a person and a business.
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Welcome to The Ray J. Green Show, your destination for tips on sales, strategy, and self-mastery from an operator, not a guru.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
My son's basketball team got absolutely massacred in a um in a tournament in the first round. 10 years old, they, you know, they they were pretty beat up about it. Two days later, same kids, same team. They looked like a completely different group out there. The coach did it by ignoring almost everything that went wrong in the in the game. And there's a really important management and coaching lesson in here.
Um, so what happened, a little bit of context, the first game really it came down to defense. I mean, these the kids are they're they're 10 years old. like they're cha they're chasing where the ball is like not where the ball's going. Kind of grouping around the same kid. They're they're trying to play manto man. They can't really keep up and they just they didn't really know what they were doing. They got outplayed. Um and the defense wasn't fantastic. Now they've got two days to practice before they play again that same tournament. And it's the same game where they either stay or they go in the next game.
And I dropped my son off at practice the other day and I sit down. I'm watching and let me ask you, what do you think that they practiced? Because if you're like a lot of coaches that I know and a lot of managers that I know, um, sales managers, managers in general, like you go back and you make a list of everything that you found and that list has 10, 11 things that they didn't do right or that they could have improved and you go out there and you do some free throw shooting that could have been better and it could have been they they had some breakaways where they could have done the layup if they practiced a little more. just little stuff like all over the offensive side. And you look at that list and you go, "All right, well, we're going to spend time on layups. We're going to do some free throws. We're going to spend a little bit of time on defense cuz there was a bigger problem there. And we're going to hit all these things." And that feels like the responsible thing to do. You're going to hit all all the deals. Um, that's not what he did. He spent two days on one thing. That's it. Defense, defense, defense, defense, defense. They didn't touch a free throw. They didn't do [expletive] They didn't run new plays. They didn't practice layups. And the way that he did it was the part that I I can't stop thinking about was funny. He got them out on onto the court and he tied a rope around all of them. Like every every kid is like roped together because the like the actual problem obviously it's not it's not effort. Like they're all just converging on the ball that's just 10-year-olds again. Like it's it's the concept of zone defense doesn't really live in their head. And so they're they're chasing guys. They're chasing the ball. They're not moving as a unit. And so he he made it physical. Like you can't separate. We tied them together. Every time one kid pulls, the whole squad gets pulled with them and they feel it in their body instead of like the the huddle.
Two days of this and they they go back and they absolutely crushed it. Um they they played phenomenal. Now they didn't win the whole tournament, but it was good, right? Like they it was substantial improvement and their confidence walking off of the the floor that day was like was nothing like it was the the two days prior.
And it's because the coach found the one highest leverage change to make to steal from from Gary Keller. What is the one thing that if you do it, it makes everything else easier or unnecessary? And that that coach found it. Like that was the thing in two days with a rope.
That's the job of coaching and management. And when we do sales coaching, we yeah, we make a note of all the other stuff. Like it's not like we're oblivious to it. We're not pretending there aren't problems there. But everybody walks away from sales coaching with one thing. One, like what is the single change that if you make it right now is going to have the biggest impact on your results?
And here's the thing. When you drill that one thing, as long as it's the right one, when you drill it over and over and over and you focus on it, you get it installed, you get it permanently embedded, then you add the next one and the next one and the next one. And what happens is you start compounding all of these high leverage improvements and those things have outsized returns on that person, on the business, on everything else.
So, um, little basketball, little Gary Keller. Hope it helps. Adios.
